Metahaven
Metahaven is a research and design studio located in Amsterdam and Brussels that was created in 2007 from the cross-fertilisation between Vinca Kruk (Leiden, 1980) and Daniel van der Velden (Rotterdam, 1971). They both studied at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Amsterdam and then the Willem de Kooning Academy. Their visual work reflects political and social issues in co-produced graphic designs, films, books and various digital media. In addition to international research projects Metahaven has edited numerous publications, such as 'Uncorporate Identity', a design anthology for our dystopian age. The duo teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee (Switzerland) and was awarded the CoBRA Art Prize in 2013.
Metahaven's work explores the porous boundary between information, fantasy, fact and fiction. The duo speculates on this shifting status of truth and its emotional, technological and geopolitical implications. Their work takes the form of moving images (digital video and cinema) and design in which poetry, storytelling and a profound interest in the internet and information politics form the connecting elements.
Metahaven has done a great deal of work in dialogue with the thinking of design theorist Benjamin Bratton (1968, Los Angeles). He argues that the distortion of all possible frames of interpretation narrows the critical space between the depicted and the image. An important insight for understanding Metahaven's work also comes from him: if an interface structures our thinking, then contemporary complexity becomes an enormous design problem. It is a problem that particularly concerns the artist because it is essentially aesthetic. The core of their research focuses on the hidden ways in which interfaces abstract and structure reality and on the power structures that lie behind the shaping of our digital environment. The world still presents itself to us but it can no longer be captured in a twentieth-century way. In a mix of critical design, theory and political activism, they make the 'networked' present visible.
Metahaven drives, as it were, an artistic wedge between our screens and the underlying logarithms and associated abstractions. By removing the logarithms and structures, a flashy, associative visual language is created that can be interpreted so openly and so broadly that it makes the viewer dizzy. The overwhelming number of styles, patterns and pixels is a true visual and auditory bombardment of the senses. The poetry, mainly by Russian poets, that is superimposed on the image refuses to be 'read' unequivocally and can offer us some resistance to the massive information manipulation.