Dear graduates,
You are over 300 new young fine artists, graphic artists and draughtsmen, graphic designers, advertisers, illustrators, visual communicators, media designers, fashion designers, lifestyle designers, interior architects, retail designers, animation designers, audiovisual designers, digital photographers, art & design teachers and art educators.
You represent the diversity of the range of courses in fine art, in media and design and in education offered at Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University (WdKA) – both at Bachelor and Master levels.

This summer, you graduate from WdKA. You are now Bachelors or Masters in your trade. You are proud to show the work you’ve made, and rightly so. You show it at FIRST VIEW – the programme of festivities marking your graduation from WdKA in 2009. A FIRST VIEW? We may have been able to admire your work before. As students at WdKA, you have participated in projects, workshops and competitions. You have done real-life commissions. You have won prizes and awards, both in the Netherlands and across the globe.

Now you are ready to start your careers as professionals in art, media and design, or education.

On this occasion, we offer you this ‘Krooning’ – this ‘Cooronation’; the double ‘o’ is a reference to our alumnus Willem de Kooning (his name in Dutch meaning ‘the king’… hence the crowning motive of this ‘Krooning’). Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), born and bred in Rotterdam, was trained as an artist at the Rotterdam Academy that since 1998 proudly bears his name. In 1926, merely 22 years young, Willem left Rotterdam for America and ended up in New York City. There he developed into one of the major artists of the Twentieth Century. An inspiring example! “I have to change to stay the same”, he once remarked. These somewhat mysterious words may refer to the river – Philosophy’s metaphor of life. By its nature, Life – like a river – is in constant change, continually trying to move its course and direction, yet always remaining itself. Movement and change are the essence of life. And indeed of art, media and design, and education.

Even when rivers may seem to temporarily slow down, their levels falling – the waters will always find new ways, new streams, driven by perpetual energy. Come crest, come crisis – creativity, ingenuity, inventiveness and innovation, combined with common sense and a hands-on approach, will keep the waters flowing in ever new directions. FIRST VIEW proves that all of you share these essential qualities.

This year, the ‘KROONING’ catalogue is fully in English, underlining your and WdKA’s international ambitions and quality. Many of you have already been ‘going there’ like Willem de Kooning, and some of you have been ‘coming here’. This catalogue-as-a-glossy (designed by three of our alumni of Graphic Design – thank you guys!) is not only published in print, but in an online version as well (www.krooning.nl). It combines the works of all of you – listing graduates from both our Bachelor and Master courses alphabetically instead of by individual creative discipline. This set-up exemplifies both WdKA’s interdisciplinary ‘crossover’ approach and its firm belief in continuous learning tracks linking the various levels of expertise.

The FIRST VIEW festival started out with WdKA’s annual Fashion Show at Rotterdam’s Schiecentrale – once a mid-urban electricity plant, now the centre of a new creative quarter of our city. Not being able to find a location large enough to present all of you in a single FIRST VIEW graduation show, there are now four of them at various locations in Rotterdam. Each of these locations is prestigious, each one an example of change, and each one significant in its own way.
You graduates from our Ba Fine Art and our Ba and Master in Education in Art and Design present yourselves at LP II, located in the former warehouse of Rotterdam’s famous Holland America Line. The building was designed in 1953 by Rotterdam architects Van den Broek & Bakema, and renovated for cultural use in 2006-2008 by Benthem Crouwel Architects. Its original purpose – to store goods that were to sail around the globe in HAL’s gracious, speedy and efficient ships – offers an apt metaphor for the present FIRST VIEW exhibition.
You Ba graduates of WdKA’s School of Media and Design proudly show your works at Rotterdam’s HUF-building. Equally designed in 1953 by Van den Broek & Bakema, the building is shining in new glory after meticulous restoration by Rotterdam architect Wessel de Jonge (2009). A monument of Modernism with exquisite glass curtain walls, it once housed the American consulate. After a period of sad derelict, this architectural gem is now opening up to new activity. We are happy to see our design graduates to be the first of a new generation of users.
The fresh Masters of Media Design show their works at the Rotterdam Centre for Visual Arts (CBK); built in 1928, the building was face-lifted in 2007 by Dutch artist Krijn de Koning. The CBK strives to strengthen the position of visual arts and artists in Rotterdam by creating favourable conditions for the production, presentation and sale of visual art in all sectors of society.
Last but not least, our new Masters of Fine Art have pitched their tents at TENT. A former secondary school from 1874 by Rotterdam City Architect CB van der Tak, it was renovated in 1999 by architect Roy Lim of OD205 to house experimental exhibitions by innovative Rotterdam visual artists. We hope you feel at home there!

From FIRST VIEW onwards, you’ll represent Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University and all it stands for when you ‘sail out’ from Rotterdam into the world, like once Willem himself did. We hope that this FIRST VIEW will not be the last view you’ll offer us: we hope to see much more of you and your work. Wishing all of you all the best in your future careers as professionals in art, media and design, or education, we end by warmly congratulating you on your FIRST VIEW.

Richard E. Ouwerkerk MA
Dean | Executive Director WdKA
Rotterdam, June 26 2009
 

The Fine Arts as an universal structure of expression contributes to our visual consciousness, communication and cultural memory and to the diversity of the private and public domain. The artistic view on reality has a strong and undeniable significance. The arts can take up different rolls in society: functional, ornamental, ceremonial, confrontational, esthetical, political, entertaining…
This multilayered character takes the arts beyond the stage of mere personal expression and creates the necessity for a professional approach.

Experimenting with the newest techniques is as essential for the visual artist as understanding of tradition and history. Last decennia artistic practice and production radically changed in media, method and material. Boundaries perish or are deliberately taken down: between low and high culture, between the visual arts on the one side and technology, information and entertainment on the other. Between personal and public.

The complex, hybrid and multilayered character of modern artistic practice takes it beyond the stage of mere personal expression and creates the necessity for a well focused professional approach. The artist has to take position and carve out a pathway through the dynamic and challenging worlds of visual cultures, theoretical context, medium related skills, information technology and commerce. Imagination is no longer the terrain of the visual artist alone. Our culture has become an image culture altogether. But the artist knows how to create highly personal communicative works, creating new structures of meaning and understanding , inspired and motivated and thus inspiring and moving others.

While studying Fine Art at the Willem de Kooning Academy students experience the high demands that modern art practice poses on the young artist. Talent, motivation and stamina have to be paired with richness of ideas, inventive research and a strong personal commitment. The study program puts emphasis on developing artistic concepts, with a growing focus on art in the public domain and in new media. Our training is interdisciplinary (in a world with less and less boundaries), supporting the student to acquire transferable knowledge and skills and includes the organizational and financial strategies that come with the profession of a visual artist.

As the works show, this leads to a great diversity and freedom of chosen media and expressions, by young artists determent to make a difference. They have been trained to create works of art, but foremost they have been trained to create vision.

R.A.Verouden
Head of School of Fine Art
Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University

The Master of Fine Arts programme of the Willem de Kooning Academy is based on an understanding of contemporary art as embedded within a larger field of cultural, social and political practices. It encourages critical discourse on artistic practice and places an emphasis on self-reflection and analysis. Furthermore, public interaction is given a special focus, inciting participants to connect with practitioners outside of the academy and present their works to general audiences.

Our programme provides an international platform in which artists can develop their practice through independent studio work as well as a lively dialogue with artists, curators and theorists from a diversity of disciplines: art, theatre, literature, philosophy, film, and others. Our students, faculty members and guests come from all over the world: Canada, Germany, Great-Britain, Israel, the Netherlands, New-Zealand, Rumania, Turkey, among many other countries, providing participants in our programme a truly international experience.

