PhD Defence - Anja Groten
You are cordially invited to the public defense of designer and educator Anja Groten of the research project entitled Figuring Things Out Together: On the Relationship Between Design and Collective Practice.
On 24 November at 13.45, Groten will defend her dissertation in the Academy Building of Leiden University. From 24 until 27 November, she will present her artistic work in the form of an on and offline publication, an accompanying installation, and a workshop program at Page Not Found in The Hague.
Anja Groten investigates matters of collectivity, drawing from the experience of working with the Amsterdam-based collective Hackers & Designers(H&D). H&D self-organizes educational activities at the intersection of technology, design, and art with a focus on hands-on learning and collaboration between practitioners from different fields. Along with organizing workshops, people involved with H&D produce on and offline publications and build open source tools and platforms.
The main thesis of Groten’s research is that conventional design vocabularies cannot sufficiently express and account for collectivities’ resistance to fixation and stabilization. According to Anja Groten, collective design challenges notions of individual authorship, differentiations between disciplines, product and process, user and maker, friendship, and work relations. While collectives not only shape particular affiliations, design approaches, and aesthetics, they also require perspectives on working and designing together that resist a progress-based understanding of a design process.
Groten's published First, Then…Repeat, in collaboration with the Hackers & Designers collective. The publication is presented at Page Not Found from 24 – 27 November, accompanied by a book presentation and a workshop program.
Supervisors
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Prof. dr. Janneke Wesseling, Professor Emeritus in Practice and Theory of Research in the Visual Arts, Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University
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Dr. Florian Cramer, lector in 21st Century Visual Culture, Willem de Kooning Academy
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Femke Snelting, artist and designer
Workshops
First,
Then…
Repeat.
Workshop scripts in practice.
24 – 27 November 2022, Page Not Found, Boekhorststraat 126-128, Den Haag. Follow this link or the one above for the detailed information on the workshop programme.
