Workshop with the Dutch author and curator Els Kuijpers and the graphic designer Jan van Toorn 31st October to 4th November 2016 (including the holiday, 1st November 2016) 10 am – 6 pm Cooperation between Communication Design and Exhibition Design/Scenography (Lehni/Dorn)

The workshop intends to offer participants theoretical and practical tools for an editorial approach of visual production. It concentrates on the diversity of means of the critical ‘journalistic’ tradition in media that works in the tension between realistic imitation and self-conscious artifice, i.e. between representation and presentation.
In reaction to the virtual realism of the spectacle dominating mainstream media, which prevents a meaningful use of word and image, the workshop deals with textual, visual and other practices that further more complex and argumentative forms of communication and foregrounds the constructed nature of messages in order to solicit the active interpretation of the viewer/reader. That is why the emphasis is on the potentialities and richness of the ‘reflexive’ or ‘dialogic method’, trying to recuperate the specificity of its projective and emancipatory practice. Taking the social workings of the message as a starting point the workshop focusses on the editing and making process, introducing a method which structures the collecting and editing of information in a way that lays the foundation for the staging, the mise-en-scene of fact and vision to the multiple sensory tracks of the visual.

Subject and course of action
To keep the discussion concentrated in a short workshop like this it seems useful to opt for:
1. a commonly shared field of interest: design and the culture industry; its institutions, products and activities as avenues and vehicles of information and symbolic exchange at the service of shared private and public interest.
2. a division of participants in groups of 3 to a maximum of 5 persons Each group formulating its own subject within the given arena.

Assignment
Create a visual essay in any media – print, electronic, spacial – on a subject in the above-mentioned field. Please present subject and point of view on it and bring visual documentation at the first session of the workshop.

Maximum of 20 participants
Applications until 21st October 2016 to aruschival@hfg-karlsruhe.de

Els Kuijpers (1958)
M.A. art history at Leiden University, Netherlands) author and curator on graphic design and visual culture. Kuijpers sees writing as cultural, that is, value production. An interest that originates from the assumption that language (visual and textual) constructs meaning in dynamic, social processes. She was head of the research centre and editor academic publications at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht. Currently she teaches design history and theory at the Royal art academy in The Hague and exhibition design at the Academy for art and design in Zwolle. She has lectured at several other art schools in the Netherlands and abroad, and curated exhibitions for the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Museum voor communicatie, The Hague and the van Abbemueum in Eindhoven. Els Kuijpers regularly writes on graphic design for several design magazines and weekly’s. Author of the monograph Ootje Oxenaar, designer + commissioner, Rotterdam 2011 and Strategies in communication design, Eindhoven 2015.

Jan van Toorn (1932)
studied graphic design at the Institute of arts and crafts in Amsterdam where he maintains a practice in communication design since 1957. The emotional charge and open character of van Toorn’s design work stems from his interest in investigating visual meaning and the social role of the profession in the media as opposed to purely practical requirements. Jan van Toorn for many years taught graphic design and visual communication at various academies and universities, including Gerrit Rietveld academy, Amsterdam, the Department of architecture of Technical university Eindhoven and the Multi-media department of the State academy of fine arts in Amsterdam. As associate professor he taught in the ma programme of design at Rhode Island school of design, Providence Usa. From 1991 until 1998 he was director of the Jan van Eyck academy in Maastricht, transforming it into a postgraduate centre for fine art, design and theory.

Els Kuijpers and Jan van Toorn currently work together in editorial projects of visual communication that focus on the dialogic character of the message. They recently published the experimental publication And/or extended: on contradiction of the work of Jan van Toorn (nai010 publishers Rotterdam 2013) as the result of close collaboration between the author and the designer: the complex text with its many excursuses and digressions resembles Van Toorn’s visual project; the layered structure of the design follows Kuijpers’ literary undertaking. In order to bridge theory and practice of design [in thinking and making] they together conduct seminars and workshops on communicative design addressing the staging of messages by investigating media, strategies, method and language use of communication.