Play & Prosume

On March 5, the exhibition Play & Prosume will open at the Kunsthalle Wien, accompanied by a symposium featuring a number of VU University faculty members. The exhibition and symposium result from the HERA funded research project “Technology Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices and Commercial Application”. It brings together the key research findings of the project research teams at Plymouth University, VU University Amsterdam and the University of Applied Arts Vienna together with contributions from the EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum. A catalogue (Verlag für moderne Kunst) will accompany the exhibition, which includes contributions by the project partners about major findings, as well as reflections about key terms such as “serious games”, “interfaciality” or the “prosumer”. The character of texts ranges from essays, interviews, commented images to literary reflections.

Stedelijk Collection Highlights

More book news – but this time from a student rather than from staff members! On the occasion of the reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, Stedelijk Collection Highlights: 150 Artists from the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents a discussion of the most defining works of the Museum’s renowned art and design collection. VAMA student and Stedelijk intern Angela Bartholomew was highly involved in the development of the publication, authoring and editing many of the entries for the book including those with works by Nam June Paik, Ellsworth Kelly, Danh Vo, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mathias Poledna, Martha Rosler, Melvin Moti, Cady Noland, Jean Tinguely, Max Beckmann, Yael Bartana, Carl Andre, and Willem de Kooning, among others.

New Books

Mysteriously, some VU University faculty members and VAMA teachers still manage to find or make time to write books. In November, Amsterdam University Press published Koos Bosma‘s book Shelter City: Protecting Citizens Against Air Raids, which examines air-raid protection plans and structures  in Europe between 1933 and 1945. “Air Raid Protection represented an era: a mode of thought, a political and administrative concept, and a collection of technical and organisational measurements to protect citizens against attacks from the air. This book offers an interpretation of the Dutch, English and German air raid protection systems, and the construction of a Shelter City, parallel to the existing city. The reconstruction of Shelter City, of which some remnants still present themselves as theatrical memories or enjoy a fragmented existence in deeper layers of the earth, could be characterised with a medical metaphor: the historian must scan the urban body in order to imagine Shelter City. This insightful study explores the hidden traces of war, outlining ways of dealing with the physical remnants of air raid protection, which have long been useless but are still part of our landscapes.”

In March, Duke University Press will publish Ginette Verstreate‘s Tracking Europe. “Tracking Europe is a bold interdisciplinary critique of claims regarding the free movement of goods, people, services, and capital throughout Europe. Ginette Verstraete interrogates European discourses on unlimited movement for everyone and a utopian unity-in-diversity in light of contemporary social practices, cultural theories, historical texts, media representations, and critical art projects. Arguing against the persistent myth of borderless travel, Verstraete shows the discourses on Europe to be caught in an irresolvable contradiction on a conceptual level and in deeply unsettling asymmetries on a performative level. She asks why the age-old notion of Europe as a borderless space of mobility goes hand-in-hand with the at times violent containment and displacement of people.”

The spring will also see the publication of History in Motion by Sven Lütticken (Sternberg Press), which deals with the current “economy of time,” marked as it is by ubiquitous real-time media, and its impact on the representation and the production of history. More on that publication at some future moment.

VAMA Deadlines

If you are interested in applying for VAMA: the deadline for international applicants is April 1, or March 1 if you are also applying for a VU Fellowship Programme grant. The Art & Education announcement is here.

Seminar with Caroline van Eck

On Monday February 18 we welcome Caroline van Eck of Leiden University for a VAMA reading seminar. We will discuss two recent texts by her on sculpture, agency and petrifaction: “Living Statues: Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response and the Sublime” and “Medusa as the Ultimate Sculptress: Stone, Petrifaction and Life.” This reading seminar complements this semester’s “Imagining the Image” course, which investigates the embodied image—the image as object and/or thing.

Caroline van Eck is professor in the history and theory of architecture and the arts to 1800 at Leiden University. Her homepage is at http://www.hum.leiden.edu/research/artandagency/staff/eckcavan.html

New Opportunities

A whole range of listings have just been added to the Opportunities page, from Kunstlicht‘s call for a digital whizzkid in the Internships section to new Ph.D. positions in architectural history listed in Future Prospects.

In addition, several Call for Papers have been added as well. Among them is a Call for Papers for a one-day symposium entitled Uneasy Alliances, which will be held by the OSK on May 23, 2013 at the University of Amsterdam. The symposium is organized to mark the foundation of the European Society for Nineteenth Century Art, a new working group in nineteenth-century art studies that has been formed under the auspices of the OSK’s Modern and Contemporary Art section. ESNA aims to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between scholars, graduate students, and museum professionals based in the Netherlands whose research focuses on European art of the long nineteenth century. It also welcomes collaboration on events with similar working groups in other countries, including XIX: Werkgroep 19de-eeuwse Kunst based in Belgium.  

In other news, OSK is organizing several courses for Research Master students and Ph.D. Candidates this summer. In collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), for instance, they will offer a summer school on Memory and the Museum. More information on this course, worth 4 ects, can be found here. For the complete overview of courses offered by OSK, please visit http://www.onderzoekschoolkunstgeschiedenis.nl/site/index.php?page=edu-researchmaster&lngg=nl

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