ADS0: Environments

This year ADSO focussed on the development of “installative environments” which act as a pictorial stage or as a speculative scenography for the particular themes of change each student individually engages with. At the centre of the studio's program remained biologist Jakob Von Uexküll's 1907 theory of the “Umwelt” which formulates that every living organism actively creates a highly unique and self-centred “image” or “model” of the world it inhabits. This mental image or model merely constitutes a partial, incomplete and subjective representation of reality. The Umwelt thus constitutes reality as it is perceived by the individual living organism, it is by nature non- detachable from its subject and autobiographical in every sense. ADSO explores this concept of the Umwelt as a spatial category which challenges our notions of architecture and space and which demands new formats of representation using multiple combinations of different audiovisual, scenographic, linguistic and performative media. We explored the concept of the Umwelt by introducing a similar more tangible concept; the “environment” and activated this as a pictorial stage. The “environment” refers to the artistic practices of installation and performance art that originated in the sixties. It can be defined as a coherent spatial system which communicates a partial and subjective view of the world through the establishment of its own codes and protocols of experience. ADSO engages with the narrative and discursive capacities of architectural space in relation to art, photography, film, installation, scenography, and performance. The studio systematically puts the image and its construction process at the core of its research and explores the hybrid use of both analogue (models, drawings, printed media, collages, objects) and digital representational techniques (photo, film, rendering & animation). This approach displays strong affinities with art practice and consequently responds to the evolution of our daily living environments into multi-spaces in which the physical and digital are strongly merging into a more complex, interconnected, and associative experience of space. The studio's program therefore incorporates a unique series of art seminars led by Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte, exploring contemporary art practice and its diverse relationships with space. ADSO is ran as an artist collective; a group of individuals each developing their own trajectory through pro-active and tuned in coaching. Every student is intensively guided into the development of their own practice and personal discourse on a longer term. As a result, the studio’s projects display a diverse body of work, offering a multitude of unique perspectives on the contemporary world we live in.

Studio tutors: Steve Salembier, Isabel Pietri & Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte

Image: ADS0 Wip-Show February 2023