Piet Zwart Institute

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Institute for Postgraduate Studies and Research

Lens-based Media

Lens-Based Media

The Master of Arts in Fine Art & Design: Lens-Based Media program focuses primarily on artistic and experimental lens-based practices (both still and moving image/animation) that embrace the use of artifice, formal and technical innovation, fictional strategies and other unconventional visual approaches to create new and meaningful visions of the world.

We support visions that seek to move beyond the conventional narratives of our society and create new impetus in the viewer towards an open-eyed engagement with myriad challenges humans (and non-humans) collectively face in a world saturated with disinformation, increasing polarisation and fragmentations of communities, centuries-old political and social injustices, marginalisation of the most vulnerable, and a rapidly degrading global environment.

Such work is necessarily based on a solid artistic research practice: allowing makers to take responsibility for the specificities and narratives of the images they create in such work, and the complexities and histories of both the forms they employ and the topics they explore.  However fictional the worlds we create, we must take responsibility for their claims to truth.

 

SHOWREELS LENS-BASED MEDIA

Above:Performing the Lens 2020 Graduation Exhibition virtual walk-through 

The course is taught by core tutors with international reputations in their respective fields: course Leader Simon Pummell is a BAFTA and BIFA winning filmmaker and animator and 2009 Harvard Film Study Center Fellow currently completing his fourth feature film; Barend Onneweer is the owner and director of the established NL film VFX company R3MWERK; Ine Lamers is a visual artist with a practice based in photography that has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally; David Haines is a visual artist working with a range of media, predominantly drawing and video exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum, The Turner Contemporary, the Drawing Room London among many other museum shows.

In addition to the core tutors, we regularly bring key professionals within the field into the program both as advisors and as tutors (see curriculum).  The development of the curriculum is in continual discussion with this rotating team of professionals in the field.

Please see Staff and Tutors for a listing and full profile of all our tutors.

Core to the approach of the program is maintaining an active set of institutional relationships with key institutions in the Netherlands relevant to our professional field.  We have recently co-organised exhibitions, seminars and symposiums with EYE Filmmuseum,  IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam),  Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave science museum, KINO cinema and arts centre, WORM and V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.

For an overview of current courses and the work that’s being developed within the department, please refer to our wiki. Functioning as an ever-changing and growing archive, we use it as a teaching tool where course descriptions are posted and students can sign up for tutorials, but also as an online workspace where students keep an active log of their research, projects and thesis progress.

We seek students who recognise that the future of lens-based images lies in the proliferation of new forms, working methods and delivery platforms: new forms of cinematic narrative, inter-active visual media, photographic and cinematic gallery installation, cross-media narrative, database film technologies, site-specific projection projects, and many more hybrid forms that loop together both digital and analogue techniques.

If you wish to develop a critical and creative practice within the expanding field of lens-based media, this Masters programme will be a stimulating environment for your research and studio practice.

Lens-Based Media will welcome prospective students to an online Q&A session on 11 March 2023.  More information will follow.

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