2011 – Graduates
Erfan Abdi Dezfouli (Iran, 1983) graduated in graphic design at the University of Tehran in 2006, and is currently finishing the ArtScience Masters program at the University of the Arts in The Hague. He has a background in electronic music composition, video installation, computer programming and graphic design. His research for the MMus ArtScience includes investigating the possibilities for interactive computer-generated animations as interfaces for electronic music synthesis. His works slide on the edge of interactive installation and interface design for performances. He is interested in merging notation with the visual representation of virtual musical instruments, and tries to find his place between instrument designer and music composer/performer.
Nicky Assmann (Netherlands, 1980) explores in her work how the body relates to objects and spaces and refers to the concept of “wearable space”. The skin, both visible as invisible is a recurring metaphor in her work and is extended into the intimate space. This results in the use of different media, like wearable technology (embodied instruments), performance, light and soap film. With these soap films she creates temporary spaces in which wonder takes a central point. It reveals her fascination for technology, science and natural phenomena.
Her graduation project “Solace, a soap film apparatus” is a cinematic installation that investigates the mental process and physical activity of seeing. At regular intervals a handcrafted apparatus creates a soap fluid membrane as a spatial intervention. Through lighting the inner movement of the soap film is revealed, showing a turbulent choreography of iridescent color and fluid motion. As gravity slowly gets a hold of the film the viewer can drift off into the phenomenon, until inevitably the film bursts, suddenly breaking the spell.
Her work was nominated for the Artificial Light Award 2010 Reflection and she has participated in exhibitions at the Key of Life Festival (Leiden), 5 Days Off Media (Amsterdam), STRP Festival (Eindhoven), the Biënnale of Carrara (Italy) and performed with others at festivals like TodaysArt (The Hague), E-Pulse (Breda) and 5 Days Off (Amsterdam).
Katherine Cunningham (USA, 1982) is a visual and performance-based artist whose work explores identity construction and the possibilities for personal freedom within mass-mediated environments.
Grounded within research in the social sciences, Cunningham has explored concepts such as American attachment to the idea of hope, Post-Feminism trends in contemporary art, psycho-geography and the small town, the female role within religious fundamentalism, ‘States of Exception’ or human rights as theorized by Giorgio Agamben, and the science and spirituality of being a medical patient. Throughout all of her work she has been influenced by the theorist Jacques Rancière and his essay, The Emancipated Spectator, seeking complexity and contradiction within visual aesthetics so as to allow multiple interpretations within the works. Her work is concept-driven employing a variety of mediums including: photography, video, performance, time-based installation, audio composition, textiles, and drawing.
She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from The University of Notre Dame (USA). In 2008 she received the Erfroymson Fund Emerging Artist Award. She is currently pursing an Master of Music at the ArtScience Interfaculty in Den Haag, Netherlands.
http://www.katherinecunningham.net
Bardo Frings (Netherlands, 1984)
Within ArtScience the main focus of Bardo Frings lies in exploring the possibilities of digital real-time audiovisual synthesis and transformation. Using different programming environments such as SuperCollider and openFrameworks he creates live cinema performances, and plans to extend these technologies towards experimental theatre performances.
With his live cinema project Bardo Frings has performed at festivals such as STRP and Key of Life, at the Van Gogh Museum and at the BG-22-24. He has also participated in the ArtScience Structet project at Todays Arts in 2010, and several other projects from within and outside of ArtScience, such as the experimental theatre ensemble AdLib.
Furthermore, he has a great interest in natural sciences and has recently finished a minor in this subject area at Leiden University.
In his spare time he also enjoys writing, such as poetry and peculiar theories about the fundamental structure of the world and the universe.
http://www.bardofrings.nl/
http://ruisgeneratie.wordpress.com/
Jelle Goossens (Netherlands, 1987) is a musician and multimedia artist. Inspired by science fiction and video games his installation work often creates a fantasy setting for the audience to get lost in. He uses different media to research and eventually find the balance between story-driven concepts and simple minimalistic esthetics. Jelle has a lot of experience in composing and producing music, combining acoustic and electronic elements in a varied range of genres. He is part of multiple musical projects with his main focus on Fourteen Twentysix, and is a long-time guitar player and teacher. His passion is performing live on stage where shows often include visual and interactive aspects and has also participated in both editions of the ArtScience Structet project at the Todays Art festival. He is currently finalizing the Bachelor at the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague.
