Roel Roscam Abbing, Yoana Buzova, Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, Nicole Hametner, Marlon Harder, Menno Harder, Niek Hilkmann, Michaela Lakova, Nan Wang
The graduation show of the media students from the Piet Zwart Institute reflected a shift in popular culture. Whereas no self-respecting media self-help book or newspaper article published in the early 21st century missed using ’linked’ or ’stay connected’, a more recent rash of articles and best-sellers feature words such as ’introvert’ or ’silence’. Have we reached a consensual moment where we might agree it has become urgent to critically look at how the words ’social’ and ’media’ might be used together?
The range of works of the graduating artists and designers shared a persistent focus on displacement, erasure, and loss.
Dislocations
Yoana Buzova (BG) created a network of voice-mail boxes that allowed members of the public to record, distribute and listen to audio messages in the public space. The boxes were installed in different countries. Connected to each other, they provided playful moments for strangers to enter into a network of anonymous voices.
Marlon Harder (NL) created a visual representation of our template culture. Her installation transposed the web template into the gallery space, and vice versa. The work commented on the age of “insert your content here”, a concept that is discernible in every aspect of life.
Nan Wang (CN) experimented with the intersection between memories and technology. In her DUST series, she considered the dust she collected from her room as a self-portrait of her life and physical being.
Roel Roscam Abbing (NL) examined the urge to strategically disconnect from the Internet. He utilized a collection of pots and cans that people use around the world to give shape to their collective dream of making an alternative Internet.
Disappearances
With a projection of a dark, almost indecipherable image, Nicole Hametner (AT/CH) explored the status of an image that oscillates between presence and absence.
In 2013 a Rotterdam resident – a neighbour of Menno Harder (NL) – was found to have been lying dead in her apartment for at least 10 year. How could this have happened in a bustling and social neighbourhood? Harder made a monument to all those that are forgotten.
Niek Hilkmann (NL) worked as a media archeologist and presented a ‘cabinet of curiously conditioned calamities’ – roaming around ‘the lost, defaced and unforeseen in the land of redundant contraptions’.
With [DEL? No, wait! REW] Michaela Lakova (BG) asked if it is possible to delete something digitally. She confronted the visitor with the a dilemma: whether to COPY/TRANSMIT/SHARE or to DELETE/REMOVE/ERASE retrieved files.
Deprecations
Lasse van den Bosch Christensen (DK) researched digital labour and the critical aspects of crowdsourcing. He connected with a group of volunteers who createed digital models for Google for free. His project explored what happened to that community when Google changed its policy.
Curated by Willie Stehouwer.
artists
Roel Roscam Abbing, Yoana Buzova, Lasse van den Bosch Christensen, Nicole Hametner, Marlon Harder, Menno Harder, Niek Hilkmann, Michaela Lakova, Nan Wang