Overview
The International M.A. in New Media & Digital Culture (NMMA) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is accepting applications for 2010-2011 academic year. The NMMA is a one-year residence program undertaken in English at UvA in the heart of Amsterdam. Students become actively engaged in critical Internet culture, with an emphasis on new media theory and aesthetics, including theoretical materialist traditions and practical information visualization trends. Our permanent faculty are recognized experts in their fields, who are committed to their students. The program admits approximately forty students per year, classes are no larger than 20 and often smaller, and the faculty-to-student ratio is 1:8.
Curriculum and Academics
1st Semester: students follow a course in academic blogging, led by critical Internet theorist and tactical media practitioner Geert Lovink. Their entries form the internationally noted Masters of Media site, http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/, regarded as a top blog for new media research and nominated for a Dutch blog award for best education blog. The concurrent new media theories course focuses on classic texts by innovators from Alan Turing to Tim Berners-Lee. The final first semester class, Digital Methods, given by the program Chair, Richard Rogers, trains students in novel techniques for Internet research, http://www.digitalmethods.net/.
2nd Semester: the student chooses between courses on digital aesthetics, new media politics or information visualization. The digital aesthetics course is theoretically inclined in the traditions of art history and visual culture, and the new media politics class is concerned with the transformations the Internet is bringing to politics. Information visualization is a joint theoretical-practical collaboration between designers, programmers and analysts, where the product is an online tool, digital visualization or interactive graphic. The course of study concludes with the M.A. thesis, an original analysis that makes a contribution to the field, undertaken with the close mentorship of a faculty supervisor.
The graduation ceremony includes an international symposium with renowned speakers. Graduates of the NMMA have gained an analytical and practical skill-set that enables diverse careers in research and practice-related areas that make use of the Internet, including business, government, NGOs, and creative industries that are evolving with emerging new media. Our graduates include Lotte Meijer, winner of a Webby award, and Eva Kol, whose MA thesis, Hyves, was published by Kosmos in 2008 and sold over 5000 copies its first year in print.
Student Life
The quality-of-living in Amsterdam ranks among the highest of international capitals. UvA’s competitive tuition (see below) and the ubiquity of spoken English both on and off-campus make the program especially accommodating for foreign students. The city’s many venues, festivals, and other events provide remarkably rich cultural offerings and displays of technological innovation. The program has ties to organizations including PICNIC, the Waag Society, Institute for Network Cultures, Virtueel Platform, Netherlands Institute for Media Art, govcom.org, and other cultural institutions, where internship opportunities may be available, in consultation with the student’s thesis supervisor. Students attend and blog, twitter or otherwise capture local new media events and festivals, while commenting as well on larger international issues and trends pertaining to new media. The quality of student life is equally to be found in the university’s lively and varied intellectual climate. NMMA students come from North and South America, Africa, Asia and across Europe and from academic and professional backgrounds including journalism, art and design, engineering, the humanities and social sciences.
Faculty
Richard Rogers, Professor and Chair. Web epistemology, Digital methods. Publications include Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004/2005), awarded American Society for Information Science and Technology’s 2005 Best Information Science Book of the Year Award, and the End of the Virtual (U Amsterdam P, 2009). Founding director of govcom.org. http://www.govcom.org/.
Geert Lovink, Associate Professor. Critical Internet theory, Tactical Media. Publications include Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (Routledge, 2007). Co-founder nettime listserve (1995 – present); founder, Institute of Network Cultures, 2004. http://www.networkcultures.org/.
