Research

My research focuses on the interplay between non-anthropocentric desire and the building of perception in architectural conditions and unstable media, moving image in particular. It covers a specific field within affect theory and media philosophy, and its dealings require a specific vocabulary. This vocabulary is not something I have invented alone: it stems from Deleuzian scholarship and its propagation under the affective turn. Its key concepts are frequently used in my publications and education. The most crucial of these concepts are: Agency (is not being, it is becoming), Assemblage (works with capacities, not properties), Energetics (deals with the intensive, not with the extensive), Exteriority of relations (eliminates all ego in favour of ecology), Asignifying (is nonrepresentational, yet non-trivial), Heuristics (not a method but an approach through trial and error) and Affordance (does not describe a function, yet it allows for functionality). On basis of these lemmas, II have successfully developed and applied modes of thinking and teaching in various fields of art and design, varying from architecture, fine art, moving image and theatre to graphic-, crossmedia- and communication design.

Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Faculty of Architecture, Delft School of Design.

Researcher and lecturer 2004-2015.

Conducting research, curriculum development, administration, lecturing, mentoring, writing, publishing, representation, collaboration.

Leiden University, Centre for the Arts in Society, Doctorate.

PhD Researcher 2013-2016.

In my dissertation I created a meta-framework for the investigation of the desire of the medium, for which I often use the concept of the Grey Mouse: a mouse-grey element that appears light against a dark background and dark against a lighter background. This element acquires its visual properties in relation to its setting without losing any of its capacities. The mouse may be a metaphor, its affects certainly are not. What it produces in this relationship can be detected as a shadow of its being, yet without it having a body to produce that shadow. Therefore, my grey mouse can be seen as a placeholder for the desire of the medium, even if it is never replaced by an actual definition. For regardless of whether or not I find a proper and conclusive definition, the effects of the interplay between the mouse and its background are very real (exteriority of relations). To this end, I adapted a model used by social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai to create a specific framework. As we can only see the subject through its encounter with its environment (the grey mouse), and as the environment changes by definition, the system can never be arrested in time. This a-temporal mechanism is a means of revealing what I refer to as the bodiless shadow.

Member European Research group ‘What Images Do!'

Member 2012-2019.

An international research network established in 2012 in collaboration between NCCR Iconic Criticism 'eikones' in Basel, Delft University of Technology, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The “What Images Do!” network and its activities were funded by The Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities (FKK). The aim of this network (which I was part of), was to ‘take stock’ and promote the further development of the ontology of the image. The main research question was to create different new perspectives on the acts of images, shifting the ontology of images perceived as objective subjects, towards an ontology of embodied subjective objects. The network organized several seminars in the respective countries of the participating universities, a conference in Copenhagen and delivered a publication (What Images Do!, 2019, Aarhus University Press) with contributions of selected participants and the main scholars involved (such as Georges Didi-Huberman, Jonathan Hay and Jacques Rancière).

Surroundings Lab

Member 2019 ->

Surroundings Lab is an online platform cluster of projects and people interested in the relations of film and surroundings. How state-of-the-art research, practice and teaching within architecture, landscape, film and related artistic disciplines explore characters and values of surroundings in, by and through film.
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The film medium presents processes, time or sensory variations that may progressively qualify discussions of quality, characters or spatial atmospheres. The film medium can diminish our attention on objects and metrics, in architecture, landscape and the city, and increase the awareness of bodily, sensory and relational merits for defining our spatial surroundings.

Indirectly the film media instates a need for alternative media explorations that in its verbal, audiovisual and online communication move beyond previous forms of spatial representation and categorisation. Therefore the Surroundings Lab is a pilot network platform for new potential initiatives of theory and applied research as well as cross-disciplinary exhibitions, publications and initiatives on film and surroundings.
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Surroundings Lab explores the values of surroundings as they are experienced and sensed in time, sound and movement by ordinary people, practitioners and professionals alike, through film. Through interdisciplinary publications, outreaching events and seminars, state-of-the-art interdisciplinary research is sought vividly disseminated within and outside the related disciplinary environments.

ORGANISATION OF CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS

(2023) Noetic Without a Mind Colloquium. Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, NL.

(2020) Epiphylogenetic Turn and Surroundings:In (Tertiary) Memory of Stiegler. Delft University of Technology.

(2019/2020) The SurroundingsLab, symposia in Malmö, SE and London,UK.

(2018) The Critical (un)Making of Smart Cities, Conference at University Twente

(2017) Science-Frictions: Creations in bio-art & bio-science, University of Twente

(2017) A Grin Without A Cat. Annual National Deleuze Conference. Enschede, Holland.

(2015) What If: From Formal Logic to Material Inference. Seminar at: Daughters of Chaos, Utö & Stockholm, Sweden.

(2015) ALEPH Autonomous Laboratory for the Exploration of Progressive Heuristics, at UQAM Université du Québec à Montréal & Concordia University, Montréal, Canada.

(2014) What Images Do! Research group and conference Royal Academy of Art, Copenhagen, Denmark.

(2012) Asignifying Semiotics: Or How to Paint Pink on Pink. Second National Symposium on Deleuze Scholarship, Delft.

(2012) The Asignifying Affordance of Assemblage. Seminars at the University of Cambridge & the University of Liverpool, UK.

(2012) Cartography; to have done with tracing in favor of mapping. Seminar at the 13th Architecture Biennale Common Ground. Venice, Italy.