We’re really happy to announce that one of our longtime most favorite places in the country is hosting us! On Wednesday June 21st The Hmm is touching down at Worm, an (the?) avant-garde, DIY-crazed, fantastic venue just off the Witte de Withstraat in Rotterdam. Join us for dead data, brain orgasms, steganography and more.
This month’s program is put together with the help lecturer/researcher Florian Cramer and artist Lisa Gliederpuppe.
Guests
SARAH AMRANI
In her project Strategy of Beautification Sarah explores the visual language of hijab- and makeup tutorials on YouTube. In these videos the faces of hijab girls are beautified extensively, until they almost become masks. This is enforced by how the hijab visually operates in these images: framing and drawing focus to the face.
WALTER VAN HOLST
In September 2016, the European Commission proposed new European copyright legislation. One of their bright ideas is to force companies to screen all our uploads for copyright-infringement – and block them if necessary even before they’re published. Imagine a world in which Justin Bieber’s mom wouldn’t have been able to upload a video of her son singing Ne-Yo covers, an internet without memes because the images we use are copyrighted and the stupid upload filters don’t recognize parody, humor, political commentary or any other legitimate reasons for using those images. Walter advocates for human rights and can tell you all about the gazillion ways in which this is a really, really bad idea. Link
TYCHO POSTHUMUS
Tycho Posthumus works like an archaeologist of his own photographic archive. By combining his pictures from the past and present to create new ones, he gets closer to understanding his world and surroundings.
Link
SCHATTEKE
Around 2010 she belonged to the most promising Dutch YouTube-stars. However, her channel never became as popular as those of her colleagues. Schatteke will tell us all about the strict (beauty) requirements set by viewers and commercial offers, and how, if you fail to live up to these, you might soon find yourself a YouTube-outcast. Link
THOMAS WALSKAAR
Thomas is a graphic designer with a healthy interest in data storage. Tonight he’ll talk to us about his project My Hard-Drive Died Along With My Heart, a book that collects forum- and social media posts from people who are dealing with the aftermath of dead storage. Link
LISA REITH
Lisa is in the midst of graduating from the Willem de Kooning Academie. In the project Authoritative by Design she explores the intricate ways in which offline ways of communicating information are finding their way onto the Internet. Specifically she takes the case of news design to explore the tension created by the repurposing of offline design principles in combination with the opportunities presented by the online environment. Link
LISA GLIEDERPUPPE
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response videos on YouTube create an experience in which everyday sounds triggers a tingling sensation in listeners. Inspired by these videos, Lisa carried out several sound experiments and discovered that ASMR really affects her own state of mind, eventually even resulting in a so-called brain orgasm. Tonight Lisa will carry out an ASMR performance to transfer this tingling sensation. Link
AYMERIC MANSOUX
Aymeric leads the experimental publishing master course at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, and is an artist and media researcher. Tonight he’ll give you a crash course into the meme wars between /pol/ and /leftypol/. Link
CHARLOTTE VAN WINDEN
We love Charlotte for her work -currently she’s busy with a project that deals with fictitious advertising- as well as for the energy and idea behind Moose Space, an artist-run space showcasing the work of young artists. Find out more from Charlotte tonight. Link
AMY SUO WU
With her research project The New Nüshu, artist Amy Suo explores Chinese feminism, language politics, steganography (a form of secret writing) and publishing. The first manifestation of this research is “Thunderclap”, a steganographic fashion zine that instrumentalizes fashion accessories to publish the erased work of an early Chinese anarcho-feminist, He-Yin Zhen (1886-1920), into the public sphere. Link
JOSHUA THIES
Artist Joshua Thies ♥ sounds. His current practices stems from experiments with sound and voice while hosting a monthly radio program about sound art called RAAR (Rotterdam Art and Radio). At The Hmm he will introduce ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) as an internet phenomenon and a reference to his own work. Link