Jan Simons, Associate Professor. Mobile Culture, Gaming, Film Theory. Publications include Playing The Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema (U Amsterdam P, 2007). Project Director, Mobile Learning Game Kit, Senior Member, Digital Games research group. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.a.a.simons/
Yuri Engelhardt, Assistant Professor. Computer modeling and information visualization. Publications include The Language of Graphics (2002); founder and moderator of InfoDesign (1995-9); codeveloper of Future Planet Studies at UvA. http://www.yuriweb.com/
Edward Shanken, Assistant Professor. Digital aesthetics, visual culture. Publications include Art and Electronic Media (Phaidon, 2009) and Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness (U Cal P, 2003). http://artexetra.com
Thomas Poell, Assistant Professor. New media politics. In 2007 he defended his PhD-dissertation on the democratization and centralization of the Dutch state during the revolutionary period around 1800. http://nl.linkedin.com/in/thomaspoell
Application & Deadlines
1 January 2010 for “early bird” candidates for Fall 2010. Early bird candidates notified on 1 February. General deadline: 1 April for Fall 2010. Applicants will be notified around 15 June. Applications received after 1 April may be considered if places are available. See http://www.studeren.uva.nl/ma-nieuwe-media/ for details.
More Info & Questions
• International M.A. in New Media & Digital Culture – University of Amsterdam, http://www.studeren.uva.nl/ma_new_media/
• Graduate School for Humanities General Information, http://www.hum.uva.nl/gs/actueel.cfm • Further general questions? Please write to UvA’s Graduate School of the Humanities, graduateschool-fgw “at” uva.nl.
• Specific questions about curriculum and student life? Please write to Richard Rogers, Chair in New Media & Digital Culture, University of Amsterdam, rogers “at” uva.nl.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson “The important little man” performance for Piccolo Stato Neon Campobase, Bologna, 2009 Photo: Gino Gianuizzi
NUA new contemporary arts
How is the practice of making art experienced today in certain geo-cultural micro-areas and small States of Europe? “Little Constellation” began in 2004 as a research project focused on contemporary art, but not with the attempt to answer this question by ?nding a label that could be attached to “small states”, or to provide a full, systematic picture of the art that can be found today in Andorra, Cyprus, Iceland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino and in other signi?cant cultural micro-areas such as Canton Ticino, Ceuta, Gibraltar or Kaliningrad.
Alexander Arrechea’s installation, Orange Tree, occupied Crane Arts‘ huge Icebox as well as the Grey Box leading to it from Jan. 21-Feb. 21, 2010, and it definitely held its ground within that vast space. Arrechea’s work, combining suggestions of menace and the high-tech production values of the latest Hollywood movie, rose to the challenge of the monumental scale. On entering the darkened Grey Box visitors were confronted with Black Sun (2009), a silent video projection of a swinging wrecking ball that marked time in the exhibition like a destructive pendulum.
Alexander Arrechea, front room of 'Orange Tree' installation at Crane
On the walls around it were three huge drawings and a digital print, all executed with tromp l’oeil virtuosity. Almohada (Pillow) (2005) and T-Shirt (2005) are watercolors depicting vastly-enlarged versions of the named objects, bound with measuring tape. I can’t say exactly why the form of the bound pillow evoked a trussed corpse, but the association was undeniable (I made me think of David Hammons ). Birds (2009) is a c-print referring to the camera-bearing tree in Garden of Mistrust, a video projection in the large space beyond. It creates the illusion of a piece of marbleized paper cut into the silhouette of the tree and pinned to a black background.
Alexander Arrechea ' Almohada' (Pillow) (2005) watercolor 66×44 in.
The Icebox space contained Orange Tree (2010), a towering, multi-limbed “tree” sprouting nineteen basketball hoops, rather than branches, surrounded by balls which looked liked fallen fruit. Facing it was a similar-sized video projection of Garden of Mistrust (2007), an earlier “tree” with constantly-moving video surveillance cameras substituting for branches. Both are obviously urban species, and strange mutations. If the increasing use of cameras is a way of keeping urban youth under control, basketball is one route they take to make their way within and out of the ghetto. It is unclear whether basketball will empower these players or ensnare them in the corporate control of professional sports.
