Nida Doctoral School of VAA: from international partnership to new activities in the new building

Published on Monday, 30 November 2015 08:36

The next Nida Doctoral School intensive session will be held in the new second building of Nida Art Colony. The new building, open since November, is designed for project activities, practical and theoretical education programmes, conferences, creative workshops, exhibitions, performances, concerts and residencies. In February 2016 more than 12 students and lecturers from Lithuania and abroad will come to Nida for the second Doctoral School session.

On the 15th of September, 2015 Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts and Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture signed an agreement establishing the Nida Doctoral School, which develops and runs a joint non-degree doctoral programme. NDS is located at Nida Art Colony on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania. The program offers international doctoral courses and residencies for doctoral and post-doctoral students of art, art history, design, media and architecture from Aalto ARTS, VAA and other universities which will join the initiative. The members of the NDS Board are Dr. Paula Hohti and Prof. Sofia Pantouvaki, representing Aalto University, and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius and Assoc. Prof. Julijonas Urbonas on behalf of VVA. The board will work for two years. The contract also stipulates the procedure of academic credit allocation – NDS gives students 5 international credits. The parties commit to co-fund the project and include at least one teacher from the university and the academy in the curriculum of each of the School's sessions.

Nida Doctoral School functions as a test of the possibilities of generating knowledge outside the conventional models of research. Unorthodox approaches to research in art, design and architecture are explored through making, performing, writing, and discussion. In addition, NDS offers lectures, workshops, one-to-one tutoring, experiments, games and other educational activities. The curator of Nida Doctoral School is Justė Kostikovaitė. Programmes are supervised by the academic staff of Aalto Arts, Vilnius Academy of Arts and other universities as well as outstanding guest speakers. Nida Doctoral School residencies are administrated by Nida Art Colony and constitute a part of the international Nida Artist-in-residence programme. NDS offers 2 month long doctoral residencies and is involved in various long term projects, such as research projects, pop-up research experiments and labs. Nida Art Colony and Aalto Arts hopes to develop a small and inspiring guild of European postgraduate institutions which will contribute to and benefit from the program.

The open call for the first Nida Doctoral School was announced this spring. The first session was held on the 19–25th of October, 2015. An intensive course titled "Smoke and Mirrors – Staged Arguments and the Legitimation of Artistic Research" had 12 students and lecturers from Lithuania and abroad (United Kingdom, USA, Latvia, Sweden) analyze the interactions of science and art. Each edition of Nida Doctoral School hosts at least four Aalto and at least four Vilnius Academy of Arts doctoral students and no less than four international students from universities from all over the world. All of them received a scholarship.

The first session was inspired by the French philosopher Bruno Latour's idea that science is a fairytale, which is hard to disbelieve. The curators of this session extended this thought by claiming that if this is true, then scientific research is nothing but scripting fiction. Dr. Timothy Ingold (University of Aberdeen, UK), Dr. Stephen Wright (European School of Visual Arts), artist and designer Julijonas Urbonas (Vilnius Academy of Arts) and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius (Vilnius Academy of Arts) spoke about persuasion which requires creativity and knowledge, and led workshops related to these issues at Nida Art Colony.

The week-long NDS courses will be held twice a year, every February and August at Nida Art Colony. In February the students of the next session will reflect on the following topic: "The "Digital Affect" in Relation to Post-Internet Art and Design". In relation to the post-digital aesthetics (Art, Computation and Design) and the recent proliferation of the digital media and its effect, there is a growing need to analyse the phenomenon of the Digital Affect in several aspects: for example, particularly interesting is the meta-modernist approach to the digital technology and the affect it produces – as a semiocapitalist value generating place, but at the same time a potential platform for healing and connecting communities, the politics of the affect.

In August the students of the summer school will discuss the topic "CO-ACTION – Artist Placements in Non-Cultural Spheres". The idea of the "CO-ACTION" summer school course is based on the assumption that representatives of creative professions (such as artists, curators, architects, designers) are no longer romantic lonely creators. Contemporary cultural practitioners are self-managing units, freelancers floating between creative, social and commercial fields. Now they can be called universal experts with exceptional capabilities to react and respond to certain social, business and aesthetic surroundings by creating new aesthetic and conceptual regimes. CO-ACTION was also inspired by the British artists' collective "Artists Placement Group". They claimed that the role of the artists in 70's society was limited to the aesthetic problems, and APG's mission was to expand this role. In the period between 1966 and 1980 APG had 15 artists placements in such companies as British Steel, Department of Environmental Security, and Council of Scotland. APG's placements had utopian goals but some of them resulted in producing significant social effects, such as David Hall's seven short films ("TV Interruptions", 1971) aired on Scottish Television in the place of commercials.