Category: Contributors

Ágnes Karolina Bakk (1986), PhD-researcher (MOME), conference founder, producer and curator. She is the founder of the immersive storytelling conference entitled Zip-Scene (zip-scene.com), that will take place for the third time in March 2021. She is the cofounder of Random Error Studio, a lab that supports various VR productions and is currently the curator of Vektor VR section in the frame of the Verzio Film festival. She is teaching escape room design, immersive&VR- storytelling and speculative design at MOME. She presented her research on immersive theatre and VR at various conferences and platforms from Moscow (CILECT, 2019) to Montreal (SQUET, 2019).  

“The ‘-’ in theory-fiction denotes not a merging but a dissolution of the two categories. Fiction doesn’t just ‘contain’ theory, but produces it”

Fisher, Mark (1999) Flatline constructs : Gothic materialism and cybernetic theory-fiction. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

The dissolution of categories is perhaps the most important, albeit abstract, guiding line in my work, as both an artist and an educator. Be it the act of dissolving disciplinary-, discourse-, methodological- or epistemic-related  categories, it is undoubtedly present in many practical outputs of my work. In regards to the elephant in the room; I guess I relate more to the prefix ‘trans-’, than to the root word ‘ -discipline’, or as it is defined: “across,” “beyond,” “through,” “changing thoroughly,” “transverse,”. And by extension, applying these movements to the limits of our surroundings. Simply because of the conviction that this ‘trans-‘ movement ought to be applied to more than just the domain of disciplines.

“The line between social reality and science fiction is an optical illusion”

Akomfrah, John (1996) The Last Angel of History.

Are these dividing-lines even real? One could ask with a slightly rhetorical tone… Or, are these lines nothing more than mere optical illusions?

In my work as a coordinator and teacher in the Willem de Kooning Academy’s Honours Programme, we set out to re-formulate and engage with these aforementioned questions.

For example, in our course ‘Theory-F[r]iction’ (which I taught together with Sonia de Jager), that ran from September – December in 2019, the students developed what they call a ‘Punctionary’ (a portmanteau neologism, consisting of the terms ‘pun’ and ‘dictionary’). This Punctionary consists of hundreds of words that the students developed themselves, as a kind of sincere gesture in finding multiple unexplored connections through the mechanism of a ‘pun’ (click here to see the project). Essentially, stretching the possibilities of meaning, insight and ramifications.

Similarly, in my own artistic practice, I approach the limits of epistemology, aesthetics and inference as a latent opportunity of renegotiating the integrity of these limits. Or in other words, to constantly ask: how to make sense of that which can’t be (phenomenologically) sensed? For examples of how this research-interest is mobilised in my work, see schizoaesthetics.

After that little rambling about my interests, my courses and my own work, I guess I should conclude with some sort of standard bio:

Sami holds a BA Honours in Product Design from the Willem de Kooning Academie and a MA with distinction in Research Architecture at the department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London. Sami has been teaching in, and coordinating, the Honours Programme at the Willem de Kooning Academie since 2019.

Since I encountered transdisciplinarity it questioned me in the most productive ways and helped me to look at phenomena of the world from perspectives I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. Transdisciplinarity is a mode of thinking, doing and working that I love to practice in my projects and together with students.

Disciplined in what?!

I was disciplined with a BA in Visual Communication Design at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart that I graduated from in 2012. This first education was followed by an MA in Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) where I received the tools of transdisciplinary working and thinking. A further MA training in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern helped me to deepen the empirical and especially ethnographic methods that became important to me during my projects in transdisciplinarity. Since 2017 I am doing a doctorate in Studies in the Arts (SINTA) at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, called Challenging interfaces. The epistemic role of design in evolutionary biological knowledge production.

Throughout my education the question of the diverse forms of knowledge that can be performed through and by means of design accompanied me. My conviction of the potential of transdisciplinarity did not guide me into design research as it may seem obvious but rather into the field of Science and Technology Studies. However, not entirely ignoring design research, combining it with STS enables me to bring together and question various forms of knowledge, beyond design.

