Capsulating Precyclopedia presented by Class of ’16

How does the way we access, collect, and represent information in the form of archives affect our conceptualization of the future? What are the forms of recording and distributing knowledge, the epistemological infrastructures, that arise from our spatiotemporal specificity? In our network society, with its fleeting information, is there a need to save and archive these practices for the future, and if so, how can they materialize?

Starting from these questions, Witte de With’s Class of ’16 invites you to embark on a workshop program of open speculation and discussion with media theorist, writer and educator Eric Kluitenberg, digital archivist and researcher Arie Altena and curatorial fellow of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Marie Egger. The discussion will address the ontological status of the archive in our network society, and the tension between the temporality of the content and the materiality of the infrastructure that sustains it. Eric Kluitenberg will introduce the topic through his project Tactical Media Files as an attempt to produce a "living archive" – a simultaneous theoretical reflection and a collection of contingent critical practices on digital and online archives. Arie Altena will contribute on the discourse through his continuous involvement on the digital archive of V2 and his research on new media and internet culture. Marie Egger will be joining the panel as the invited curatorial fellow of Witte de With for the long term project WDW25+ that introspectively looks into the archive of the institution and explores strategies of negotiating between physical and digital material while organizing and representing it for the future.

The open conversation will be followed by an archival experiment - an attempt to bundle a collection of current knowledges and their forms of exchange - together with an epistemological guide to be used in the future.

About Witte de With Class of ’16

Studium Witte de With Class of ‘16 is a peer-led education initiative by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Each year a select group of students from partner institutions collaboratively explore art and art education on the intersection of the professional field and higher education curriculums. The participants form a co-programming team by and for students, to explore and map the cultural and political ecology of our time.

Parallel to the events of the Class of ’16 the students maintain a blog that regularly features their articles and research material: http://wdwclass16.tumblr.com/

Class of ’16: Lila Athanasiadou (TU Delft), Lauren Brand (Willem de Kooning Academy), Rosa de Graaf (Leiden University), Luca Menesi (Piet Zwart Institute), Jan Siebold (Erasmus University College), Chloë Neeleman (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Dimitris Poteas (University of Amsterdam), Clarisse Russel (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Natasha Taylor (KABK The Hague).

About Studium Witte de With

Class of ‘16 is part of Studium Witte de With, the higher education platform for art and theory by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. Studium Witte de With is intended to serve as a catalyst bridging various fields of knowledge across higher education. It presents lectures, debates, workshops, and other programming in collaboration with partner institutes, to root firmly the programme in the curriculums of Academies and Universities.

Futurosity Summit

Capsulating Precyclopedia is part of the Futurosity Summit, a two-day summit exploring our relationship with the notion of ’the future’, organized in the framework of the yearlong Futurosity program by Kunstblock. Futurosity is part of Rotterdam celebrates the city! (for the complete program go to: www.rotterdamcelebratesthecity.nl) and is kindly supported by The Art of Impact.

Please click here for full program of the Summit.