Temporary Master: Materialisation in Art and Design–MAD

Has the World Gone MAD?

The Master

“The temporary master’s program MAD investigates the wonder of being able to
communicate through material.”

MAD explores the genesis and (un)definability of materials, and the development of the
literal, philosophical, and metaphysical meaning of materiality. It documents the
formulation and materialization of ideas by alchemistic, scientific, and sociopolitical
methods. To document this investigation the master’s students use their bodies
(bioprocesses, movement, and sound), natural resources and forces, different
technologies, verbal and visual storytelling, and interactive installations.

MAD also investigates the ways in which the processes of materialization can be taught,
shared, and developed into new and innovative directions. MAD proposes a didactic
program where materiality and abstraction constantly shift and swap their positions.
The program is based on gathering insights about the interaction between the two
entities, and uses these encounters as a creative force. It also poses the necessity of
learning to communicate on a common ground, reaching to knowledge production in
design as well as in the arts.

The Context

We could argue that our conceptual understanding of the world is based on physical
phenomena, eternally going back and forth between materiality and abstraction. The
dynamics between the brain, the body, and the hand is in continual transformation
through contemporary cultures. Throughout history our relationship towards making
has changed dramatically. Nevertheless our connection to the world, our human
interaction with our surroundings, has remained both physical through our body, as
well as mental through our brain and sensibilities as a whole.

It was the tendency of conceptual thinking and conceptual expression in the arts from
the twentieth century onwards that promoted the de-skilling of the artist’s technical
capacities. This questioned the position of the virtuoso, as well as the techniques, tools,
and instruments utilized to guide and influence the work’s outcome.

However, such phenomena did not lead to a process of dematerialization of the arts.
Somehow the physical remained and is still strongly present in art and design discourse.
The same applies to the industrialization of many of our designed everyday objects and
spaces. Somehow an interaction between the digital and the analog is deemed necessary
and valuable. Through our senses and emotions–the surprise of visual, spatial, and/or
haptic experiences–our human bodies crave connection and physical impulses.

The Result

Quote: “When making things without prior knowledge about

the material, how could such naive and almost savage
behavior be interpreted, and what does it represent and
generate?”

The temporary master’s MAD has investigated materialization through a variety of

working modes, such as: a. handcrafting with industrial ingredients, b. embracing the
role of the amateur and the dilettante, c. harvesting new materials, d. finding new
resources, e. shifting our perception and changing the functionality of a material’s
qualities, f. expressing personal attachment and love for materials to the point of
identification, g. going to the root of what materiality is and means, h. exploring how
much a material “double” influences and confuses our value systems, i. bending and
mending materials to extremes, j. using time-based qualities of material: from liquid to
solid, shrinking and expanding, k. the use of new technologies, l. using tools to the extent
of breaking them, m. exploring the performance of a material, n. moving away from the
manipulating hands of the human and towards the form finding capacities of nature.

The MAD master’s students came prepared: they chose this particular master’s because
of its focus on process (the word materialization also denotes “process”), and
contributed by posing questions about the communicative qualities of materials in art
and design.

The Book

Like a multidisciplinary guild, where apprentice and master intermix, we were on a

continual quest for (re)establishing our relation towards material on both a personal
and societal level. And this quest, of course, has and will not stop with the ending of the
temporary master’s; not for the alumni, nor for the tutors, nor for the thought processes
that have been ignited and have taken off along the course. Therefore, with this
publication, we would like to try and address some of these ever-unanswered, long-term
questions and thoughts; not to use it as a conclusive endpoint or reflection, but to offer
space for new developments, interpretations, and insights that could further help shape
similar approaches in art and design education. We see this publication as an extension
of what MAD has been and keeps being, as a progressing entity.

Therefore, we asked all MAD alumni to participate in this venture. They each share some
new insights, overviews, and reflections on the topics that are dear to them. And we
asked some experts to help us in gathering a deeper and more thorough understanding
of two of the essential “ingredients” of the MAD temporary master’s, as follows:
The Workshop and The Collective

The position of The Workshop within the environment of the art academy is addressed
through three essays. As we all know, the use of the art academy’s workshops is in
permanent flux. But did we know, as Jeroen van den Eijnde describes in his essay “A Hall
of Mirrors of Art Production,” that the workshop originated as a place for “imitatio”? His
contribution states that to further facilitate in shaping the qualities of art and design
students we might end up with a system of workshops outside the school’s walls.

We have all experienced in one way or another the sheer fact that the language spoken
by a workshop technician could be completely different from the one spoken by an
artist. Koen Brams’s contribution provides us with some insights into this phenomenon,
stemming from his own experience as former director of the Jan van Eyck Academy.

During the master we also addressed gender, and we specifically analyzed and
questioned the level of emancipation characterizing the workshop. Gabriel A. Maher and
Carly Rose Bedford take us on a journey projecting us into the ideal workshop, where
failure and mistakes are taken on as essential parts of the functioning of the workshop
environment.

The other topical ingredient, The Collective, is about identity, and the functioning and
role of the collective in art education, art production, and society. Harnessing their
experience as directors of the temporary Master of Voice, Lisette Smits and Snejanka
Mihaylova provide us with insights into the fundamental importance of learning about
one’s own practice by means of existing among others, through collective remembrance,
and redistribution of knowledge.

MAD head tutor Jens Pfeifer poses an accent on the specific bond that started to manifest
and grow between the students; first out of necessity and later into something more
resembling a survival mechanism.

The Past is the Future

Overall we had a great time; it felt inclusive, daring, sometimes painful, mostly
challenging, and unexpected. Together we made it work.

We responded to the current tendencies in art education towards the rational and
academic, tackling in particular the holy grail–research–as an ever-growing and ever-
shaping discipline within each profession and education system, although these usually
follow rules concocted by society, science, and technology. As aestheticization of
research has become an answer to the content-driven types, we made MAD become a
platform for developing new insights related to experiencing the world through
experiments without exact parameters and without measured gradients. And this is
exactly what the students did, without fault.

From the very outset, we have experienced this opportunity to take lead in coordinating
such an ambitious set of tasks as a unique privilege. Particularly, given the nature of the
program: becoming part of the realm of the Sandberg’s temporary master’s programs, a
rather unique achievement of the school’s director, Jurgen Bey. In synthesis, this was an
opportunity for experimenting with ways of performing education to address relevant,
contemporary, urgent societal topics, and global issues. In our case, addressed through
processes of materialization.

Both individual and collective dynamics were tackled throughout the program. In doing
so we were able to establish a very strong collective feeling in a natural way; in turn this
enabled students to recognize the power and urgency of cross-collaborative initiatives.
This insight allowed for a reciprocal exploitation of skills. An exchange that
subsequently helped in positioning the individual when standing before their own work,
and in understanding how an autonomous practice might work as a set of relations in
“real” life.

Moments of collective reflection and dialogue addressing the after-graduation-life have

also taken place with the ambition to provide tools and suggestions for the
establishment of individual practices. Such processes of confrontation have continued
steadily up until graduation, and in some cases still continue …

Together (the entire MAD team, no matter the role) we each contributed to shape MAD
and its identity, though actions, works, and reflections.

We are grateful for what we have been privileged to explore together: new methods,
new approaches, and unusual frameworks for performing education. These discoveries
offer the potential to positively inform and affect existing, traditional educational
curricula.

Not an end, always a new beginning: a continuous, cyclical, collective process.

Herman & Maurizio