Alexander Arrechea, rear room of 'Orange Tree'
Arrechea’s world is one of illusion, often invoked in the name of power. The mutant forms and shifting scale create an intentional unease. He has previously dealt with the equipment and spaces of sports, those arenas and stadiums where boys and men play out their manhood, where symbolic wars are fought and national passions aroused. Raised within the state control of Castro’s Cuba, Arrechea is sensitive to the control that corporate power and fear have imposed on more open states in Europe and America. The project, curated by Anabelle Rodriguez, was the first in the International Curatorial Exchange at Crane Building, and a roaring start it was.
Alexander Arrechea 'Orange Tree' (2010)
Miller Lagos’ Silence Doogood at the Arthur Ross Gallery, U. of Pennsylvania
Miller Lagos’ 'Silence Doogood' during fabrication
Miller Lagos’ Silence Doogood at the Arthur Ross Gallery (the title was one of Benjamin Franklin’s pen names) through March 21, 2010 is the product of the artist’s residency at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the independent projects of Philagrafika He worked with fine arts students to paste a ton of newspaper pages together and wind them into a huge roll which he sculpted to resemble a cross-section of a huge tree, although I needed to read the label copy to discover that. The gallery also contains stacks of newspapers sitting in the form a cube; walking around the pile the visitor discovers that a group of paper has been removed, resulting in a shape that reads as a throne (a sort of ur throne that a child might make). A video of Lagos working with the students and a short introduction by Lynn D. Marsden-Atlass, director of the gallery and Jose Roca, curator of Philagrafika, is shown beside the entrance. It can be seen on Youtube . .
Miller Lagos is clearly a charismatic teacher and the project appears to have been a pedagogic success. Jose Roca remarked that Lagos’ work reminds us that paper comes from trees; if the students hadn’t learned that in grade school, it was probably a useful lesson. They clearly saw the power of one artist to transform materials and gained experience with the shared vision and coordinated work required by such labor-intensive art, which they could never attempt within an educational system marked by semesters. The final product, however, was a bit thin as a gallery presentation. That’s a shame, because Lagos’ previous work sculpted from recycled newspaper is very impressive. The notion that the work deals with the dissemination of knowledge via newspapers may have been impressed upon the student collaborators, but did not come through as a significant focus in the work on display.
Santiago Forero, The Riot, 2009
from the series Action Heroes, digital print
Two films about Palestine by noted artist Suha Shoman deal with critical issues concerning the Israeli occupation of her homeland.
Charif Benhelima’s photographic project, Welcome to Belgium, illuminates the plight of Arab immigrants in Europe. An essay by noted Belgium painter, Luc Tuymans, describes Charif’s project as “a testimony, beginning at the beginning and covering a research period lasting nine years.”
Santiago Forero presents a singularly perceptive perspective on life in the United States through his cryptic photographs. Santiago is a graduate student from Colombia attending the University of Texas.
Saluto Romano by Czech artist Martin Zet is a series of photographs portraying himself as an object within various environments. This is his ongoing attempt to find freedom and his true identity in a post-communist world.
Houston artist Ed Wilson’s steel sculptures are based on photographs that he took of concentration camps in Germany. They convey moral outrage at the same time as they represent his powerful sculptural identity. His photographs will be exhibited along with his sculptures.
Station Museum is also presenting a group of mystical paintings by Elliot Wolfson who, in addition to being an artist, is one of the world’s most important authorities on the Kabbalah, understood as esoteric teachings concerning about mysticism and nature of the universe.
These exhibitions will be on view:
March 13, 2010 – May 30, 2010
Station Museum is located in Midtown on the corner of Alabama and La Branch.
The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Admission is free.
For more information or to schedule a tour, please call or visit our website. www.stationmuseum.com
Very lucky me happened to be in Tokyo during the Japan Media Arts festival. Cheerful, a bit chaotic and very laid-back, the festival had much to tickle a European amateur of media art.
