Metropolis M followed the first day of Studium Generale, written by Hinde Haest in Metropolis M

JAPAN SYNDROME — AMSTERDAM VERSION

Click hier for the program of March 13

LANDINGS: EXTRACTED BODIES

AND SELF-CARTOGRAPHIES

Click hier for the program of March 14

POIESIS OF WORLDING

Click hier for the program of March 15

By exploring the potentialities of ecological worldviews, old and new, through theory and art, WAWGWW seeks to accelerate, accumulate, animate and activate our poetical and political understanding of the world. To this aim Gabriëlle Schleijpen, head of Studium Generale Rietveld Academie invited Anselm Franke, Binna Choi, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev as well as Natasha Ginwala & Vivian Ziherl to each inaugurate a discursive and performative program of one day. In their scintillating company plus that of the artists, poets, writers, thinkers, activists and musicians they've teamed up with, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie will embark on an energetic 4 day - long voyage. If around in Amsterdam you are most welcome to join.

WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN?

An ecosophical roadmap for artists and other futurists.

The program open to the general public.

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie 2012-2013

Conference-Festival 12-15 March 2013

click here for the website

click here for reservations & tickets

STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE 2012-2013:

Wednesday February 06, 2013

at the Gym, Rietveld Academie

2–4 PM

WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN?

An ecosophical roadmap for artists and other futurists

PROGRAM:

(Open to the general public.)

-SPOKEN COLUMN: 'Is the Revoluti- on, or off?', Clare Butcher curator and tutor at the Fine Art Dept at the Rietveld Academy asks in response to Marius de Geus lecture 'What Will The Future Bring Us, Bookchin And Naess?' (as presented at the Rietveld on Wednesday January the 30th in 2013).

-ARTIST CONTRIBUTION: Artist, educator, writer Renée Ridgway will confront the pharmaceutical industries claim that it is inventing new medicines, with the knowledge of thousands of years as it is contained in archival documents such as the Hortus Malabaricus, and in the ideas of scientist, seed activist and author Vandana Shiva.

-KEY-NOTE LECTURE: With his lecture 'Living in the Age of the World Motion Picture: Toward an Ecosophy of the Moving Image' Adrian Ivakhiv, Associate Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont, wonders how cinema is faring today; on the cusp of a digital era that heightens the speed of life in every direction – through the uncertainties of global hyper finance, the turbulence of cultural identity clashes and looming ecological collapses, and the rapid mutations of all manner of image, representation, spectacle and simulacrum.

Click here for the website!

SPOKEN COLUMN: CLARE BUTCHER

'Please Replace The Lamp' - appreciation and superfluity-

When the measure of progress is not in mega bites per second; when things reach the end of their useable lives; when the state of nature turns out to be a state of grace; is the Revoluti-on or off?

Clare Butcher (Zimbabwe) is a curator and writer who cooks. She is currently teaching in Fine Arts at the Rietveld Academy and taking some time to think.

ARTIST CONTRIBUTION: RENÉE RIDGWAY

Hortus Malabaricus

The Hortus Malabaricus is an archival document printed in Amsterdam between 1678-1693 and is the earliest comprehensive work on the flora of Malabar, illustrating around 740 indigenous plants whilst explaining their medicinal properties, with captions in 4 languages (Latin, Malayalam, Arabic, Konkani). Its spectacular, detailed renderings of Malabar plants made from copper engravings based on original watercolours are magnificently detailed. It is an illustrated botanical garden, a taxonomy of named plants, a medicinal bible or a translator’s dictionary or perhaps a work of art?

This compendium captures the world’s ecologies, imaging one of the most bio-diverse regions in the world, the state of Kerala in Southwest India. There, local medicine still makes use of the traditional knowledge contained in these pages and it is this ongoing usage that shows just how the pharmaceutical industry is not inventing new medicines with their patenting of plants, seeds and trees. This knowledge has been continuing for thousands of years and contemporary physicists and activists like Vandana Shiva demonstrate how these corporations gain control over our lives. This presentation will include images of past artistic exhibitions that draw on the contents and contemporary usage of the Hortus Malabaricus and a short interview with Vandana Shiva.

Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator, writer and educator based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and internationally. Besides her work as a visual artist, Ridgway is co-initiator and contributor to n.e.w.s. (http://northeastwestsouth.net), a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activities and curates the Roaming Academy at the DAI, a master’s curriculum that addresses the current context of art and its manifold economies.

KEY-NOTE LECTURE: ADRIAN IVAKHIV

Living in the Age of the World Motion Picture: Toward an Ecosophy of the Moving Image

Philosopher Martin Heidegger characterized the modern world as the “age of the world picture,” an era when the world itself became conquered by humanity as a picture or representation set fully and clearly before our gaze.

In the 1960s, the first images of the Earth from space delivered a glimpse of a world picture that was global and ecological, but that also suggested humanity’s domination both of the earth (today) and of outer space (tomorrow).

Fifty years later, we have not colonized other planets, but we might speak instead of the “age of the world motion picture,” an era when our colonization extends both to imaginary planets (like Avatar‘s Pandora) and to our very psyches and souls, and where we see both our world and our selves in turbulent and uncontrollable motion –- on screens around the globe.

The moving image has been with us just over a century, but over that time it seems the world itself has come to move faster and faster all around us. This talk will provide glimpses across that history, in its evolution from the first motion picture shorts to epics like Avatar (2009) and The Tree of Life (2011), and to the proliferating liveliness of YouTube and its many digital relatives. Like Charles Darwin’s image of nature as an ever branching bush, a “tangled bank” so “interesting to contemplate,” cinema’s branching bush continues to become ever more interesting to contemplate.

For cineaste and philosopher Gilles Deleuze, it was cinema that provided the greatest resource for reviving our lost “belief in this world.” How is cinema faring today, on the cusp of a digital era that heightens the speed of life in every direction –- through the uncertainties of global hyper finance, the turbulence of cultural identity clashes and looming ecological collapses, and the rapid mutations of all manner of image, representation, spectacle and simulacrum?

Adrian Ivakhiv will argue that the metaphysics most adequate for grasping the liveliness of this world of the moving image is a metaphysics of relational process — an aesthetics, ethics, and ecologics built on the insights of Charles S. Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze.

Adrian Ivakhiv is Associate Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont. His writing spans a diverse range of environmental and cultural themes, with a focus on the affective dimensions of environmental perception, including the roles of visual media, technology, national and regional identity, and religious experience in conflicts over landscape, territory, place, and nature. His publications include Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (Indiana University Press, 2001), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), and the forthcoming Why Objects Fly Out the Window: A Process-Relational Manifesto-Thriller. He blogs at Immanence: Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, Mediapolitics.

Next week, Wednesday February 13, again from 2-4, Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman? welcomes both T.J. Demos (key-note)and Subhankar Banerjee (artist contribution) for the Dutch launch of a special issue of the art journal Third Text on "Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology". Next week's spoken column will be delivered by Arnisa Zeqo.

Warm wishes from the SG team,

STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE 2012-2013:

Wednesday January 30, 2013

at the Gym, Rietveld Academie

2–4 PM

WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN?

An ecosophical roadmap for artists and other futurists

PROGRAM:

(Open to the general public)

SPOKEN COLUMN: Janice McNab, artist and tutor at the Fine Art Dept at the Rietveld Academie presents this week's spoken column in response to Joao Florencio's performance-lecture "Bodies that (Didn't) Matter: Ecologies of Art and Performance After the Anthropocene" on Wednesday December the 5th in 2012 .

KEY-NOTE LECTURE: Marius de Geus, lecturer in political philosophy at Leiden University will introduce the groundbreaking ecosophical visions of American anarchist Murray Bookchin and Norwegian father of Deep Ecology, Arne Naess.

ARTIST CONTRIBUTION: Jeffrey Babcock, filmmaker, performance artist, writer, cultural activist, best known in Amsterdam for his gripping work as a film programmer for the alternative cinema circuit, investigates how the psyche can effect future revolt and how that is related to the formation of underground cinemas.

Click here for the website!

SPOKEN COLUMN: JANICE MC NAB

The Anthropocene in the Aesthetic Economy Climate change is a truly strange object with time and space dimensions it is hard for the mind to grasp. Focussing on the images that were used to report on the Fukushima earthquake and Hurricane Sandy,this column will look at the aesthetic messaging within the notion of the Anthropocene, and ask how artists can respond to this sort of image economy. Janice McNab lives in Amsterdam and is an artist and a fine art tutor at the Rietveld Academy and the KABK, Den Haag.

