Aesthetics of Exclusion is a design research project and functions as an open collective.
The project is supported by: Art Center Nabi in Seoul (Korea), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), Alcova Sassetti (Milan), Waag Technology & Society (Amsterdam), Failed Architecture and is supported by the Creative Industries Fund Netherlands.
Dr. Melvin Wevers
Dr. Melvin Wevers currently works as researcher at the Digital Humanities Lab of the KNAW Humanities Cluster, where he focuses on the computational analysis of cultural-historical phenomena. He obtained his PhD at the University of Utrecht, where he studied the role of the United States as a reference culture in twentieth-century Dutch newspaper debates on consumer goods. During his PhD, he was part of the Cultural Analytics program hosted by the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathemtics (UCLA) organized by Tim Tangherlini, Lev Manovich, and others. He used computer vision techniques to study visual patterns in advertisements as a way to shed light on the aspirations and ideals of the past. His current research deals with computational analyses (both text and images) of historical food culture.
Dr. Thomas Smits (Utrecht University)
Thomas Smits is completing a PhD on the transnational trade in illustrations of the news and the production of identity by mid-nineteenth century European illustrated newspapers at the Radboud University Nijmegen. A recent project at the Royal Library (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) applied two computer vision techniques to sort the images of digitized Dutch newspapers according to the way in which they were reproduced (engraving/photographs) and study the nineteenth-century visual culture of the news. More recently, he worked on a project (together with Melvin Wevers and Leonardo Impett) that combines textual and visual large-scale digital methods to study a corpus of Dutch advertisements. In this project, he will focus on working with a digital and historical archive and the application of neural networks. Thomas Smits was a board member of the Royal Dutch Society of Historians (2015-2017) and is connected to ‘Faces of Science’ where young and talented PhD-researchers present their research for a wide audience.
Vera van de Seyp
Vera van de Seyp is a designer / creative coder with great interest in typography, languages and artificial intelligence.
Mark Jan van Tellingen
Mark Jan van Tellingen is an artist and graphic designer based in Utrecht. His work focuses on the impact of algorithms and automation on society. He graduated Design at the Sandberg Instituut in 2014 and was selected for the talent development program from the Creative Industries Fund NL. In 2015 he was a participant of the cross-disciplinary Sandberg@Mediafonds masterclass, teaming up with filmmaker Thomas Vroege working on the project Paranoia.watch. His work has been shown on the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven, PASSAGEN Köln, Boijmans van Beuningen and Nederlands Film Festival. Furthermore he worked as freelance graphic designer with Het Financieel Dagblad and Oneworld Magazine. His latest project Seeing From Nowhere is a short film questioning the objectivity of data.
Joseph Pleass
Joseph Pleass is a designer and coder and made the website for www.aestheticsofexclusion.com.
Jorrit Schaap
Jorrit Schaap is a coder and web entrepreneur from Amsterdam with a Master’s degree in New Media & Digital Culture. His start up Free Loops is an online subscription based platform for royalty free video loops with 130.000+ members worldwide. Jorrit is specialized in combining different programming languages and approaches in creating environments for new and smart (web) applications. Ever since writing his first line of HTML in 1996 at the age of 9, Jorrit has been passionate about technical developments and coming up with ways to improve efficiency and launch products quickly.
Sjoerd ter Borg
Sjoerd ter Borg is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam whose research focuses on the transformations of cities. Through the use of design, fiction and technology he uncovers hidden layers within an urban context, showing forgotten histories, societal developments or even alternate realities. In doing so he reflects on the past, present and future of city developments. Sjoerd ter Borg has graduated in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and from the Vacant NL master programme (interior architecture) at the Sandberg Instituut art academy. In 2014, he was selected for the talent development program from the Creative Industries Fund (NL). In 2015 he spent a summer residency Documentary Art at Uniondocs, New York. Places where his work has been shown include the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Northside Festival (New York), Forms Festival (Toronto), Studio-X (Rio de Janeiro) and the Biennale of Urbanism 2013 (Shenzhen, China). He works on several educational projects for the Sandberg Instituut and as tutor of the Master programmes of the Design Academy (Eindhoven).