DIALETHEIA
Graduates 2014

Sandberg Instituut
Design Department
Think Tank for Visual Strategies







Featuring
Tessel Brühl (NL)
Giada Fiorindi (IT)
Lenka Hamosova (SK)
Anja Kaiser (DE)
Polina Medvedeva (RU/NL)
Mark Jan van Tellingen (NL)
Jaroslav Toussaint (DE)
Rasmus Svensson (SE)
Tommi Vasko (FI)
26Th—29Th June
11:00—20:00

Framer Framed
at Tolhuistuin
Buiksloterweg 5c
1031 CC Amsterdam


Opening
26Th June
20:00—23:00


Sandberg Instituut
Design Department
Think Tank for Visual Strategies

The design department functions
as a think tank where students
commit themselves to various cul-
tural, politicaland research based
visual projects that grapple with
critical issues in contemporary
society.The master students initiate
their own projects, engage in tech-
nology, collaborate, curate events,
direct, write, edit, program and design
hybrid forms of communication.
In short, they are ambassadors of
a changing design profession.

sandberg.nl/design

sandberg.nl/design/essays
sandberg.nl/design/yearbook

course director: Annelys de Vet
coordinator: Anniek Vrij
tutors: Rob Schröder,
Daniel van der Velden,
Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen,
Nikki Brörmann (essays),

guest tutors: Max Bruinsma,
Syb Groeneveld, Femke Herregraven,
Chris Keulemans, Rudy J. Luijters,
Francisco Laranjo, Pinar&Viola,
Ruben Pater, Malkit Shoshan,
Diego Tonus, Astrid Vorstermans

graduation jury: Katja Novitskova,
Ellen Walraven, Juha van 't Zelfde

Dialetheia, Graduation Show 2014

Students 2012—2014: Tessel Brühl,
Giada Fiorindi, Lenka Hamosova,
Anja Kaiser, Polina Medvedeva,
Mark Jan van Tellingen,
Jaroslav Toussaint, Rasmus Svensson,
Tommi Vasko

Students 2013—2015: Gilles de Brock,
Asieh Dehghani, Mirte Duppen,
David Ortiz, Marthe Prins, Isaura San,
Sofia Stankovic, Teodora Stojkovic,
Benedikt Weishaupt, Benedikt Wöppel,
Marleen van der Zanden

exhibition curator: Agata Jaworska
exhibition graphics: Benedikt Wöppel
exhibition design: Mirte van Duppen,
Marleen van der Zanden
exhibition production:
BENDE: Tijmen Dekker, Looy Driesser,
Tom Lugtmeijer
A/V production: Jan-Kees van Kampen
typefaces: Arial (modified), Dialetheia
printing: Pinguin Druck GmbH,
Berlin, Germany
published by: Sandberg Instituut, 2014

The view that a statement can be true and not
true at the same time is dialetheism. Such statements
are called true contradictions, or dialetheia.

The 2014 Graduates of Sandberg Instituut's
Design Department confront the dilemmas of our
disoriented times. Witnessing and accelerating the
deterioration of formal rules and systems, they have
a tendency to point out contradictions. They are
willing and wanting to embrace incongruity as reality,
and as a condition for new possibilities.

Forward-thinking, risk-taking critical optimists,
the graduates reflect on the present with a sense
of clarity and an alternative perspective. They narrate,
enact and embody the polemic tendencies of society
today. They challenge alleged truths and dominant
systems, those so engrained as to become invisible.
Dialetheism is emerging as a mode of thinking
and of being.



Agata Jaworska, curator
Flight Forward –
Welcome To The Flagship Store!

Tessel Brühl (NL) and
Jaroslav Touss
aint (DE)

The genuinely new is having hard times. Society is
addicted to the superfluously new – new for the
sake of newness – producing and consuming
aesthetic stimuli without end.

Flight Forward reclaims imagination, exploring
creative practices that go beyond enhancing the
commodity fetish. Flight Forward fights for the
genuinely new, restoring the power of the aesthetic
producer. The flagship store offers tools and
strategies and a space to play in order to
collectively create the genuinely new with shape,
colour, sound and structure. Our objects materialize
a view to commodities, in order to trigger the
imagination of their users. With these, we can
immerse ourselves in an atmosphere of chaos
and abundance. Branding offers no escape.
Attack is the only way out.

www.flightforward.cc
Tokens of Decadence
Giada Fiorindi (IT)

From Dior bathrobes and The Witcher 2 video-
game to crocodile attack insurance policies and
chocolate snack bars. The belief in the magical
power of gestures and tokens seems to have
been forgotten as one-of-a-kind gifts of State are
replaced by customized mugs and caps, souvenirs
from tourist shops and sterile objects of planned
obsolescence. What was once a sublime portrait
of thriving epochs is now a gadget of mediocrity:
the diplomatic gift.

Tokens of Decadence is a collection of diplomatic
gifts that captures the spirit of today's disoriented
nations, which are torn between symbolism and
commerce, between tradition and business plan.
The collection makes persuasively clear the tragic
hysteria of a custom that has gone awry, and the
cultural impotence of our times.

www.tokensofdecadence.com
#apathy #survival #whatever
Lenka Hamoso
va (SK)

Consumerism does not satisfy people's needs
and desires but instead creates new ones. It is a
myth, constructed and designed to please you,
to comfort you, to make you want more, to fool
you, to consume you.