Students receive very strong individual tutorial support with weekly studio visits by both regular staff and guests. Furthermore, we offer a challenging programme of annually changing thematic projects, exhibitions, seminars, excursions and public lectures that provide a broad framework for the exploration of issues relevant to contemporary culture and society. The small size of the programme makes for intensive and focussed discussions and allows for close interactions between the course director, faculty members, guests, and students, creating a very special community of artists and cultural practitioners. In addition to our curriculum, we organize an ongoing public event series based on issues related to the curriculum, but reaching beyond the framework of the seminars.

The public events are an important ressource for students, tutors and guests, serving as bridge to the city and building a community around areas of interests.
Recent public lecture series have dealt with ‘Notions of Storytelling’ (organized by Uqbar Foundation), ‘A Perfect Society’ (organized by Maria Pask), ‘Speechless:
The Proximity of Gesture, Philosophy and Cinema’ (organized by Hadley+Maxwell), and ‘The Monstrous at Play’ (organized by Felix Ensslin), among others.

We like to think of an art school as a place in constant flux, where various currents of thought meet, intertwine and disperse, where the stability of meaning is disrupted and firm beliefs are unfixed, and where individuals meet to engage in creating a new, ever shifting, shared space of dialogue. Thus, our programme is different every year – it is the changing combination of students, tutors and guests that determines who we are and what we do within the field of contemporary art.

Vanessa Ohlraun
Course Director
Master of Fine Arts

Last year, bachelor students of both Schools of Media & Design and Fine Art mingled together during the final show of the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University at Las Palmas 2.
The following section of this year’s edition of De Krooning is structured more or less the same way.
The School of Media & Design includes quite a large number of courses, specifically: Audiovisual Design, Advertising, Animation, Digital Photography¹, Fashion, Graphic Design, Illustration, Interior Architecture, Lifestyle & Design, Product Design², and Visual Communication.
By now the reader may understand it is our wish to bring down the sometimes artificial walls between different applied courses. Mainly because the most interesting, innovative experiments & research are done when the in-between is reached, and the No Man’s Land is conquered.
Of course our Project weeks are vivid examples of transcending boundaries. Just another example of blurring disciplines is the swift work of Fashion-student Rosalie van Velzen who has participated twice already with the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University at the famous interior-exhibition Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan. In 2008 she contributed with her humorous New Gardens and this year with Lashes on a Stick³.

Both our part-time courses, Interior Architecture and Visual Communication, began with a revised fresh Curriculum in 2005. Since then, part-time education at the WdKA has been mainly project-driven. The first part-time students are now passing their final exam. Please realize that besides talent, all of our part-time students need much perseverance and tenacity. Make no mistake: the part-time bachelor’s degree, which is equivalent to the full-time one, is really an achievement. That’s why I would like to direct you to the works on pages 62, 66, 72, 100, 116, 122, 128, 135, 144, 150, 137, 186, 191, 192, and 194 in Krooning '08-'09, WdkA's Graduation Catalog 2009. Congratulations Aernout, Desiree, Dianne, Eline, Fabrizio, Feikje, Floor, Hill , Inge, Irene, Javier, Jurriaan, Kim, Koert-Jan, Linda, Marith, Micha, Michael, Nienke, Sanja, Susan, and Tamara.

Not only are the students of the School of Education – for the first time – part of this publication; also our Masters are at last included. You can find both the master Media Design & Communication (Networked Media), and master Retail Design, on the pages after the bachelors of the School of Media & Design (pages 00-00). This year’s edition of De Krooning – designed with much acuity by Graphic Design alumni Charlotte Aal , Tim Braakman and Stephanie de Man – is of course still a hybrid between a catalogue and a magazine, but seems rather complete and might turn out to be invaluable. If needed, it now even seems possible to focus on the so-called BaMa structure!

Finally, most students at the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University study quite successfully. We participate in all kinds of international workshops⁴ and have won prizes⁵ everywhere.
But a global recession is going on, and – let’s admit it – we all know design is cyclical. So all the students presented here, by now alumni, may be heading for hard times.
Still I am convinced they will benefit from the advantages of a fresh mind and their own desire for mobility.

To you all the very best.

