Thesis 2011

Frank Mohr Institute (FMI)
From 2009 till 2011 I attended the Masters of Fine Art program at the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. My study program was then called ‘Interactive Media and Environments’. A program mainly focused on art, media and technology. During this program I developed the installation ‘Reconstruction of a Catastrophe’ and wrote a thesis.

Thesis
Doing research and writing a thesis was quite a new experiment for me. I decided to keep the research close to the themes, forms and technologies I am working on right now while developing the installation ‘The Tower: Reconstruction of a Catastrophe’. The installation is a combination of new forms and technologies, and old and new ideas:

Installation
Reconstruction of a Catastrophe recreates a scene that shows the moment after a catastrophic event. A narrative that describes the consequences of a destructive force.
The installation exhibits a miniature (scale model) of a disaster, where the amount of dead bodies keeps on increasing through out the exhibition period. The body of the spectator will be scanned, and a 3D generated model of the spectator is used as a mold for a miniaturized, printed, version of one of the many corpses in the miniature. The more visitors, the bigger the catastrophe.
The installation is part of the series The Tower, an ongoing collaborative project with Ruben Boxman.

Online
The decision to write an entirely online thesis is also part of the experiment. I am interested in online methods and tools that help you to collect and organize in a more intuitive manner. No complex HTML coding, but using an online visual tool to build, embed, copy, past, write, move, slide, link, re-order. Instantly creating an online collage of found and written material. A great discovery was Hotglue developed by WORM and moddr, an opensource online visual tool for creating websites directly in your browser window. The creators of Hotglue adapted the idea of creating collages based on cutting and gluing. This gives you the freedom to continually add, re-order, or update the research, with very simple and intuitive tools. My thesis is created with Hotglue.

Two Parts
The thesis is divided in two parts. Miniature is an elaborate research to the significance of the miniature as an art object and as a new media object. In my works the miniature is a rather new form. This research helped me to expand my knowledge about the miniature, and contextualize it in my own work. In SCAN I decided to use the open form of a collage. Because I really was struggling with the demarcation of the word SCAN, I decided not to specify it in smaller definitions. The reason for the research on SCAN is because I noticed that we use the word a lot when describing our work. Also scanning is a returning technology in our work. To gain a better understanding of the word I decided to use it as a starting point for research.

Link to Miniature

Link to Scan