First of all, the festival doesn’t just celebrates media arts, it also highlights creative works of entertainment, animation, and manga which gives the feeling that media art is part of a broader contemporary culture than it is in Europe. On the other hand, i didn’t see as many socially-engaged artworks media art works as one can find in similar exhibitions in both Europe and the U.S. of A. I’m all for activism and hacktivism but you know what? i didn’t expect to find conscience-wrecking works in the exhibition anyway, so its scarce presence didn’t spoil my dessert.
Unlike most similar events, Japan Media Arts festival displays not only the awarded works but also the ones that have been recommended by the jury.
Finally, there was light instead of the usual crepuscular atmosphere in the exhibition space. I don’t understand why media art exhibitions are so desperate to have you nose-dive into darkness and gloominess.
While lasers scan the onion from one of three angles, a fuse deposition modeler creates a plastic model based on the information collected. The device repeats this process every twenty-four hours scanning from a different angle. After a new model is produced the system advances a conveyor approx. 17 inches so the cycle can repeat. The result is a series of white plastic models illustrating a simple organic phenomenon from different angles.
Vernissage tv interviewed Bowen about his installation.
One of my favourite works in the exhibition was Braun Tube Jazz Band. Wada Ei lined up tv screens and used them as percussion instruments, reinventing thus the purpose and characteristics of a media we thought we knew so well. The artist explains: One day, a spectacular picture popped up in my brain. It was an image of abandoned electrical appliances being played as musical instruments on a street in a town. Using this image as a starting point, I set up the same number of tube televisions and PC-controlled video decks correspond to the number of notes in a musical scale to create a set of gamelan percussion instruments. Tapping TV tubes produces primitive and cosmic electrical music.
People were forming a long queue to be allowed to enter the transparent cylinder and sit on its chair, right in the eye of the upcoming storm… Once you’ve press the start button, a huge volume of foam polystyrene beads swirl frantically against the internal wall of the cylinder. All hell breaks loose around you and after a first moment of shock, the experience turn out to be soothing and perfectly safe.
Leçons de Français (French Lessons), a very charming French lesson by Vanessa Louzon who cut and rearranged images from a French lesson book that belonged to her mother and a communist-era atlas of Europe that belonged to her father, and constructed a video narrative using language lesson clichés to tell about modern life, displacement, and failed dreams (movie.)
Common Flowers, by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel (of the Biopresence fame), reverts the blue “Moondust” carnation -the first commercially available and purely aesthetic GM product- back to its natural white state using open-source DIY bio-bending methods and procedures.
Box 2.0, by
Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak, is a bright orange rubber LCD monitor showing clones of the artists duo trapped inside it. As they bump and hit on the walls surrounding them in 2D video, pneumatic system and software transfer their movements into actual 3D space as if their kicks could actually enable them to escape the tv set (video.)
Bearings Glocken, by Kawase Kohske, is a musical instrument that performs a glockenspiel using steel ball for bearings, said to be the world’s most perfect sphere on earth.
Eli Klein Fine Art 462 West Broadway, 212-255-4388
Soho
March 4 – April 22, 2010 Opening: Thursday, March 4, 6 – 9 PM Web Site
ZHAO BO: VIBRANTCITY
Eli Klein Fine Art is proud to present Zhao Bo’s second solo exhibition in New York, his first at the Gallery. Through his paintings, Zhao Bo records the monumental cultural and political shifts in China, shown from the perspective of Chinese people. China’s opening to the West in the late 1980s ushered in a new era and these paintings provide a snapshot into this unique period. He clashes Communist and contemporary icons together in the same scene, revealing that Chinese society is more interested in adapting to contemporary culture than adhering to staid traditionalism.
Mocking the social realist propaganda of Communist China, Zhao Bo replaces the ideal Chinese worker or citizen with an ostentatious cartoon. The bright colors and enthusiastic poses express the vitality and exuberance of this new Chinese generation. Rather than revering Chairman Mao and principles of Communism, these wide-eyed figures revel in the glow of billboards and luxury goods. Yet, their placement in front of important Communist markers, such as Mao’s tomb or signs proclaiming, “Long live the people,” is a constant reminder of the government’s presence.