Since 2015 I am collaborating with biologists. In field and lab studies I shed light on their knowledge production methods and their engagement with aesthetic practices. What role do the tools and media they employ during their fieldwork and processing for data play? What role does this aesthetic surplus play in the formalization and representation of knowledge about phenomena in nature? What modes of observation can be encountered among the actors in the field? How can individual relationships between the human and non-human be represented and lead to a form of objectivity that is more truthful to the real world (Haraway 2016) and allows to question the governance between the human and non-human?

Since the start of this project, I am part of the research staff at the Master of Transdisciplinary Studies in the Arts, which allowed me to combine my research topics with the curriculum of this MA program. I, thus, focus especially on art and science collaborations that I facilitate. Particularly topics of ethnographic practices as part of artistic practice as well as the theoretical framework of Science and Technology Studies are the core of my teaching. With regard to situated objectivity, I am also particularly interested in the analysis of the use of language, such as the development of metaphors or narratives, as a way of doing cultural analysis and science studies.

Who teaches who?

In transdisciplinary teaching, I regularly encounter myself, my co-lecturers and students in various roles that do not always correspond with the one of a lecturer or a student. The roles are shifting depending on expertise and experience and often students and lecturers swap them. The more heterogeneous the group of lecturers and students is, the more expertise that comes together, the more the hierarchies seem to disappear and the role of the lecturers often becomes the role of a facilitator or mediator, sometimes also one of a student, rather than an expert. I am interested in these diverse roles in transdisciplinary teaching settings and how they can be made productive as an educational practice.

Besides this, when it comes to practice within transdisciplinary courses different approaches to tasks can be observed. This can be an approach by (1) conversations or dialogues, by (2) defining a common language, by (3) setting rules or methods of work, by (4) finding a common boundary object that can be approached from the various expertise that comes together or by (5) starting from the existing material, resources or skills. These settings are usually highly shaped by the togetherness of the students, their exchange, discussion and require high awareness of responsibility for each other as well as care. I am interested in these approaches that I have observed over my time as a lecturer and how these can be facilitated and practised more consciously as transdisciplinary teaching and learning methods.

The Master in Transdisciplinarity Studies in the Arts is a course that supports highly individualised teaching and learning by offering one-to-one mentoring sessions in addition to the curriculum to each student. Particularly through this close collaboration between students and teachers, the curriculum can be developed based on the student’s demands and trending interests. It also allows lecturers to engage their interests and topics into the curriculum. This I consider a great opportunity to learn from each other in non-hierarchical teaching settings where dichotomies such as student-master, lay-expert, theory-practice can be questioned and overcome.

Since 2017 I am doing the Faculty Visits, a program offered by ZHdK for further education for lecturers in higher education. In the context of this I deal with the different roles of actors in transdisciplinary teaching and learning settings. In 2017 and 2018 I was part of the Recherche and Interventiongroup (RIG) of the Merz Akademie where we conducted a recherché and a symposium about historical and current models of teaching. In this context we reflected on future perspectives of education, teaching and knowledge production.
In the project RASL Transdisciplinary Research I am employed as scientific staff and am excited about further exchange in regard to these topics and to meet people with similar questions and interests.

Connie Svabo, MSc, PhD, Associate Professor of Performance Design and Communication at Department of Arts and Communication, Roskilde University, Denmark.

I am Director of the transdisciplinary research centre Experience Lab, which involves collaboration, co-creation and co-writing with practitioners and researchers from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, from Art and Archaeology over Business to Computer Science and…

Zoology.

(Well kind of.) (More precisely: Biology). (And) – (if this is of interest?): My independent creative work typically engages with nature, natural environments, plants and animals. My doctoral dissertation was on staged, mediated and museum-based experiences of Natural History, here communicated in a short article).

Anyway:

I curate knowledge.

I work at the intersection of experience, technology, art and design. As a practice-based researcher I curate knowledge across the Humanities, Natural, Technical and Social Sciences, promoting experiential, creative and aesthetic modes of engagement.

I have done research-based exhibition work with the UNESCO natural heritage site Stevns Klint, the performance-inspired museum of natural history Naturama, the Danish cultural heritage museum for World War 1, the Open Air Museum of the Danish National Museum and more. I am academic chair of the Roskilde University Museum Partnership RUCMUS.

I do aesthetics in academia.

I play with voice, translation and mediation in my scholarly work. Recent journal articles which demonstrate this are: Performative Schizoid Method: Performance as Research, where I develop schizoid tactics for integrating creative-aesthetic work in academia; Knowledge Catcher: on the performative agency of scholarly form, which presents a playful emotional choreography for research; and Scholartistry: Incorporating Scholarship and Art, published in Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 6(1), (2018).

I teach practice-based research.

As an educator, I supervise BA, MA and PhD projects, and my teaching portfolio includes courses on practice-based research, performative communication, creativity and design thinking, experience and research methodology. I chaired the Roskilde University interdisciplinary Performance Design graduate and undergraduate programs from 2013-2016, with 150+ students and great colleagues.

I currently supervise two PhD candidates in curatorial research and experience-based exhibition design.

I promote innovation with care.

I work for the development of sustainable, nourishing and inspiring environments, taking into consideration moral-aesthetic and normative-ethic features. In my consultancy work, I help create digital-spatial architectures for human experience.

I do business consultancy on design and innovation with care and am appointed member of Innovation Fund Denmark’s multidisciplinary Industrial Research Committee.

I am a practitioner of divergence, who turns black holes into disco’s to give rise to new energies, experiences and forms of thought. My hope is to create moments and momentum in which the possibility of another world feels real and appealing. I want to unleash a mental revolution. I do so by changing cognitive maps of experiencing the world and use forms of thinking that are in the present logics of today recognized as “naive”, “wild” and “childish” and outcasted as a regressed form of thinking In my practices I reclaim their relational attunement to the world that in the hegemonical ways of thinking and education are lost. In retracing them, I develop enchanted adventurous practices that invite and make people think and study together with and within our cosmic surroundings in deviant fashion. Consequently, my praxis calls into question, the standardized ways of knowing and play with the preconditions of value and recognition, subvert social conventions, seek to affirm that intellectuality comes in many forms and will state over and over again that “there can no be social justice without cognitive justice”.

I have currently the following practices, see for more: www.denkfiguren.com

Diffracting Worlds

With diffraction glasses the spectator has another look at reality, one beyond mirrors and representation and I show the entanglement of all organisms, creating a new experience of reality that embodies the importance, of openess, magic, and care.

Fictioning Alternatives

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Fictioning Alternatives is a form of storytelling that creates alternatives to the dominant fictions that make our post-truth, populist and the Anthropocene a reality today. This practice creates new communities and forms of belonging and give voice to the fragile state of the world, without anthropomorphizing it.

Wild Thinking

Wild thinking interferes with the performative neurotypical and violent imperative of being civil in presenting and generating our thoughts in academic institutional settings. As a result, wild thinking reclaims wild not as unmanageable, or just being too much. Wild thinking opens up other forms of knowing, by moving, shocking, stuttering, and stammering, allowing childish behavior, precarious bodies and dressing up to come into the arena of knowledge production.

Body Anarchiving

My body, like yours, is an anarchive. It is not solely an archive that holds memories, or experiences that belong to the human generations before me. My body like yours can be activated in other ways and make different kinships. I activate my monstrous, animalistic, non-human traces to put my body in new iterations, to explore the limits of community in Western imaginations and encounter my vulnerable self without interruption.

I am a lecturer in the Humanities at Erasmus University College, member of the lectorate Transdisciplinary Education Innovation at Codarts University of the Arts, and am involved in the development of transdisciplinary (teacher) education across three higher education institutions: Codarts, Willem De Kooning Academy and Erasmus University. Currently I am writing my PhD dissertation on innovative educational practices that combine artistic, scientific and societal knowledges, and take a new materialist approach to rethinking collaboration, transdisciplinarity and educational research. In my educational practice, I work with SF and alternative futurisms to encourage students to question how we construct the narratives of the future, past and present. 

