RAAAF made a large new art installation for Het Hem. This former bullet factory becomes a new space for experimental art and contemporary culture in Amsterdam. Our artwork Still Life questions the abandoned war factory and creates a link between the present, past and future of this historically burdened heritage. Below you will find our short film on the process of making it. Please watch it full screen and with sound on.
Dutch national newspapers NRC and Volkskrant published on our new art installation Still Life, which was tailor made for the large new art space Het Hem.
Happy with this new Synthese article on our distinction between the rich landscape of available affordances and the field of relevant affordances. Open access here:
Kiverstein, J., van Dijk, L., & Rietveld, E. (2019). The field and landscape of affordances: Koffka’s two environments revisited. Synthese, 1-18. doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02123-x
I really enjoyed working on my inaugural lecture for the Socrates Chair on Making Humane Technologies. I presented it on April 18th 2019 and you can now read it here online. Title: The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies.
I will be working on this for a day a week at the University of Twente. My ERC/VIDI team remains based at the University of Amsterdam the rest of the week. Thanks to all those who came to celebrate this special occasion with me, it was a beautiful day!
Rietveld, E. (2019) The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies. Inaugural lecture at the University of Twente, Socrates Chair, April 18 2019.
TiCS published our latest paper on Deep Brain Stimulation and Self-Confidence. Work done in collaboration with Julian Kiverstein, Heleen Slager and Damiaan Denys. Reed it open access here:
Kiverstein, J., Rietveld, E., Slagter, H. A., & Denys, D. (2019). Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: A Pathology of Self-Confidence? Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.02.005
Proud that Synthese has published our article ‘Situated Anticipation’. It is based on ethnographic observations by Ludger van Dijk as part of my ERC-project ‘Affords-Higher’.The process of making of RAAAF’s art installation Breaking Habits was observed on site for over 9 months. It shows the potential of using RAAAF as a living lab for investigating so-called ‘higher cognition’ in practice.
We introduce the concept of ‘large-scale affordances’ for possibilities like the making of an art installation that take many months to be enacted. We have also visualised the relation between smaller- and larger-scale inviting affordances. The aricle is available open access here.
Best visual art of 2018 internationally. Deltawerk // was listed twice by the Dutch national newspaper NRC.
Read more about Deltawerk // in this NRC Handelsblad interview:
In November 2018 RAAAF was in Moscow for the screening of our new movie at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and several lectures.
Can we imagine a future world without chairs? Die Zeit publishes an article on Breaking Habits, RAAAF’s latest experimental ‘landscape of affordances’ at the Mondriaan Fund for Visual Art. Link (paywall but free): https://goo.gl/KR4Wwh
March 12, 2018: A Great Leap Forward for the field and our NWO VIDI-project ‘The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind’! After four years of hard work Jelle Bruineberg, the PhD-student on that project, succesfully defended his impressive PhD-thesis ‘Anticipating Affordances: Intentionality in self-organizing brain-body-environment systems’. Well done Jelle!
On September 27th 2018, the largest artwork of RAAAF | Atelier de Lyon so far openend: Deltawerk //.
A huge wave basin in the National Monument Waterloopbos served as a test location for the Delta Works. With the aim of creating an indestructible delta, engineers experimented with, among other things, meters high tsunami waves. We have excavated and sawed open this colossal 250-meter-long monument of the Dutch struggle against water.
Deltawerk // physically questions the famous Dutch pursuit of indestructibility. Just like our National Monument Bunker 599, which has been sawn through, it is a plea for a radically different approach to cultural heritage: Hardcore Heritage.
Read more about this in Frontiers in Psychology, Metropolis NYC, Volkskrant, etc.: https://goo.gl/sFvY6A
In June 2018 we opened RAAAF’s fire installation Hidden Worlds at UNESCO World Heritage site Cappadocia, Turkey. The entire valley was set on fire as part of Cappadox Contemporary Art.
Hidden Worlds reflects literally and figuratively the life worlds behind the landscape of Cappadocia. After sunset it shifts the focus from the volcanic landscape to the many oppressed ancient cultures that hided in the valleys. Behind the millions of man-made holes in the rocks several underground cities are obscured from view.
On a timeline of thousands of years, the caves in the valley of Ortahisar just got abandoned very recently: only 40 years ago. Currently most people don’t notice that for centuries this valley was the center of life in Ortahisar. Reflected on the inner cave structures the silent movement of the flames at night makes one feel the human presence in these ancient hidden worlds. From a distance it deepens the experience of a forgotten city that is brought back to life.
In 2018 we have published several new academic papers to develop aspects of the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) for Embodied Cognition and our new approach of Ecological-Enactive Cognitive Science more in particular.
In two papers published in philosophy journal Synthese we deal with topics that are seen as central for understanding so-called ‘higher’ cognition: anticipation, planning, and dealing with the absent and not-yet existing. We have also collaborated with the renowned neuroscientist Karl Friston to model the complex joint agent-environment system that is at the core of our approack. Finally, for a chapter for the Oxford Handbook Series we have written an introduction to the Skilled Intentionality Framework.
Van Dijk, L, and Rietveld, E. (2018). Situated Anticipation. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02013-8
Bruineberg, J., Chemero, A., and Rietveld, E. (2018). General Ecological Information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition. Synthese 196(12), 5231–5251. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1716-9
Bruineberg, J., Rietveld, E., Parr, T., Van Maanen, L., and Friston, K.J. (2018). Free-energy minimization in joint agent-environment systems: a niche construction perspective. Journal of Theoretical Biology 455, 161-178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.07.002
Rietveld, E., Denys, D., and Van Westen, M. (2018). Ecological-Enactive Cognition as Engaging with a Field of Relevant Affordances: The Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF), in Newman et al (eds.) Oxford Handbook for Embodied Cognitive Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 41-70.
With RAAAF we have developed a new way of giving meaning to historically burdened cultural heritage. We call this approach “Hardcore Heritage”. Bunker 599 below is an example of it. Read more our approach in The Architectural Review, Frontiers in Psychology, Metropolis NYC, Dutch national newspaper Volkskrant via this page on the RAAAF-site: https://goo.gl/sFvY6A
Research by Erik Rietveld 