KEY-NOTE LECTURE: MARIUS GEUS

What will the future bring us, Bookchin and Naess?

In this lecture Marius de Geus will present an introduction to Murray Bookchin(1921-2006), American libertarian socialist, author, orator and philosopher and Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess(1912-2009)and elaborate on their most fascinating theoretical views on the fundamental and underlying roots of our current ecological crisis. What are the main starting points of their ecological and political, philosophical and societal visions? Which are their main notions and ideas concerning a future ecologically balanced society ? More particularly: What does the anarchist Bookchin exactly mean by his innovative theoretical concept of “social ecology”? What do the ideas of academic Naess about the “intrinsic value of nature” imply for his ecosophical framework? How, according to their analysis, can such a futuristic green society be imagined ? And to what extent do their green philosophies differ or converge in terms of norms and values? Marius de Geus teaches political theory and environmental philosophy at the Institute of Political Science, Leiden University. He has published many articles and books about ecological utopias, the contemporary environmental debate, and on the social and ecological limits of our consumer society. His latest book is The End of Over-consumption(2003) and a new work about living the good life and ecological living will be published in the second half of 2013.

ARTIST CONTRIBUTION: JEFFREY BABCOCK

INVISIBLE IMAGES and Les Mains Négatives

Seeing social life as an ecology exposes us to some dilemmas and downright dangers. Firstly, ecological thinking has shifted radically from its very beginnings- from apocalyptic thought to offering us the heaven of a decentralised balance-seeking process, much like liberal economists' idea of the invisible hands. For the purpose of this seminar Jeffrey Babcock will go along with the idea of a social ecology, but then it seems essential to introduce some necessary antibodies into the theme. He will offer a short investigation into the ramifications of intimate revolt, drawing on the work of Bulgarian/French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and her experiences in the barricades of Paris in May 68 as a primary blueprint. What is the importance of revolt in any ecology? How is revolt/intimacy/creativity possible while we are being anesthetized by the vacant spectacle of marketing, technology and economics? How can the psyche effect future revolt? How can we be in the present and outside of time simultaneously? What is crucially being stolen from us through the gifts we receive? How can we deal with the situation of some images being crowded out, or watered down, by the proliferation of inessential images? What is the difference between revolt and revolution? And how is the formation of underground cinemas related to all this? Jeffrey Babcock is a filmmaker, performance artist, writer, film programmer and cultural activist. In recent years he has created a profusion of underground cinemas in Amsterdam where he provides an eclectic program of rarely seen films. Together with Agata Winska he has also published a book on the concepts behind his alternative cinemas called Screening as an Ideology (2011).

Next week, Wednesday February 6, again from 2-4, Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman? welcomes Professor Adrian Ivakhiv from the University of Vermont for a lecture on Eco-politics and Cinema. The spoken column will be delivered by Clare Butcher and the artist presentation by Renée Ridgway.

Warm wishes from the SG team,

STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE 2012 - 2013

WHERE ARE WE GOING, WALT WHITMAN?

An ecosophical roadmap for artists and other futurists.

November  14    December  05    February  13
November  21    January   30    February  27
November  28    February  06

Wednesdays at the Gym, 2 to 4 PM

free entrance

Conference-Festival coming up:

12-15 March 2013

information about > Studium Generale

In Metroplis M a review is given of We Are The Time Studium Generale Rietveld Academie. The text is in Dutch only.

This article is in Dutch only but you can try to read at:
Metropolis M

PROGRAM:

Spoken Column : Saying no in/to democracy by Samuel Vriezen

Key Note: Future Calling: Being Human in a Networked Society by Nishant Shah

Artist Contribution: The Arbour Lake Sghool by John Frosst

SPOKEN COLUMN: SAMUEL VRIEZEN

Saying no in/to democracy

he ecological vision of a proliferation of things and their inter-relationships, maps perfectly onto a certain ideal of democracy as was sung by the American bard, Walt Whitman. There is great revolutionary potential in this vision of endless flux and uncontrollable growth, but it is also the world of liberal capitalism – one which, by definition, is not always acceptable. For artists of course, the potential to connect and form relationships is always hugely attractive, because it is a source of creativity. But what about saying no? What if you live in ethical circumstances whereby you can't just go and celebrate everything that exists? What if sometimes you actually need to cut the connections and see democracy itself as a limiting regime? We might contrast the vitalist, ecosophical, democratic vision of Whitman with the much more defiant vision, equally inspired by nature, of the anarchist Henry David Thoreau – and ask ourselves what he might have to say in relation to our era, in which trans-national capitalist instabilities rule a ‘democratic’ world in an almost totalitarian manner.

