Welcome to the Studium Generale Rietveld Academie website! To encourage critical making and thinking, Studium Generale offers a diverse and transdisciplinary programme every year on an urgent theme. Read more about the set-up and structure here.

This website consists of 3 substantive and informative layers that constantly feed each other.

The Programme Overview home page displays announcements of ongoing events and activities, and provides instant access to their live streams when appropriate.

Below the Programme overview is the Archive Picks area, which presents varying selections of older programme contributions, curated by guests or by ourselves. Older contributions can thus regain attention or meaning, or be presented in alternative arrangements.

At the bottom is the Archive. There you will find material from 2011 to the present: part of the video-recorded contributions to the annual conference of Studium Generale and since March 2020 also recordings of events and presentations of the preliminary programmes. The archive is searchable in various ways and offers a chronological overview of previous editions and links to the associated project websites. It also contains announcements and descriptions of previous programme components, which can no longer be relived, but do provide some glances in the histories of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.

The purpose of the website is to inform and present what is happening at the moment, but it is also a memory, in which a lot can be found and unexpected encounters can take place.

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N.B. This website is still under construction! Not everything has been completed yet and the search functions in the Archive are not yet fully functional.

Brainwaves in Neuroculture. Would the Buddha Wear a Walkman?
Flora Lysen

‘Would the buddha wear a walkman?’ is the title of a 1990 sales catalog for ‘consciousness tech’, a collection of tools that might “change the way we think - and perhaps even our brains themselves.” In this lecture, Flora Lysen examines historical fantasies of brain wave recording and current art-science experiments with E.E.G. to think about how we could position ourselves in relation to the authority of neuroscience and the promises of neurotechnology.

Flora Lysen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam, based at the Mediastudies department, writing about the history of brain science and popular culture. Previously, she has worked at various institutions, including the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (Utrecht) and If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam).