Piet Zwart Institute: Master Media Design & Communication

The Piet Zwart Institute, Master in Media Design is an intensive project-based research degree that will equip you to create a distinctive voice as an artist/designer in the contemporary media landscape.

Our programme encourages students to explore the new possibilities released by the friction between media forms, critically working across the historical gaps between photography, cinema, animation, mobile media, information systems and technological networks. This course does not believe in old media and new media, nor in the pattern of media extinctions that punctuate traditional media histories: we believe in the cross fertilisation of a thriving media ecology.

Digital media can be thought of as a field in which radically different materialities of software, interface and human behaviour are being brought together for the first time. This is often experienced as tensions between computer code and the images that this code generates but does not explain; a tension between abstract symbols and concrete models, between concept and sensation. This course does not try to resolve these tensions but uses them to stimulate new ways to think about how we might live with information today.

Graduation 2015: Tempted by Tomorrow

Exhibitions, programming, conferences and publications are a means of expanding our research beyond the confines of academia, while simultaneously valuing the very necessary speculative space for reflection and knowledge-building that is only made possible through an academic framework like the Piet Zwart Institute.