Samuel Vriezen is a composer, pianist and writer. Much of his work investigates how different types of time operate in relation to one another and the space for action generated by such mixtures. In his texts, voices and meanings are mixed in highly structured forms, and in his music, actions and layers of metre and rhythm interfere with one another to form complex temporalities. He has collaborated with ensembles and musicians all over the world, and published two books of poetry as well as many essays and poetry translations. Currently, Vriezen is working on a CD of conceptual piano music written by himself and by composer Tom Johnson, to be released on the German label, Wandelweiser, in the spring of 2013.

KEY NOTE: NISHANT SHAH

Future Calling: Being Human in a Networked Society The rise of the network as a metaphor that explains our existence – individual and collective – has been meteoric. From being a society dealing with the information explosion, we have quickly evolved into talking about networked societies, living with the paradox of being simultaneously incessantly connected and increasingly individuated – of being ‘Alone Together’. Our ideas of who we are, where we are going, and how we are getting there have taken a new turn with the network that reduces and abstracts the whole of our life and living into mappable, understandable transactions within a multi-nodal ecology. This talk examines the network, especially the digital network, as a way by which we re-configure our pasts and imagine our futures, and questions the tenacity and value of this persistent explanatory framework. In the attempt, it focuses on the affects, emotions and values that slip through the porous borders of the networks, threatening to undermine the conditions of being human. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore, India. He is a visiting fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies and a Knowledge Partner with Hivos, Den Haag, the Netherlands. He has worked as an information architect and Cybercultures consultant for MNCs like Yahoo! and Partecs, for NGOs such as CSCS, and Khoj, and for governments in Asia, advising them on building deliberative and participatory frameworks of community engagement. Nishant’s ongoing research is investigating the ways in which young people in the global South are changing the world we live in through their use of digital and networked technologies. He is co-editor and the leading researcher for a 4-volume collection titled ‘Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?’ and has recently initiated a dialogue that looks at Networks as Habits of Living.

ARTIST PRESENTATION: JOHN FROSST

The Arbour Lake Sghool John Frosst is a member and co-founder of the Canadian art collective, The Arbour Lake Sghool. The group began in a suburban house in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, using the home as a living space, studio and exhibition hall. Formed from a loose collection of artists, musicians and technicians, the group presents entertaining and critical reflections on suburban ecology. The Arbour Lake Sghool is currently working at the Kunstvlaai festival of independents, designing everyday and whimsical products with students from the British School and building them over the course of the festival.

PROGRAM:

Spoken column: The Good the Bad and the Ugly:

what's so hot about being human anyway? by Simon Ferdinando.

Guest presentation including 2 artist contributions: Yes, Naturally by Ine Gevers & artists Sjaak Langenberg & Tea Mäkipää respectively.

Key-note: Bodies That (Didn’t) Matter: Ecologies Of Art And Performance After The Anthropocene by João Florêncio.

SPOKEN COLUMN: SIMON FERDINANDO

The Good the Bad and the Ugly: what's so hot about being human anyway? Simon Ferdinando in response to last week’s key-note, Nishant Shah's Future Calling - Being Human in a Networked Society.

The rise and spread of the global digital network is both mirroring and defining social relations across this cute little planet of ours. But machines always produce ghosts... Is Bambi's death the measure of Artaud's terminal curses?

Simon Ferdinando is an Amsterdam based practicing artist and curator and MPhil/PhD researcher at Liverpool John Moores University where he is researching parallels and relationships between the interpretations and inspirations of the works of Vincent Van Gogh made by Antonin Artaud and Francis Bacon.