Zhao Bo received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in Chongqing, China. His works have been exhibited in museums in China and the United States including the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Museum of Shanghai, the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, and the Art Museum of Chongqing.
ZHANGGONG: MISSPANDA
Eli Klein Fine Art is proud to present Zhang Gong’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Zhang Gong’s work parodies instantly recognizable Western art, demonstrating the effect of Western popular culture on contemporary Chinese society.
In his most recent works, Zhang Gong incorporates cartoon characters with scenes from modernist Western paintings and other popular images. These juxtapositions simultaneously satirize and question ideas about what constitutes high art and originality. His own unique creation, Miss Panda, interacts with the Western characters in chaotic scenes. Miss Panda often finds her way into famous Western paintings, reminding the viewer that Western art, once banned, has now been assimilated into the collective consciousness of modern Chinese society. Through his works, Zhang Gong brings historic and contemporary art into dialogue with one another.
Zhang Gong’s paintings record the change in Chinese society and a shift toward a more global outlook. The characters from Western media are instantly familiar to their audience. The cartoon nature of the pieces implies humor, yet the subdued colors, repetition of the characters, and incongruity with their surroundings causes tension.
Zhang Gong received his Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Arts and Design in Beijing and is currently a Professor in the Animation Department at Qinghua University. Zhong Gong’s works have been exhibited at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn Germany, the Singapore Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Zhang Gong’s animations have been selected for prestigious international film festivals throughout Asia, Europe, the United States, Australia, and Latin America.
_Both exhibitions will be on view at Eli Klein Fine Art from March 4 through April 22, 2010 and are accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the Today Art Museum in Beijing, China. Both artists will be present for the opening reception on Thursday, March 4 from 6 – 9 PM.
For further information, please contact the gallery at (212) 255-4388 or info@EKfineart.com._
Thomas Schütte: Hindsight at the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid is the most comprehensive retrospective of the German artist’s work ever organized in Europe. It offers visitors a detailed insight into his work. The works on display span from Thomas Schütte’s early works in the late 1970s to his latest creations. The show features little-known works as well as well-known ones such as the series of sculptures entitled Frauen (Women). The exhibition has been curated by Lynne Cooke and presents installations, sculptures, watercolors, etchings, photographs, and architectural models.
Thomas Schütte: Hindsight at Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid / Spain. Opening reception, February 16, 2010.
THE TANK
Wednesday, March 3rd 7:30 pm
Tickets $5.00 | 354 West 45th Street
Spectacle De Variétés is an eclectic program of women filmmakers and
video artists from the US and Europe that have collectively screened
and exhibited at festivals and museums around the world including:
Whitney Biennale, Sundance Film Festival, New York Video Festival,
World Wide Video Festival, Danish Film Institute, Redcat Theater,
Locarno Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film
Festival. The program shows a broad spectrum of styles and subject
matter from the experimental, dramatic narrative, fractured
fairytales, social satire, and animation to the conceptual eco-doc.
Spectacle De Variétés is a mini-festival of dark, funny and strange
short films & videos. Running time 60 minutes.
Ilya Chaiken, Black Out | Andrea Staka, Daleko | Erika Yeomans, Boo!
Imelda O’Reilly, Lilly in the Woods | Virginie Yassef & Julien Previeux, L’Arbre
Andrea Polli & Chuck Varga, Cloud Car | Amber Boardman, 3 animated shorts
Danziger Projects 534 West 24th Street, 212-629-6778
Chelsea
March 4 – April 10, 2010 Opening: Thursday, March 4, 6 – 8 PM Web Site
Over the past several years, Viviane Sassen has emerged as one of the freshest voices in European photography. Already an acclaimed fashion photographer whose work appears regularly in magazines such as French Vogue, Purple, and i-D, in 2001 Sassen began regular trips to Africa, where she had lived as a child. Her work there moved away from fashion and documentary and towards an ongoing body of collaborative portraits.
