The Rodina The Rodina

What's the story behind your web cover design for Het Nieuwe Instituut Online?

We're thinking about the possibilities of designing bodies in virtual spaces, and about the temporalities connected with them. What does time mean for computers, for rendering 3D scenes, for the server communicating with browsers, for exhibiting in virtual environments, for you as a human or posthuman being (sitting in front of a screen the whole week), for flowers and trees suffering slowly through an extremely dry spring? Many of these topics have come to us through the digital projects we're working on these days. For the cover, we were specifically interested in the images hidden behind visible human experience.

To display a virtual environment, 3D software needs to prepare textures (images displayed on 3D objects). Such rendered images are made only for machine-to-machine communication and are hidden from the human eye. The cover displays the precomputed light and colour renderings of the online exhibition Technologies of The Sacred. It reveals how the software decomposes the surface of the walls of the exhibition spaces into images. The quotes of philosophers Lukas Likavcan and Federico Campagna, and theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, are scribbled onto the ceiling as though they are a sorcerer's magic formula or symbols of witchcraft. For us, it was exciting to realise that many of these 'magically' made technical images are for the machine's gaze only. We are fascinated by how machines 'see' the art space.

How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

It expands our investigation of performance and 'performativity' in design. How do we build closeness and commonality through digital platforms? We experience each other situated in - and mediated through - various overlaying infrastructures like software tools, internet services and mobile phones. We want to explore how, in the current context, closeness can be understood, defined and created. How is shared experience performed, mediated and experienced? What rituals and protocols are deployed as part of this process? And finally, what is the role of the image and its proximity in this mediation?

Is the coronavirus pandemic changing the way you work? 

Yes - all our activities and projects have shifted online. Currently, we are helping several cultural institutions migrate their programmes beyond the physical. We are developing various virtual spaces, including an immersive clubbing event, a custom-developed chat interface, a digital playground, a 'rhizomatic' educational platform and a website for live interactive programmes. In doing this, we also want to find ways of designing interfaces and interactions between the digital and physical worlds. Our intention isn't to focus solely on the online environment. We don't want to escape the 'reality' of what's going on, politically, economically and socially; we want to stay in the challenging position of artists reflecting the situation, subverting and appropriating the rotten language of capitalism, designing alternatives and proposing dreams.

The Rodina (Tereza and Vit Ruller) describes itself as "a post-critical design studio with an experimental practice drenched in strategies of performance art, play and subversion. In both commissioned and autonomous work, it activates and reimagines a wide range of layered meanings across, below and beyond the surface of design, inventing ways in which experience, knowledge and relations are produced and preserved." The Rodina often explores the spatial and interactive possibilities of virtual environments as a space for new thoughts and aesthetics arising in between culture and technology. The studio works for cultural clients including Harvard GSD and FRONT International (USA), Sonic Acts Foundation (the Netherlands) and Hyundai Card Library Seoul (Korea). Tereza is an educator at Design Academy Eindhoven. Together with Vit, she exhibits and lectures internationally, including at CalArts and Cooper Union (USA) and ZHDK (Switzerland).