Matter of Art

Matter of Art is a course carried out in cooperation with the Royal Academy for Visual Arts (KABK - Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten) - ArtScience Interfaculty Department. The course brings to the class the interactions experienced between scientists and resident artists in top research laboratories.

Dr. Arthur Elsenaar and Drs. Eric Kluitenberg, colleagues from KABK - ArtScience Interfaculty, take part as instructors.

The interaction between highly specialised scientists/engineers and contemporary creative artists is becoming very popular among prestigious laboratories who can afford it. The exchange is, however, not always obvious since both communities (artists and scientists/engineers) are on a first glance “orthogonal” professionals with methodologies and focus that are apparently, opposed.

Matter of Art fills this gap in our education by bringing together these two communities at a very young age. Working in mixed classes with students from KABK and TU Delft, small groups of students work on formulating and executing common art assignments.

For instance, while engineers tend to think about new materials as a function of their new useful properties, artists tend to use materials as canvasses either for aesthetic or meaningful questions of social, personal, ethical, ecological, or any other origin.

The same holds for technologies that support the virtual world we are immersed in. Social media that, in principle, connects people to people, are built on machine-machine connectivity of high tech layers beneath the user interfaces, almost taking a life by their own. That "immaterial" world of metadata exchanges and signal flow is also an expression of who we are as humans since it is completely imagined and built by human minds as any concrete sidewalk in your streets. Similarly to a wall built on any material, any layer of such virtual world can also be used to express Art or question society or the way we live and shore the world and ourselves.

In Matter of Art, real or virtual, material or immaterial, everything is canvas.

During the course, short inspiring lectures, papers and videos will be given to the students that are organized in small art/engineers mixed groups. The teachers will then act as coaches to help the students to formulate their own final art assignment, via discussions in groups and/or open classes as well as homework.