Recently I have been developing an educational practice inspired by the notion of worldmaking and re-worlding, called Collaborative Worldmaking. Collaborative Worldmaking was developed as a pedagogical tool to introduce students to transdisciplinary research and education in the context of the transdisciplinary minor Re-Imagining Tomorrow Through Arts & Sciences, in which students from a range of academic and artistic disciplines attempt to approach complex societal problems by combining artistic, academic and societal forms of knowledge. During collaborative worldmaking, students collectively imagine and explore an alternative reality, guided by examples from alternative futurisms. In small groups, students are instructed to visit their newly imagined world and, inspired by small exercises in collaboration with experts (such as an architect, social worker, dancer), develop the intricacies of their world. The created sketches, concepts, objects and stories bring to life narratives that offer new perspectives on current societal issues through a process of defamiliarization. In addition, collaborative worldmaking exposes students to the core components of a transdisciplinary approach. Based on Thompson Klein’s (2013) five clusters of meaning found in discourses on transdisciplinarity, collaborative worldmaking enables students to: 1) experience integration of disciplines when collectively creating an alternative world; 2) engage in non-hierarchical collaboration with participants from different knowledge domains and levels of expertise and specialisation; 3) explore complex and entangled systems and become aware of their own situated perspective in those systems; 4) apprehend, and engage with, diverse forms of knowledge; 5) interrogate existing hegemonic narratives and truth claims through alternative futurisms and realities. As an approach for transdisciplinary education, collaborative worldmaking allows students and other participants to work together to imagine alternative worlds and instigate change in our own, damaged, world.

I see myself as a traveller, partly goal-directed and at the same time free to go with the wind.

Being a gymnast as a child and teenager I experienced the rewards of practice, determination and commitment, all driven by passion. When starting my education at the Rotterdam Dance Academy, I took those and also added the joy of dance: the aesthetics, the physicality, the expression and the creativity.

I’ve always preferred teaching over performing and soon after graduating I was teaching dance full time. From the very start of my career, I crossed borders between disciplines: combining dance and gymnastics while teaching toddlers, inviting male gymnasts in my women dance class, choreographing for both, combining physical theatre and dance in workshops and performances, exploring the use of text and voice in dance, using all different images from nature to deepen the understanding of my learners and more.

I am a collaborative learner and I have always reached out to find partners to work together in choreographing, in teaching, in in creating all the different projects I joined and implemented.

Since 2009 I’m working at Codarts, university of the arts in Rotterdam and since 2016 also at Fontys, academy for dance education in Tilburg. I teach, do research, coach students in internships and research. I was a member of research group of the lectorship blended learning.

I’m fascinated by how people learn. Finding the balance in the education between group and individual, between giving space and giving directions, between process and result, between authentic artistic development and craftsmanship is a daily challenge. My master thesis in the education of Learning and Innovating was about peer feedback. I developed a strategy to implement peer feedback through the curriculum of the music theatre department. Other themes of research are self-management and team-teaching. All research projects were practice-based.

I was invited to the transdisciplinary group because of my knowledge and experience in team-teaching. I believe this is where the wind took me. I’m happy with the challenge and opportunity, because I think this is what I’ve always been doing and because I believe this approach will help education and learning.