Goossens’ graduation project uses magnetism to make iron waste come to life. It creates beautiful patterns -some that resemble landscapes or even creatures- out of dead material. It is an ever-changing visual work that draws the attention of the audience, sparkles their imagination and sucks them in. By combining both the human imagination and the inevitable laws of nature it becomes an unpredictable and exciting installation.
Ivan Henriques (1978) is a Brazilian artist and independent researcher working in multimedia and site-specific installations. Henriques examines different perceptions of time, memory and environment using different mediums in his works. He also co-founded GEMA (Experimental Multidisciplinary Autonomous Group) in 2007, an artist-led conceptual framework that acts as an open interdisciplinary interface to explore the city of Rio de Janeiro and its environs with the support of international research partners of arts, sciences and technology.
Ivan has won several prizes for his work, among them for EME (EstЬdio MЧvel Experimental) – Experimental Mobile Studio in 2008 and 2010, a project selected and funded by the Secretaria de Cultura do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was also invited to exhibit his video ReLandscaping at FILE 2010 in SЛo Paulo and participated in residency programs at V2 in Rotterdam NL (summer 2010), 4TerritЧrios – Funarte – 2008, BR and Beacon Project, Oslo, NO – 2007.
For Henriques’ final project at ArtScience, he will present his project Action Plant, which is an interactive bio-machine. It consists in a customized machine that interfaces a sensitive plant (Mimosa Pudica). The consciousness, specifically in the nerve system from the Mimosa Pudica is part of a research developed with Professor Bert van Dujin from Leiden Biology University, in collaboration with Hortus Botanicus from Leiden and V2_ Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam. When the plant is touched the electromagnetic signal from the plant changes, triggering a start up for the machine.
Hadas Hinkis (Israel, 1980)
Born in Israel, Hadas Hinkis spent most of her life in Tel- Aviv and its suburbs. In 2005 she immigrated to Holland, where she continues to enjoy a broader spectrum of possibilities and personal freedom. Her creative endeavors have spread throughout many disciplines over the years such as music, ceramics, fashion and theater.
In Hinkis’ latest series of moving images she tries to create a world that has some, but not all things in common with our physical form. It tells a story of the human soul, unfolding without words or events.
Matteo Marangoni (Italy, 1982)
Harnessing the potential of listening and sound to establish new connections between people, places and objects, Matteo Marangoni’s performances and installations employ field recordings, sound archives, computer programming and DIY electronics. At the ArtScience Interfaculty he is investigating the relationship between sound, space and the body, looking for ways to address the body of the listener trough sound and to induce enhanced states of auditory awareness.
Marangoni’s graduation project is a system of mobile robotic speakers that exposes the way in which the movement of objects is perceived through sound and which aims to produce a physical response in the audience. Staging forms of interaction that alternate between the two poles of attraction and threat it activates a referential mode of listening rooted in instincts of navigation and survival.
Matteo Marangoni was born in Florence and studied classical double bass, sound engineering and cultural management. In Florence he founded SoundKino, a collective promoting sound and media art. He contributes to Neural magazine and Exibart.
www.humbug.me
www.soundkino.org
Malu Peeters (Netherlands, 1984) makes theatrical performances and time-based installations, where subtle variations in darkness and kinetic lights structure the music composition. She is intrigued by the cacophony of large city environments, and by how our current hyperbolic environment diffuses our reflective capacities. The spatial and theatrical capacities of sound, as well as the multisensory experience of space, form recurring elements in her work and research. For her graduation in the Master Art Science she ‘composes’ a magic-realistic large-city environment, where one is urged to slow down, to reflect on background noise, to find silence in an overflow of information-input.
Before attending the ArtScience Masters program, Malu Peeters finished a Bachelor (With Honours) in Composition & Music Technology at the Utrecht School of the Arts. In 2006 she co-founded theatre collective Le Nu Perdu. Since 2006, Le Nu Perdu performed at several Dutch theatre venues and site-specific festivals, such as Over ‘t IJ Festival (Ins Blaue Hinein In Avión 2007, Schemer 2008 and Heim, 2009), Festival aan de Werf, Het VEEMtheater and Theater Frascati.
Le Nu Perdu’s seventh and newest theatre installation will have its Dutch premiere in December 2011.
Besides the arts practice she is personal assistant to composer Louis Andriessen, and co-founder, writer and editor of hard//hoofd: Dutch online magazine for art and (new-)journalism.
www.le-nu.com
www.hardhoofd.com
Nenad Popov (Serbia, 1978)
While researching the relation between sound, image and space, Nenad Popov specialised in video analysis and real-time image processing. His work ranges from live cinema performances to large scale outdoor projections.
