Friday 23th January I've held my 'Greenlight presentation' for teachers and students in order to get a 'green light' for my graduation, which took place in Concordia Enschede. I've showed a little showreel to support my talk and a slideshow about my travel through the course and working up to my graduation idea. Here's a small text which sums up a bit what I talked about:
I tell my stories through imagery, but today I'll talk about it.In the first year of the AKI, which was an orientation year,
I couldn't be happier with what was offered to me, painting, sculpture, drawing, video , photo shopping etc.
Great, but that did made me doubt until the ultimate day which course I wanted to do.
I wanted as much freedom, in material and media-choice, themes and ideas.
I chose to do Sculpture.Which I did for half year, experimenting with different material and subjects, combining and tasting,
which was really nice for getting to know different techniques and material.
It didn't make me as happy though. I missed something essential, a rhythm maybe, and inducement, a question or problem?
Then there was something as ACD on the AKI, Art & Crossmedia design. Which, in that time, was spoken about with some fine-arters a little bit as:
"That's just making logos right? Corporate identities?"
"Do whatever a client wants?"
"Being ubergood in photoshop?"
"You do earn lots of money with it tough..."
"How can you develop a signature with that?"
Well, was I mistaken. When I switched to ACD, a world opened up to me, just as much media freedom and material choices,
but we had questions or problems that we had to solve.
Where it didn't ever matter as much what the question was,
coming up with an idea for a jewelry commercial,
programming a flash game and designing the concept for it,
making a hand drawn animation starting with nothing.. etc.
Over the three years I had loads of fun experimenting with media,
getting new assignments every week and let a process go on that.
I discovered that my fascination isn't in being able to use all the media that I want and practice,
but to choose the right medium for the question.
Although I also believe that there is no perfect solution to a 'design' question, only a suited one.
Last half year I tried to discover what my point of view is and clarify that,
by looking into some more critical and political subjects with my dissertation,
film minor, working with dogma and identity research.
This was my story, and now for my graduation I'm going to look in other stories.For my graduation I'm going to look into the column, IK@NRC, a daily column with little personal anecdotes of readers, and translate that into imagery. Loads of imagery, loads of ideas and translations Where I'm going to use all the expertise in from the last years that I gained, my view and signature and as always: let the process guide me and let that frame the end-result.
Slides used during my talk.