Years ago, when I graduated from high school, I had to choose between an education in the arts and one in the sciences. Although I had a passion for both, it was an easy choice to make: I was a cellist, obviously, and as a cellist I simply had to go to a conservatory. In a way it wasn’t even a choice; I simply kept doing what I was already doing, since I had already been following a preparatory course that the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag for a couple of years. I have always been lucky with my teachers; I studied with the great Dutch cellist Anner Bijlsma, who was both a cello nerd and a true homo universalis. Research and cello playing were never separated. I flirted briefly with a career as software developer (there are cows in New Zealand whose dietary requirements are still being calculated with software that has a few lines of code that I helped design), but when the dot-com bubble burst the fancy technology was the first to go and as a cellist I didn’t see myself writing C, or C# for that matter. For several decades I traveled the world with my cello, performing in well known concert halls in Vienna and Washington as well as in the slums of Soweto and Sao Paulo. I wasn’t much of an educator, but I always enjoyed teaching, especially in places where music seemed to be as essential as oxygen, and not some kind of luxury product. Then, just before the Great Collapse of the Dutch chamber music scene, I was invited to teach Artistic Research at Codarts Rotterdam; in addition I gave cello lessons to the cellists who wanted something different than a career in classical music. I feel right at home at Codarts, especially now that I am also working on the development of the new RASL initiatives. Codarts has generously supported my PhD trajectory at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where I graduated last year, with a thesis on the 19th century cello virtuoso Alfredo Piatti. For a moment it seemed that my research was heading towards a transdisciplinary approach, but I managed to stay on course. My contemporary music group, the Ives Ensemble, now deprived of all government funding but still going against the current, has been my transdisciplinary playground for over thirty years, although I never realized that before. We were just doing weird projects with other artists and artists-scientists.

I’m a jack of all trades, master of nothing and mistress of many. Transdisciplinary practice, as elastically as it is defined in my lexicon, is integral to my education, artwork, collaborations and teaching.

My bachelor’s degree is from a small Catholic liberal arts university, where I did more classical studies. After receiving my MFA from the University of Arizona, I moved to the Netherlands to attend the Rijksakademie, which was followed by two years as a researcher in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie. With a keen interest in online writing and digital narratives, I also have a second Master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University.

From 1996 to 2012, I collaborated with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. At the time, multi-visual research was a speculative monicker. In the Netherlands, there were no visual art PhDs and the possibility of art being research was absurd to many. Operating otherwise, we became an experimental research unit exploring issues near and dear to us.

Our time together at the Jan van Eyck Academie, a place where art, design and theory commingled, was pivotal. Our practice was informed by a mix of feminist and queer practices (Valie Export, the Guerrilla Girls, Donna Haraway, General Idea, Sandy Stone, Heresies magazine, Judith Butler and many others). We were also inspired by the emergence of the internet, its popular vernacular and online DIY sharing cultures which circumvented traditional exhibition systems.

Our practice took on a variety of forms combining art, design, theoretical enquiry and dialogue with other disciplines. We created shared archives, hosted numerous lectures, created textile interfaces and published online. Next to projects in our own space and on our site, our works have been featured in exhibitions at De Appel, Manifesta, the Bienal de Valencia, Rhizome, Mute, and Thames & Hudson’s Internet Art etc.

Building on my collaborative practice, I have continued to combine various visual forms of research to explore female identity, narratives of the archive and spaces of co-learning.  With the support of the Creative Industry Funds and a Grant for Established Artists from the Mondriaan Foundation, I conducted three-years of research at Herengracht 401. Entitled, The Warp and Weft of Memory, the project had multiple manifestations: public lectures, an exhibition, a print publication and an online narrative archive. Exploring the closet of Dutch artist, Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht, I looked at how its contents reflected her life and various related histories.

With regards to teaching, I have never drawn strict lines between my artistic practice and education. Research and learning happen in both registers, but perhaps with different restraints and potentialities. I have worked at the Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute for several years.

From 2011-2015,  I was the Director of the Piet Zwart Institute where I worked on bringing departments together and promoted interdisciplinary approaches. Currently, I am a Senior Research Lecturer working in the bachelors and masters. For four years, I have been co-teaching with Professor Frans-Willem Korsten, specifically, the Critically Committed Pedagogies course in the Masters Education in Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute. This has proved challenging but also miraculously inspiring to have our respective knowledge rub off on each other.

Lastly, I am engaged in RASL Research and this Transdisciplinary Group. My hope for our transdisciplinary research is that we find ways of working together and can establish a lingua franca without levelling the richness and frictions of approaches, vocabularies (visual, verbal, aural, performative or otherwise) which we bring with us. I believe our strength resides in our plurality and differences.