Age-ism Lecture Series
14 – 28 March 2012
This lectures series is produced by the department and is entirely initiated and made by students. Curating, staging and organisation are the work of students.“Speculating about economical and social scenarios, Age-ism approaches the field of making as a borderless practice. Like uncontrolled missiles, skimming the surface of history, landing on unknown territory, Age-ism hopes to provoke and unveil the relationship of progress to production and experience. Questioning design in the most ambitious sense of the word – ‘anything is possible’ -, it aims to go beyond the borders of post-modern production where ‘anything goes’. The Age-ism lecture series will show speed, the screen, the desert, cars, behind the scenes software programming, cargo ships, satellites, the indigenous of here and there, the merging of matter and information, violence, entropy, a keyboard, the spectacle and the particle accelerator…”Curator Elise van Mourik / Set up Laure Jaffuel / Moderation Guy Königstein / Music Mathias Dolder / Food concept Aliki van der Kruijs / Audio-visual Sandberg Institute.
Between Worlds
14 March 2012
In ‘Between Worlds’ we travel between cultures and economies; by means of cargo-vessels, theme parks, over the horizontal planes of the American desert driving a gearless car; questioning “what on earth!” is modernity?
We observe mainstream capitalism, its different levels of value and find form and gesture in the mundane prescence of man in habitat – the ritual, the built, the spectacle, the simulated.
Rearview Mirror
21 March 2012
In Rearview Mirror we investigate the relationship between innovation and culture. Employing both Hegelian and Marxist perspectives we roughly sketch an understanding of the dual construction between the two; between the real and ideal, the constructed and the unconscious, between economy and experience. Looking at the succession of new media over old media and the evolution of technology and perception, we attempt to portray the social, political and economical shift of our age. A blind attempt; as McLuhan explains in a 1969 Playboy issue;
“because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consiously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an
environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new
environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”
I am no Barbarian, I am an Alien!
28 March 2012
In “I am no barbarian, I am an alien!” we make a radical trip to our second planet; beyond the visible man-made landscape; into the aerial, circulative systems of the built world. What surrounds us, but we cannot see.
Propelled by the circulation of speed and virtuality we leave history behind. Since at this rate, the idea of history ends as the programmed rules the experienced, capital escapes into the universal and scarcity becomes obsolete. “We have the particle accelerator that has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all,” Baudrillard wrote before the accelerator presented us with something faster than the speed of light. No surprise for the barbarians, time travel already exists in science-fiction. I, however, am no barbarian. I am an alien!