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.

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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.

Mon, Jan 8 — Sun, Mar 24, 2024TECHNODIVERSITY
To programme

Technodiversity

We must acknowledge that we are, most of us, deeply complicit in the order of data colonialism, whether we like it or not.
– Nick Couldry / Ulises Meijas

Technodiversity involves thinking about divergences within technological development (such as cultural histories), that is, to produce alternative technologies.
– Yuk Hui

Our lives are subject to processes of datafication through which big tech companies and governments extract data from us for profit or social and political control. The material thus collected is fed into the algorithms and artificial intelligence trained to monitor human behaviour. In digital capitalism, or ‘data colonialism’ life is appropriated as a resource and managed and traded in the form of data. This not only perpetuates existing inequality and discrimination, but also leads to new injustices and power imbalances. How can we resist data colonialism and produce alternative technologies?

The concept of technodiversity can provide insights that cannot be reduced to capitalist extraction. Technodiversity recognizes that technologies are temporally and spatially produced by different knowledge systems, ideologies, political interests, economic forces and cultural practices. This liberating perspective can create space for collectives, peoples and identities to produce and control their own data – no data, small data, indigenous data, more-than-human data, feminist data, queer data – and not be governed by Big Data and oppressive algorithms.

To safeguard subjectivity and the unmediated self, we must rethink our relationships with data, defying the extractive logic of contemporary data regimes. From the intersections of bodies, identities, digital technologies, artistic practices and activism, we can envision a data agency that is embodied and potentially subversive.

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie 2023-2024 will explore this with you and in collaboration with guest curators, theorists and artists. From January through March, we present talks, performances, film screenings, workshops and reading groups in the Fedlev auditorium, the Rietveld/Sandberg Library and other areas in the academy. We conclude with a multi-day conference and the Rietveld Uncut exhibition at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. There will be a special website, a printed lexicon and a digital Reader.

Key words: AFK, AI-Da, algorithmic catastrophe, algorithmic anxiety, biopolitics, Chat-GTP, Cloud Empire, cosmotechnology, cyborg, DALL-E, dark data, extractivism, fake news, ghosts in the machine, surveillance, technodiversity, glitches, prompting…

Full program online at https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/

Preliminary programme at Rietveld academie:
Jan. 10 (Basicyear project I)
Jan. 17, 24, 31,
Feb. 7, 14, 28
Mar. 6, 13
Mar. 18 (Basicyear project II)

Techno Spectres, talks & performances, 14:00-15:30, Fedlev auditorium
https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/preliminary-programme

Drawing on Water, Beamclub film screenings curated by Jo-Lene Ong and Bo Wang, 16:00-16:30, Fedlev Auditorium
https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/beamclub

A Soft Focus for Breathing Machines, reading group moderated by Jay Tan, 17:00-18:30, Rietveld/Sandberg Library
https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/reading-group

A Story to Tell – Voice and Authorship in the Age of AI, workshop led by Mariana Fernández Mora, 17:00-18:30
https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/workshop

moon shine techno, lexicon written by CPR
https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/lexicon

On line Reader

Dedicated website by student Graphic Design Team Anastasija Diukova and Ji Won Choi

Who are you?, Basicyear workshop led by Julia Janssen
https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/basicyear-project

Conference-festival and Rietveld Uncut at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam:
March 20, 21, 22
Guest curators: Karen Archey, Zach Blas
Meet the Masters with Taka Taka

More information online at https://technodiversity.rietveldacademie.nl/

Zach Blas, The Doors, 2019

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