Studium Generale Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut will dive into current concepts and fantasies of and about the brain. 


The brain is not ahistorical, fixed, or atemporal. (…) the brain is always situated in a body and self, and thus in social relations, in family, community, in culture and the economy, in the local and the global, in history. (From Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s NeuroCultures Manifesto, 2012) 


Culture and brain form complex systems of influence, control and resistance. The present brain seems to have been invaded by technology: machines increasingly perform the previously human tasks of language, memory, and imagination, with our learning processes taken up by automated and algorithmic procedures. What are the philosophical, social and political implications of this cognitive automation for our brains and bodies? What is happening to our subjectivity, identity and free will? What about the artist’s brain?


Keywords: AI, algorithmic cultures, bio-politics, body, brainstorm, cognitive capitalism, machine, memory, mind, mindreading, neurocentrism, neurocultures, neuro-power, noo-politics, neuro-emancipation, neuro-plasticity, neurol engineering neuro-markelting, neuro-aesthetics, attention economy, brain hacking, bushwhacking, datamining, blockchain, deep storage, designer brains, bio genomics, cognitive automation, free will, neohuman, Google Brain, machine intelligence, theory of mind, collective head, general intellect, deep mind, embodied mind, ‘embrained’ body, self…


Talks, readings, presentations, performances, screenings:
Tomas Adolfs, Tarja Szaraniec, Stephan Schleim, Patricia Pisters, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Antonia Majaca, Fiona Kearney, Marcos Lutyens, Franco Berardi, Tony Sampson, Bassam el Baroni, Michele Rizzo, Amelia Groom, Yuk Hui, Flora Lysen, Lancel/Maat, Frederik de Wilde, Erik Rietveld, Janneke van Leeuwen, Tanne van Bree, Henri Snel, Melanie Gilligan, Warren Neidich, André Lepecki and many others.


Open Call Rietveld Uncut: In collaboration with Studium Generale and parallel to the conference-festival in March, Rietveld Uncut will present an exhibition and performance program at  the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. If you are interested in participating with a project, please send an email to rietveld.uncut@gmail.com before January 14. Mention your name, department and vakjaar. Do not send in a proposal yet; your mail will be replied with additional information about practicalities, the procedure and an application form that you have to return before January 18.


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Open Call PLASTIC: A Reading Group Focused on Brains,
Bodies and Plasticities. Writer and theorist Amelia Groom hosts PLASTIC, a reading group for Studium Generale held in the Rietveld library after each Wednesday lecture program. With texts by Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, Janani Balasubramanian and others, the reading group will be focused on ‘brains, bodies and plasticities’. PLASTIC is open to all Rietveld students – to sign up and receive the reading material please email studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl 

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Open Call BRAINSTORMS: Learning more about the topics of the Studium Generale program by discussing them afterwards and relating them to practice. Three groups of 10-15 students will be hosted and moderated by participants of the Sandberg’s Critical Studies Department from 16:00-17:00 on 5 Wednesday afternoons. (January 18; February 1, 15; March 1, 15) BA and MA Rietveld students can sign up and commit to a series of Brainstorm gatherings. Hosts: François Girard-Meunier/Callum Copley, Stefanie Rau/Aidan Wall, Ionna Girakidi. To sign up please email studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl


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Rietveld Uncut
‏is an annual joint presentation by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Within the Rietveld the process of making, from concept to work, is an important element throughout the whole study. This process often stays invisible to the outside world; Rietveld Uncut aims to shed a light on this unique, dynamic and experimental part of the academy and reveals this process to the public. Departments and individual students contribute to Rietveld Uncut with projects evolving around a collective content, topic or title.


Studium Generale Rietveld Academie
‏is a rambling theory program that addresses students and faculty across all departments and disciplines at the academy, as well as the general public. It wants to understand how art and design are entangled with other domains (from the personal to the political, from the vernacular to the academic), how ‘now’ is linked with past and future, ‘here’ with ‘elsewhere’. Studium Generale invites you to join it’s annually settled, slightly unruly, but always relevant research trajectories where knowledge, imagination and reflection are put to work together in a critical and unorthodox way.


Preliminary program: 
January 11, 18; February 1, 8, 15; March 1, 8, 15


Conference-festival and Uncut
March 22, 23, 24

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