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.

To programme

2016 – 2017
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR BRAIN?  — Art & Life in Times of Cognitive Automation

“The brain is not ahistorical, fixed, or atemporal. (…) the brain is always situated in a body and self, and thus in social relations, in family, community, in culture and the economy, in the local and the global, in history.” (From Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s NeuroCultures Manifesto, 2012)

Culture and brain form complex systems of influence, control, and resistance. The present brain seems to have been invaded by technology: machines increasingly perform the previously human tasks of language, memory, and imagination. Our learning processes are taken​ up by automated and algorithmic procedures. What are the philosophical, social and political implications of this cognitive automation for our brains and bodies? What is happening to our subjectivity, identity, ​and free will? What about the artist’s brain?

With: Stephan Schleim, Patricia Pisters, Antonia Majaca, Fiona Kearney, Marcos Lutyens, Franco Berardi Bifo, Tony D. Sampson, Bassam el Baroni, Michele Rizzo, Yuk Hui, Flora Lysen, Erik Rietveld, Warren Neidich, André Lepecki, Melanie Bühler, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Hannah Barton, Jennifer Chan, Paul Feigelfeld, Daniel Keller, Elizabeth Orr, Özgür Kar, Timotheus Vermeulen, John C. Welchman, Daniel Pinchbeck, Florencia Portocarrero, Lars Bang Larsen, Patricia Clough, Mette Edvardsen, Leon Hilton, Anne Juren, and many others.

Conference website: https://whatishappeningtoourbrain.rietveldacademie.nl

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