Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

Have fun and sign up for the newsletter!

N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

A Story to Tell – Voice and Authorship in the Age of AI

In the age of AI, how does the concept of “voice” start to be reshaped by generative technologies like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion or MidJourney?

Notions of co-creation and machine-human collaboration open up questions of what authorship and personal voice mean when considering yourself a part of a network of knowledge rather than a singular voice. Departing from Ursula K. Le Guin’s definition of spear (hero + beginning and end) vs bag narrative (a storytelling process with no beginning or end), we will explore how AI and algorithmic thinking can expand our ideas around creative egos and move towards collaborative structures of knowledge and culture production—shifting towards notions of digital kin and machine-human co-creation.

How can this “simple” change in perspective activate spaces of agency that counteract embedded hierarchies and biases in the algorithms?

Mariana Fernández Mora is an artist, writer, researcher, feminist and the current editor at ARIAS Amsterdam and leading the A.I. thematic line over there. Her practice intersects the fields of performance, linguistics and technology. She is fascinated by fictional archives, piles of stuff, hedges, memes, guinea pigs and PowerPoints. Currently, she is focused on researching A.I., language and our intimate and sometimes problematic relationship with technology.