ArtSciences

The initiative grew out of a series of conversations between Martin Burr, Michael van Hoogenhuyze, Taco Stolk, Sanne van Rijn, Mike Rijnierse and Ludmila Rodrigues about the history of ArtScience, Dick Raaijmakers’ work, and the need to preserve the connection between image and sound as a living artistic practice.

From the beginning of this academic year, image and sound within ArtScience have, for the first time, been separated institutionally: the Bachelor ArtScience is situated at the Royal Conservatoire, while the Master ArtScience is situated at the Royal Academy of Art. The relationship between the two institutions from which the ArtScience Interfaculty emerged can therefore no longer be taken for granted.

The ArtScience Annotation Sessions invite Bachelor and Master students explicitly to take part together, alongside alumni, former and present faculty members, and friends of ArtScience. They offer a recurring space in which the institutionally separated parts of ArtScience can meet through shared artistic practice.

We begin with a collective reading of Dick Raaijmakers’ A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound. The text serves as a shared score for annotations, recordings and experiments, bringing image and sound, theory and practice, and historical memory and contemporary work into relation.

The accumulated annotations, recordings and experiments become the material for an annual mobile production: a shared artistic work of the Interfaculty as it is practised again. Bachelor and Master students, alumni and faculty contribute their different practices and histories to this common process.

We do not claim that the Interfaculty has already been formally re-established. Instead, we begin to practise it again: as a living relationship between image and sound, arts and sciences, academy and conservatoire, and between different generations of ArtScience.

Alumni take on changing roles as fellow readers, hosts and contributors of impulses. They bring working methods, relationships and institutional memories into exchange with the questions and practices of current students. In this way, the Interfaculty takes shape between generations through recurring shared work.

In this sense, nog een keer names a reading practice, an archival practice, an artistic process and an institutional rehearsal:

to read together once again,
to connect image and sound once again,
to practise the Interfaculty once again —
under the conditions of the present.

Open Raaijmakers — Annotations: four starting passages with reading questions, proposed experiments and space for participant responses.