Stephan Saaltink
Dean
¹ Digital Photography is again a fresh course. The first student will probably pass in 2010
² Product Design is a new course which will start in September 2009 at the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University
³ http://studenten.wdka.nl/~quirk/
⁴ http://blog.wdka.nl/international/chongming-eco-island/reports/
⁵ http://blog.wdka.nl/international/the-fourth-haining-china-warp-knitting-design-awards/prize/

The Networked Media Master programme of the Willem de Kooning Academy is founded on critical, socially reflected research of computing, networks and digital media in order to develop new visions for their design and redesign. That said, it is – in the end – our students who shape and define what media design, and hence this course, is; and this shaping and defining is ongoing (unless one gets comfortably stuck in once-new media paradigms). Marshall McLuhan famously said that the content of every new medium is an old medium. Accordingly, ‘digital media’ were first emulating and incorporating preexisting communication technologies such as typewriters, print design, audio and video. Only later did computing and networks come to be understood as media and cultures in their own right. This understanding was the very foundation of the Media Design Master programme.

In the projects of this year’s graduates – an international group of graphic designers, multimedia artists, web and audiovisual designers and electronic music performers – an even more recent development can be seen. A whole generation has now grown up with sharing files and manipulating digital data via the Internet. For them, open, participatory, user-defined media are the natural mode of mass communication. ‘Net culture’ is something they no longer need to debate, except in areas that have not caught up with it yet. Consequently, a number of this year’s graduation projects are about reinventing more classical media from typography to film narration through an aesthetics and politics of programming, file sharing and reuse.

It is no longer avant-garde, but everyday culture that text, images and other media in the World Wide Web are dynamically generated from databases, customized to individual reading and changing with every page view, eliminating the classical divide between a design and its reproduction. This is quickly becoming the model for all areas of communication and design. Media design therefore no longer remains a specialized domain of a narrow ‘new media’ field. And while these examples may still sound technical, their concrete implications for the culture and politics of media and communication are profound – for the details, just study the projects on this page.

Florian Cramer
Course Director

Interior architecture as an artistic design discipline, has great influence on our environment. The current modern society keeps demanding more and more from this environment. The citizen lives these days in a melting-pot of different ethnic cultures in which the awareness of your environment asks for new rules of conduct and in which high-tech communication technology adds new dimensions to the experience of time and space. Architecture, and mainly interior architecture, has to aim towards the needs of a changing society in which existing buildings ask for a different function, meaning and design. The role of the design itself is changing. The increasing complexity and demands for high quality require competences from the interior architect which can be secured within the master programme.

Retail design is one of the most challenging areas of interior architecture. The retail area not only shows the aforementioned changes quicker, but the area also gives the designer the possibility to get to know the different parties involved, for example marketing and purchase managers, salesmen, commercial agents and store staff, but also the different design aspects, from graphic 2D-design to interior 3D-design. The multidisciplinary context of the programme guarantees an inspiring trust and flexible attitude to creatively working with professionals from different disciplines.

The content of the curriculum has been developed according to the vision on the discipline that there are three main sources for knowledge and methodology: the customer, the consumer and the design ‘object’. At a ‘meta’-level are the designers themselves: they develop an optimal design result through integration of artistic and technical skills, as well as the ability to reflect on their own work and that of other designers.
The Dutch situation has a characteristic that can be called unique, but also is a perfect case in which the interior architect can develop an expertise which is globally useful. The Netherlands is a densely populated country with an intensive use of space, in which existing buildings rapidly change function. The revitalisation of existing buildings or their environment, the intensification of usage of available space, the changing demands of the building’s environment by developments in mobility and demands for sustainable production and usage of a building are the focus points not only of the Dutch government, but also of the master programme Interior Architecture and Retail Design.

