Studio Digital-Native
In times of public protest, digital tools and practices can play an instrumental role in causing harm and facilitating surveillance and oppression. An example of this can be seen in 'Black Out Tuesday', a digital protest staged in 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and the killing of Breonna Taylor. Instagram and Facebook users posted a single black square with the hashtag #blackouttuesday. As organisations appropriated the black square, flooding social-media platforms, the protests became counterproductive. Now a form of performative activism, the black square blocked critical information and resources related to anti-police brutality demonstrations. The movement began as a united digital protest. However, the multiplicity of the black square blocked crucial information.
In Studio Digital-Native, we will start with the analysis of a chosen digital portal and highlight its cases of friction – this could be surveillance, oppression or appropriation. Students will infiltrate or hijack their chosen digital platform to oppose its systemic structures and biases, resisting and reappropriating digital culture and media as a form of liberation against extractive digital systems.
Students will have to consider their theoretical positioning of themselves and their gaze as actors in the physical-digital feedback loop. We will interrogate digital material that mediates the relationship between digital infrastructures and citizens.
The global digital divide reflects the persistent extractive relationship between Western countries and the rest of the world. Critical areas bare the environmental, social, and political burden of the mineral extraction and toxic waste dumping needed to support our contemporary lives. Students will be asked to consider the material implications of digital technologies and the violence of reducing, constraining and converting landscapes into digital commodities, as well as systems such as Data Centres and E-waste that are leading to the rising temperature of our planet.
In Studio Digital-Native, we encourage experimental thinking and debate on design and art theory. How do these relationships change through extractive processes? And how can we use digital resources as a strategy for liberation?
Working methodology
The studio will take an interdisciplinary approach to research through design, encouraging students to take a theoretical standpoint that they develop into creative output. An architectural and spatial understanding will form the background to our methodology, whilst broader references and techniques will be encompassed, such as sound, fashion, painting, immersive technologies and visual essays. Speculative design will be explored in the form of imagining possible futures through design objects, media, performance, and collaborative practice.
We will experiment with technological tools in a playful way. Workshops will introduce students to new skills and allow them to work with digital technologies using open-source software, positioning AR/VR and game engines as design tools. Through engaging students with these new skills and techniques, we will seek new approaches and aim to rethink architectural and design practices.
Hybridity will be a key part of our creative approach, combining different research and design methods in unusual ways. For example, we might match different activities, such as a dinner party, a reading group, or a virtual game space, with a particular medium or design tool, asking students to create something for a mini brief set each week. We aim to critique design and research tools through this hybrid approach and encourage students to invent new methods, challenging current socio-political and techno-capitalist institutions.
Collaborative Projects
2024: Collaborative student project, called ‘Reimaging Deconstructed Land’, with the University College London (Cinematic and Video Game Architecture), UK; CHulalongkorn University (International Programme in Design and Architecture), Thailand; and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Fine Art), Ghana; as part of a Virtual International Collaboration, a grant funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education.
The project introduces students to exploring and reshaping reclaimed land using digital space. Students will collaborate virtually through a series of online workshops, including collaboration tasks, skill-building workshops introducing them to game engine software and group lessons. Through these workshops, Dutch students will collaborate online with students from partner institutions to build a hybrid virtual environment.