In this work she has established a visual vocabulary that is stylized, symbolic and mysterious. Her aesthetic combines a sense of childhood memory, where scenes are crystallized and highly saturated with color with a photographer’s sensitivity to the body and surface. The strong presence of shadow and darkness in Sassen’s images provokes more questions than answers. If there is such a thing as magical realism in photography, these photographs embody it.
This exhibition, Sassen’s first American showing, draws on work from three series – ‘Die Son Sien Alles’ (The Sun Sees Everything), made in South Africa; ‘Flamboya’, made in Zambia and East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania); and the series ‘Ultra Violet’, made in Ghana. These portraits combine the spontaneous with the staged, and often come out of ideas that Sasson carries in a sketchbook of inspirations for future compositions. These ideas are shared with her subjects as the starting point for each photograph. Critic Vince Aletti commented, “Her photographs tease fashion conventions but with witty and unexpected results, partly because her subjects are all young Africans who seem to have enjoyed collaborating with her. She tends to treat the body as a sculptural element — a malleable shape that combines with blocks of shadow and bright color in arrangements that sometimes read like cut-paper collages, bold and abstract but full of vibrant life.”
Viviane Sassen was born in Amsterdam in 1972. She began studying photography after going to school for fashion design, where she realized that her interest was not in clothes but in making images. In 1997, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Royal Academy in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Since then she has found great success as a fashion photographer, publishing work in avant-garde fashion magazines throughout the world. In addition, she has shot advertising campaigns for clients including Louis Vuitton, Adidas, and Miu Miu.
In 2007, she received the Prix de Rome, the major Dutch prize for art, for her series ‘Ultra Violet’. Ms. Sassen’s personal work has been exhibited in museums throughout Europe and was featured in a 2008 – 2009 solo show in Amsterdam’s prestigious FOAM (Photo Museum of Amsterdam). Her African photographs have also been published in the monograph, Flamboya.
It was when 20th-century British artists stopped trying to be modernists that they started to create honest, significant work
What with Henry Moore at Tate and Paul Nash at Dulwich Picture Gallery, it seems the art of 20th-century Britain is enjoying an unexpected revival. Obviously, coincidences like this are just coincidences. But… makes you think, dunnit.
British art from the years 1900 to 1950 is unlikely to be found in huge quantities in many museums of modern art you visit around the world. The Moore show is at Tate Britain and not at Tate Modern: in his lifetime, had the two museums been divided, he’d have been at Modern. But nowadays, Francis Bacon is the first British artist of the 20th century who seriously holds his own in international collections. I’m sure lots of people will put me right on this one, but it’s my strong perception.
British art in 1930 is arguably comparable in quality with American art at the same moment: both countries were outside the avant-garde swim of continental Europe yet both had artists who created original homegrown interpretations of modern art. In the 1940s both took off for themselves, in radically divergent directions – while American painters and sculptors discovered an inner voice of abstraction, Britain found itself in existentialist figurative painting.
Of course, there were British abstract artists, before and after the 1940s, but they so often seem brittle and precious. I can’t keep awake in the pre-war abstraction room at Tate Britain. In the room that has paintings such as Kossoff’s Man in a Wheelchair, I feel I am seeing actual art.
It was as if, in the early 20th century, British artists put on modernist clothes but felt terribly uncomfortable in them. When Evelyn Waugh satirises British art deco in his novels, I suppose nowadays we’re supposed to shudder at his snobbery – but don’t you recognise the chilly British version of the international style he’s mocking?
When the British stopped trying to be modernists their art became more honest, more real and more significant – from the 50s painters to Gilbert and George to You Know Who. Our artists are better at living in this world than they are constructing utopias – and perhaps that speaks well of them, and us.