The inevitable consequence of the unbearable
lightness of consumerist being is comfortable
apathy. But while it seems that an apathetic public
is distracted, and thus in the perfect state for
manipulation, apathy is in fact the most political
action. Institutionalized power gives an illusion of
participation, while it only triggers small local acts
that confirm the exclusion of the public from politics.
Who said it's bad, when we don't participate?

#apathy #survival #whatever
reverses the tools
formerly created for marginalizing the public into
an act of resistance, presenting a visual strategy
for survival in the 21st century. Fight apathy with
apathy… or, whatever.

www.apathyparadox.nl

www.lenka.hamos.sk

Sexed Realities –
To Whom Do I Owe My Body?
Anja Kaiser (DE)

On and off screen, the body is an inevitable
projection surface for binary-coded sexed realities
and their disruption. Bodies are rendered, replicated
and accelerated by technology, pop culture,
pharmaceutical industries, corporate concepts and
culture at large.

Sexed Realities unravels the visible and invisible
forces underlying the production of bodies, mapping
the battlefield of power and pleasure and its effect
on the body in normative societies. Four notions of
the body reflect the conditions of their production.
Str8 Data Bodies are detected and scanned by
technocratic institutions and brands.

Risk-free Virtual Bodies are performing computer
crossdressing, gender swapping and identity theft.
Smart Corporate Bodies hold on to neoliberal
individualism and underpaid wage conditions.
Promised Flexible Bodies have to develop strategies
in order to conform to social norms.

Sexed Realities offers a different way of looking
at the forces and tensions that shape the reality
of bodies.

www.sexed-realiti.es
www.anjakaiser.info

The Champagne Drinkers –
Russia’s Informal Economy
from the Backseat of a Taxi
Polina Medvedeva (RU/NL)

Stealing food which was meant to be yours.
Using often illegal taxis as a delivery service, and
the drivers as a town's yellow pages. Making car
accessories out of domestic objects. Switching car
parts to avoid road tax. Driving a taxi and milking
goats with a university degree. Receiving breaking
news via a closed chat system first hand from
colleagues who in a parallel life are also military
men operating near Ukraine.

Russia's informal economy is booming. Everyone
has a double agenda. Everyone is an entrepreneur.
You need to be in order to survive. Filmed in the
wake of the Ukraine conflict in an ordinary Russian
town, The Champagne Drinkers offers a human
perspective on Russia's informal economy from the
backseat of a taxi, revealing the bizarre survival
techniques people have developed, not because,
but in spite of their government.

“One who doesn't take risks, doesn't drink
champagne”
– a popular Russian saying

www.polinamedvedeva.nl

Data Republic
Mark Jan van Telling (NL)

Oil was the foundation of wealth in the 20th century.
A century later, a radically new raw material has
entered the stage.

Welcome to the Data Republic. Ubiquitous sensors
and devices continuously mine our minds, bodies
and actions, turning all of us into mega data
generators. Technocracy empowers our social and
economic well-being through the optimizing process
of data collection, analysis and prediction. Data has
become an asset and a mode of exchange, enabling
everyone to make a living. It has become the fuel
for the century to come.

“While we thought we were being entertained,
we were working and were being traded as
commodities”
– Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism

www.markjanvantellingen.nl
www.datarepublic.today
Foreign Drive
Rasmus Svensson (SE)

Foreign Drive takes place on the flat surface of the
interface, at the thin line where one meets another,
where U meet I. The interface is a membrane that
permits or prevents passage according to a logic
unknown to the user. The hands and eyes of the
user are driven to roam over its surface, tracing lines
that portray distant algorithms. Infrasonic vibrations
disrupt the user's thoughts, calling for attention and
demanding action. The body is shaken by a surge
of fear and hope in equal measure. We need this
connection – but we also crave isolation. We wish
to be apart and a part, inside and outside, all at the
same time. The interface is the stage for this drama.

Foreign Drive manifests the visceral and mental
impact of the interface on the human condition,
exploring the human-to-device and body-to-data
relationship.

www.rasmus-svensson.info
A Stage Full of
Anonymous Material

Tommi Vasko (FI)

Today the global lubricant (oil) underlies every
narration on Earth. Within the last 150 years, human-
ity has been liberated from physical labour and
material limitations by the seemingly endless malle-
ability facilitated by fossil fuels. Oil has directed
human life into disruptive lifestyles disconnecting
us from our earthly roots and rendering materials
anonymous and convoluted.

Rendering is the ultimate act of abstraction. In the
meat industry rendering is a process which converts
livestock into value-added materials such as ex-
plosives, toothpaste and Chicken McNuggets. In the
realm of image-making, generic stock footage,
AdSensed google image search, 3D-modelled
objects and layers of graphic elements and visual
effects are put together into image files disconnected
from the tellurian materiality of our planet.

A Stage Full of Anonymous Material
is a behind-
the-scenes science fiction that enacts the production
of a re-materialized future. Set in a motion capture
studio, the film re-renders the plastic and the hyper-
real back into the rooted and the corporeal, in search
of a new geophilosophy for our post-peak oil future.

www.low-eroei.net
www.stagefullofanonymousmaterial.tumblr.com