Fluid Rhythms—Open Set Summer School, LAB & Seminar
Open Set is pleased to announce the Call for Applications for their new seven-month program Fluid Rhythms: Urban Networks and Living Patterns. It’s a fresh round of Open Set, dedicated to exploring the potential of rhythm in the context of the Bijlmer, — one of the most vibrant neighborhoods in Amsterdam, once envisioned as an urban utopia and (in)famous for being called the “city of the future”. Open Set is looking forward to a new collaboration with the scientific consortium Designing Rhythm for Social Resilience — together they investigate rhythm-led practices as common ground for research and artistic practice.
Designed to enrich an active studio practice or ongoing education, their programs are aimed at makers and thinkers (design & art fields) who seek a deeper understanding of emergent discourses, connect to the international network of peers, and those who want to take their work in new, unexpected directions.
Summer School
August 15th–25th, 2018
Application deadline: July 1st, 2018
Intensive program of workshops and lectures.
Open Set LAB
Practicing Rhythm: October 19th, 2018–February 23rd, 2019
Application deadline: August 20th, 2018
Five-month programme with practice-based sessions held every two weeks in the Bijlmer, aiming at developing individual projects. The parallel trajectories will end in sync, with a shared public presentation and conference.
Seminar: Rhythmanalysis in Context
August 13th, 2018–February 9th, 2019
Application deadline: July 1st , 2018
Series of presentations, discussions and theoretical texts readings from different disciplines, aiming at exploring the key concepts and multidisciplinary practices related to rhythmanalysis.
*The applications are open for individual modules, or for the combination for all three. Apply now!
Theme Fluid Rhythms
“The crowd is a body, the body is a crowd”
— Henri Lefebvre
Life in the city both repeats itself, and is constantly changing. Situated in the Bijlmer, one of Amsterdam’s neighborhoods, Open Set launches a new programme, dedicated to exploring the potential of rhythm in the city. The movement of bodies in space; financial transactions; the circulation of sounds, cells, and smells; changing social constructs that divide and connect people; the flow of microscopic substances—such looping patterns generate dynamic complex structures, or ‘rhythms’, that shift over time. In the words of Caroline Nevejan: “where there is rhythm, there is life”. Understanding and working with such dynamic complexities requires careful attunement to the interactions between social, imagined, and physical realms.
Open Set is looking for artists, designers and scholars to join this international and interdisciplinary programme that investigates the potential of rhythm-led practices as common ground for research and artistic work. This means both providing tools to perceive rhythms, as well as tools to tap into their generative potential. Rhythms occur on multiple levels at the same time, in the macro-level structures of the city, within the cells of bodies, and in the interconnections between mind, emotion, brain and heartbeats. By investigating the intertwined patterns of change, a world of subtle complexity starts to reveal itself to us in how humans, machines, animals and microbes interact and coexist.
Design & artistic interventions can take on any form, whether they are sound, food or image-based formats, performances or digital applications — offering the opportunity to discover new, invisible or forgotten rhythms, to find the points of friction and blind spots and to transform and harness the power for social and ecological change. Eventually, working with rhythms is a way of synchronizing our efforts in acting and living together in a network society.
Local & Scientific Partners
All events are hosted and supported by the municipality and local cultural centres, and informed by people actively involved in the life of local communities. The principal scientific partner is the research group Designing Rhythm for Social Resilience (2018–2022), with affiliated institutions OIS Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions.
The programme is made possible by the support of City of Amsterdam Zuidoost, Het Pauwhof Fonds, CBK Zuidoost.