Margaret Wijnands
Course Director

Visibility

‘Our modern life, surrounded as we are by visual media, makes everyone and everything interested mainly in being visible. Success means visibility and visibility means success.’ Camiel van Winkel, ‘Het primaat van de zichtbaarheid’ (The Primacy of Visibility), 2005

The quality of this year’s crop of teachers who have just completed their Bachelor’s degree as Fine Art & Design teachers at the Willem de Kooning Academy, is something the world at large has yet to discover.
The position paper ‘Kunst, design en innovatie’ (Art, Design and Innovation), a joint publication of HBO-level art and design training institutes, states that art and design represent a considerable artistic and inherent value. They are important for the intercultural exchange within our society, as well as the creative and innovative momentum of our economy and the international image of the Netherlands.
Our newly graduated teachers will soon find out for themselves that this value is generally well recognised, though to a lesser degree within the educational system itself as well as the field of extramural art education. It will be up to them, as seasoned professionals and with the necessary degree of enthusiasm, to cherish this value and make it visible to society at large.

Of course it’s not entirely true that the value of our students becomes visible to the community only after they’ve graduated. They certainly haven’t been invisible during the period of their studies. Internships in the course of every academic year, as well as projects initiated by, or for the benefit of, the professional field, including a full-fledged Symposium, have brought them actively into the fields of intramural and extramural education.

Students, peer coaches and interns have made an important contribution to the development of the WdKA’s ‘Magnet Schools’, the Thorbecke Creative Highschool and the Lyceum voor Beeldende Vormgeving (Secondary School for Visual Design), working hard to foster a positive image of art education and to develop the curricula while giving art lessons to young, talented pupils within these laboratories of our teacher training.
The ‘MediaCultuur’ (MediaCulture) project generates teaching materials based on contemporary (media) artworks, allows youngsters to become acquainted with media-oriented art lessons, and provides the professional teaching field with expertise through its publications as well as the ‘Mediathinking’ lecture series.
The Symposium ‘De vierde verdieping’ (The Fourth Floor) brought together students, beginning teachers and alumni on one hand, and the intramural and extramural professional field on the other hand, enabling all concerned to exchange information and experiences. Students and their teachers increased their visibility, for example by presenting their digital education projects.

Our students certainly haven’t spent the last few years in hiding. We, the teaching staff as well as the management, are very proud that you were so visible.

Be proud of yourselves and your profession, and show them what you’re made of!

Good luck!

Robin Punt
Head of School of Education in Art & Design
Willem de Kooning Academie Hogeschool Rotterdam

Thinking is always a question of feeling

‘And so he is, as he himself admits, the prime example of one who knows almost nothing about almost everything.’ (André Klukhuhn)

Research in the field of art education is the main focus of the Master of Education in Arts programme at the Willem de Kooning Academy. This programme thus contributes to the Academy’s mission of being a centre of research, knowledge and networking for the various creative visual disciplines.
The information economy requires fine art & design teachers who are capable of translating new concepts and knowledge into economic value. Their input ensures that our economy remains creative and distinctive. The power of their creativity and imagination make them uniquely suited to think and act innovatively.

Through research in the field of art education and the sharing of knowledge, it is possible to convince policy makers of the importance of this. Art education is more than simply study and reflection, it’s also the active practice of art, and learning to deal with art in a goal-oriented way, as a means of personal expression and as a cultural phenomenon.
Fine art & design teachers who have completed the Master of Education in Arts programme, are skilled in looking, thinking and observing from an artistic perspective. This also makes them highly competent for teaching at a preparatory secondary education level, where they can also assume a coordinating role in the fields of professional content and didactics.

The research is aimed specifically towards the professional practice of intramural and extramural art education, and the students graduating with their Master’s thesis this year are no exception to this.

With their keen understanding of art in the broadest sense of the word, these students have certainly mastered their respective subjects of research. Often from a starting point of personal fascination, social relevance or their own work experience.
What is the value of a museum without walls? Can graphic symbols contribute to social cohesion within the city of Rotterdam? Is art education desirable and possible in South Rotterdam?

They believe they have found some answers to these questions.

The teaching staff as well as the management wish you the best of luck as Master of Education in Arts.

Robin Punt
Head of School of Education in Art
Willem de Kooning Academie Hogeschool Rotterdam