In The Future of the New: Artistic Innovation in Times of Social Acceleration artists, theorists, and professionals working in the art field reflect on the role of the arts in a world that is speeding up and changing through joint forces of globalization, digitization, commodification, and financialization. Can artistic innovation still function as a source of critique? How do artists, theorists, and art organizations deal with the changing role of and discourse on innovation? Should we look ...

The everyday connotations of the original, the real, sincere, valid, historical or deep are well-known, and the opposite of the authentic may then be the superficial, false, not-what-it-seems, or just new. Nonetheless 'the real thing' is still a fruitful starting point to analyze changes in the post-digital society. Digital technology is embedded in almost every personal relationship, in labour conditions, and in aesthetic practices. What does this mean for the 'authentic'? To unfold the nuan...

Graphic Design Is (…) Not Innocent questions ingrained approaches, values and assumptions of graphic design in globalized societies. The publication aims to initiate a dialogue between designers, scholars, critics and commissioners, who investigate responsibilities, potentials, politics, limits and risks of designing visual communication. How innocent is graphic design? Whom is it addressing, whom is it in/excluding? What does it bring about? When defining the role and impact of visual comm...

In cities around the world a new urban condition is spreading

rapidly: an ever-increasing push for ‘perfection’, efficiency

and control and the active eradication of any

aberration, friction or alternative. The smooth city with its

sanitized spaces and new technologies compresses urban

life into a seamless experience. While the demand for safe,

clean, and well-functioning urban environments is understandable,

the rise of the smooth city undermines the democratic

nature and emancipatory po...

Over the last few decades the term ‘bootlegging’—a practice once relegated to smugglers and copyright infringers—has become understood as a creative act. Debates about homage, appropriation, and theft that are common in the art world, are now being held in the spheres of corporate branding, social media, and the creative industry as a whole. Today, bootlegging has become fetishized as an aesthetic in and of itself, influencing everything from underground record labels to DIY T-shirts,...

Imaginative Bodies contains a series of in-depth conversations with dancers and choreographers, composers, visual artists, Hip Hop artists, dramaturgs, a lighting designer and a puppeteer. The overall theme is defined by the body, both in relation to the place it takes in the artist's work, and in relation to wider debates on the body in philosophy, science, medicine, anthropology, and the arts. Depending on the affinities of the artist, a more specific theme has been defined for each dialogu...

Geert Lovink is een Nederlandse mediatheoreticus, internetcriticus en auteur van Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (met Ned Rossiter, 2018) en Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 richtte hij het Institute of Network Cultures op aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA). Dit centrum organiseert conferenties, publicaties en onderzoeksnetwerken zoals Video ...

Sculpture as a specific medium is rarely investigated within a deeply cultural, philosophical context, nor within visual art itself. Whilst discussions about installation art, performance art, or other 3D art forms are widespread, the discourse on sculpture seems to be stuck in historical, material, or thematic frameworks. This is a loss for our understanding of art in general, and of sculpture in particular. In order to assess contemporary art practices, one should have a better understandin...

What happens between a spectator and an art work? How do we experience 'meaning' in a work of art? How can the process of interpretation be understood and articulated? To address these questions, the author explores the field of reception aesthetics, with its central premise that the contemplation of art is a matter of interaction between the art work and the observer.