He collaborated with many artists and technicians working in the field, such as Daan Brinkmann, Electronic Opera, Thomas Köner and Lillevan/Rechenzentrum. At the same time he has been developing visual improvisations and related home-brew realtime animation software and hardware. He had solo performances on festivals like Dis- Patch, TodaysArt and Share.
Anne-Jan Reijn (Netherlands, 1983) is currently graduating at the Master course of the ArtScience Interfaculty in The Hague. He finished a Bachelor and Master in Composition and Music Production at the Utrecht School of Arts in 2007. Since then he has studied three semesters with Joachim Sauter and Alicja Kwade at the Experimental Media Design and Fine Arts departments of the UdK in Berlin.
Reijn’s work evolves mostly around installation and performance. He combines playfulness with highly charged cultural material to produce artistic forms that have a dynamic and often interactive character.
Ofer Smilansky (Israel, 1982) studied electronic arts at the Musrara School for Photography, Digital Media and New Music in Jerusalem, Israel. Ofer is presently a student in his fourth year at the Art Science department at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, The Netherlands. His main artistic research is live cinema, both on the esthetic and the technical levels. He creates audiovisual performances which combine captured reality and digital manipulation using live and recording, improvised and composed elements. In 2008 Ofer Smilansky made the short movie Effraction which was screened at the Holland Animation Film Festival 2008. In 2009 he created a live cinema installation based on Nabokovs novel ‘Transparent Things’. This year his new piece Transience has been shown at the Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam) during one of the Friday nights revolving around the exhibition Illusions of reality, and at the Key of Life Festival (Leiden). In parallel to his work as an audiovisual artist, Ofer Smilansky is playing and producing electronic music in various projects, mainly a Netherlands-based electro-acoustic band Gamila, and a collaboration with the Israeli musician Danski. Ofer is also currently involved in a project S.I.R (Symbiosis Interface Research) to design a standalone device conceived for playing electronic music with maximum flexibility and expression.
Aki Takeda (Japan, 1976)
In Japan, Aki Takeda began to study art, focusing on the fundamentals of painting and drawing. She came to Europe in 2002 and visited many places: Utrecht, Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Madrid, Barcelona, Venice and London because she wanted to see art. She found the Netherlands to be the most interesting for the artworks had a strangeness to them. She had not seen this freedom of expression in art before and it re-awoke her desire to study art.
She started to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2004. During her second study year at the Academy, she discovered that her expression must come through live performances using her body. For the last 5 years, Aki has been doing live performances and creating installations. Aki’s work always circles around a particular theme, indicated by the word ´life´. In her understanding, life is about the unconscious functioning of the body as the senses and instinctive body movements share a common denominator. They all come to a definite end.
For the graduation exhibition Aki will create an installation and live performance. The installation will employ a single monitor that plays black and white images in a dark room. The live performance involves blowing into an inflatable, which will bind around a body. Through these works, she wishes for viewers to be aware of their own consciousness and unconsciousness.
Xandra van der Eijk (Netherlands, 1985)
Since starting the program, Xandra has developed a fascination for analog, tactile work. Constantly driven by the idea of structure, every work contains contradiction between emotion/aesthetics and (generated) data- cycles or strict systems.
Graduating graphic design in 2008 with a graphic score and interactive performance, Xandra decided to continue her research in image and sound as an ArtScientist. For her work she received the Paul Schuitema-prize and participated in many festivals and collaborations. Hosts include: Hong Kong Business of Designweek, Theater Zeebelt, Theater de Brakke Grond, Scheltema, Theater Frascati and others.
Her final work shows the process of decay and the human incapability to overcome it. It is a spacious, analog installation with a 4-day cycle, guided by a very slow, continuous performance of assisting the installation in order for it to work, resulting in strong graphic, 4m long prints.
Willem Waterschoot (Netherlands, 1986) is a composer and audio artist, investigating the properties of magnetizable media, the tangibility of sound and its relations to the environment. He is a former philosophy student with an admiration for the concept of sabi and natural phenomena within the world of sound, clearly audible in his divergent range of self-released lo-fidelity works, mainly under the alter ego of Akazeno. Furthermore, he has written a variety of orchestral pieces, is a former teacher in percussion, and is active as a field biologist.
As a graduation project he is constructing a play of analog audio chess, in which the concepts of canon, difference, repetition and context are magnified and shifted through the framework of a simple ‘machine’.