GUEST PRESENTATION INCLUDING 2 ARTIST CONTRIBUTIONS:

INE GEVERS, SJAAK LANGENBERG & TEA MÄKIPÄÄ Ja Natuurlijk Yes Naturally - How art saves the world is an expanded art exhibition in the making. March 15, 2013 it will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Gemeentemuseum The Hague. Ine Gevers, artistic director of Yes Naturally, will elaborate on the notion of “ecology without nature” by theorist Timothy Morton, one of the keynote authors of the upcoming Yes Naturally publication (Nai010 Publishers). As part of her presentation Ine Gevers will also introduce two artists who will speak about their work and their contribution to Yes Naturally.

Tea Mäkipää is a Finnish artist, based in Germany. Her artworks, among which Atlantis, 2008 and EDEN II, 2011 have been featured in many prominent international art exhibitions around the world. Themes in Mäkipää’s work include consumerism, environmental issues, social-economic differences, as well as globalization's disadvantages.

Sjaak Langenberg is an artist and essayist. He works together with designer Rosé de Beer on projects that take place mostly outside of the usual art context. They respond to issues current within the discourses surrounding, environmental planning, social relationships, identity abuse and falsification of history in architecture and city development. In 2012 Sjaak Langenberg and Rosé de Beer have been the Rietveld Research Residents (at the Rietveld Academie).

KEY NOTE: JOÃO FLORÊNCIO

Bodies That (Didn’t) Matter: Ecologies Of Art And Performance After The Anthropocene

On the 11th of March, 2011, at exactly 14:46 JST, the Pacific Coast of Tōhoku in the Northeast of Honshu, Japan, was hit by the 9.0 magnitude-strong Great East Japan Earthquake. What followed is widely known: a series of malfunctions and meltdowns eventually led to several hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which eventually resulted in a mass discharge of radioactive material and in the biggest nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

Taking the Fukushima episode as the latest in a series of events that may serve, in the future, as geological markers of what chemist and Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen famously named the Anthropocene, this lecture will consider the impact of the current ecological crisis in the ongoing project of Enlightenment and Modernity and, in particular, the ways in which a recognition of the Anthropocene forces us to rethink existing theories of art and performance

João Florêncio is a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also responsible for leading the “Modernities” seminars and laboratories. He has been widely published across the world in books, academic journals, and exhibition catalogues, and has shown installation and performance works in several London galleries.

PROGRAM:

Introduction: ‘Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman?’

Screening: ‘An Ecology of Mind’

Artist Presentation Ronald van Tienhoven & Laurence Aegerter: ‘Je est un autre’

A glass of wine for all

INTRODUCTION:

‘Where Are We Going, Walt Whitman?’

An elaboration on the ideas and the logistics behind Studium Generale in general and this year's assemblage of lectures, lecture-performances, interviews, discussions and screenings in particular, delivered by Gabriëlle Schleijpen, educator and head of program SG and Jort van der Laan, artist and producer SG.

SCREENING:

‘An Ecology of Mind’

An Ecology of Mind is a film portrait of Gregory Bateson, celebrated anthropologist, philosopher, author, naturalist, systems theorist, and filmmaker, produced and directed by his daughter, Nora Bateson. The film includes footage from Bateson’s own films shot in the 1930s in Bali (with Margaret Mead) and New Guinea, along with photographs, filmed lectures, and interviews. Nora Bateson’s rediscovery of his work documents the vast – and continuing – influence Bateson’s thinking has had on the work of an amazingly wide range of disciplines. Through contemporary interviews, along with his own words, Bateson’s way of thinking reveals practical approaches to the enormous challenges confronting the human race and the natural world. Gregory Bateson’s theories, such as “the double bind” and “the pattern which connects”, continue to impact the fields of anthropology, psychiatry, information science, cybernetics, urban planning, biology, and ecology, challenging people to think in new ways.

ARTIST PRESENTATION:

‘Je est un autre’

In 2010, Laurence Aëgerter and Ronald van Tienhoven reenacted a series of photographs of Brazilian Indian tribes shot by the eminent anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1930s. Their models were inhabitants of the Frysian village of Beetsterzwaag. Both Lévi-Strauss’ photographs and the ones made by the artists invoke notions of ‘the other’, both as a distinctive force and as a realization that ‘the other’ is essentially an imprint of ourselves: ‘Je est un autre’.

Gregory Bateson states that(...) ‘in the world of creatures nothing can be understood until differences and distinctions are invoked’, which underpins the duality of both an all-encompassing ‘ecology of mind’ and the distinctions that need to be made in order to recognize the intimate relationship with ‘the other’.

Laurence Aëgerter (Marseille, 1972) is a multi-disciplinary artist. Photography, textiles and artist's books are her primary media. Over the past years she had several solo exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad, and took part in a host of group shows at, among others, MAMAC Nice, FOMU Antwerp, the Institut Néerlandais and Museum van Loon Amsterdam. Next year her work will be shown at the Museo Arts Santa Monica (Barcelona), Musée Borély (Marseille) and the Hermitage Amsterdam. Ronald van Tienhoven (Den Haag, 1956) is an artist, designer, and intermediary, specializing in fine cultural forensics. From 1993 onward he works primarily in the public domain with projects, ranging from landscape art to euro coin design. His toolbox is multidisciplinary, his contexts are manifold. In the course of 2012 and 2013 he will focus mainly on developing a large-scale art project for the Dam in Amsterdam in the wake of the May events that commemorate the end of the Second Word War.

PROGRAM:

Lecture: Jacob Groot, Divine Materials - The Poetics of Joy

Launch: Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain,

no. 24 on Politics of Things

Artist Presentation: Yvonne Dröge Wendel, Relational Thingness

Spoken column: Willem van Weelden,

From Ecology Of Mind To Ecology Of ‘Self’

LECTURE: JACOB GROOT

Divine Materials - The Poetics of Joy (An introduction to Walt Whitman, a kosmos) Jacob Groot is a poet, essayist and novelist. He published, amongst more, the cult book Gelukkige Lippen/Lucky Lips (2004), about the mystery of the 'singing voice' in pop music. In 2005 he coedited a collective translation of Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). His most recent volume of poetry is Divina Noir (2010). Even more recent is his lengthy novel Adam Seconde, an odyssey; a libidinal quest into a summer at sea.

LAUNCH:

Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, no. 24 on Politics of Things What Art & Design do in Democracy General introduction to this acclaimed Amsterdam based ‘cahier’ that reflects upon contemporary public space from a cultural perspective by Jorinde Seijdel, editor in chief. Co-editors Jeroen Boomgaard and Sher Doruff will introduce Open 24, the last issue of Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain as published by SKOR | Foundation for Art and the Public Domain and nai010 publishers. Open 24 investigates the current state of affairs in the theory and practice of the ‘Politics of Things’. What does a thing like ‘art’ do in democracy, how does art make publics, how does a thing interact with other things and people, and how does it influence them?

ARTIST PRESENTATION: YVONNE DRÖGE WENDEL

Relational Thingness Yvonne Dröge Wendel (D/NL) works in the field of sculpture and performance. She sets up experimental encounters that evoke questions concerning (the future of) things. Rethinking the subject-object distinction and reworking our understanding of what it is for humans and non-humans to constitute a world is the main focus point of her work. Presently she is one of four visual artists in the Netherlands who conduct a PhD trajectory at a Dutch University with the support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Mondriaan Fund. She is also the Head of the Rietveld Fine Arts department.

SPOKEN COLUMN: WILLEM VAN WEELDEN

From Ecology Of Mind To Ecology Of ‘Self’ Or: from cybernetics to chaosophy and transversality. A column in three parts: 1. How a young and curious high school student came to understand the complexity and interdependency of vegetal and other life. 2. How a scientist, at home in a wide variety of disciplines, went out to understand the ‘pattern that connects’. And while Gregory Bateson was trying to dissect the alcoholic ‘self’ he unraveled a new cybernetic epistemology in which ‘information’ is the key operant of a new idea of the ‘self’. 3. How a French radical psychotherapist who, throughout his entire working life, had been engaged with schizophrenics, set out to understand how subjectivity is produced and thus how the idea of normality is reproduced within the traditional psychoanalytical practice and theory. In the quest of Felix Guattari to overcome this enslavement he set out to radicalize psycho-analysis by combining cybernetics, semiotics, and ethnology; working towards an polemical approach to the notion of what is ‘human’. This concern with the ‘quality of subjectivity’ is what holds together art and ecology. Bio: Willem van Weelden has a background in social philosophy and visual art. He is committed to new media from 1990 onwards and has published on this topic in various magazines and catalogues. He was involved in numerous new media projects as a creative director and coach. Currently his focus is on writing and teaching.