Research Group 2022: Benjamin Earl

Roosmarijn Hompe: How does your practice as a designer and researcher relate to what you teach?

Benjamin Earl: For me, designing, researching and teaching are inextricably linked. I teach an elective course for second and third years called Design Research. The aim of the course is to reimagine what research could be outside of scientific and traditional approaches. We help students think through methods and ways of doing things that can bring out new knowledge. Whether it’s about themselves or about a certain topic or their relationship to that topic, we consider the student as the initiating point of the research.

First, we give students a lot of input: we take them on trips, we do workshops with them, we bring in people from outside of the KABK. And then during that time they’re documenting a lot but not necessarily making things. Then there’s a kind of switch halfway through the semester where they begin to translate those things into their own forms and make new meaning with those forms.

Alice Twemlow: What are some of the methods and what do you visit?

BE: Each year we have a different theme. Last year we looked at “unproductivity”, the idea of doing nothing. We started the semester by visiting Varia, a community tech space in Rotterdam, and looking at things that were somehow unproductive in terms of computing. We visited an exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly about rest and communal care, and arranged a workshop by an artist called Kirsten Spruit who works around the idea of nonproductivity. We did a choir workshop to emphasise the idea of starting from your body as a site of research. Singing became this act of doing, making sounds together to explore what it means to make sounds collectively, do something communally.

RH: This idea of your body as a site of research and knowledge, was it specifically for this nonproductivity theme, or do you always take that as a point of departure?

BE: We’ve found it’s very useful for students to realise that the body is always the starting point of research – of having conversations, doing fieldwork, experiencing a site. From there they might iterate their own research methods. Each student finds their own way through, depending on what the topic is. And we just try to support that in whatever way we can.

AT: Let’s talk about your own research practice. Perhaps we can start with the exhibition you just had at the Goethe Institute in Rotterdam?

BE: The Goethe Institute has a program called “Passages en Passant”, which is where they invite two artists with research-based practices to make an exhibition together. They paired me with Daniela De Paulis, who works with the techniques that amateur radio enthusiasts use to communicate. In the end, we figured out a show where she presented works that were about beaming radio transmissions up into outer space, and I was doing work that was about receiving transmissions from outer space. For me the whole exhibition became a site of research. I used it as a place to gather people. I took groups to the roof of the building to listen to a weather satellite as it passed over and then we would come down and we’d make these maps of the relations of the different sounds that we had heard and how the sonic traces of the satellite had affected our experience.

RH: How did you help them to do this listening? And how did you document their experiences?

BE: Each workshop had about five or six participants. I took them to the roof, and first I asked them to do a deep listening exercise. We started by listening to what is close to the body, then on the roof, the street, and the city, and then as far away as they can listen. About 10 minutes after that, the satellite would begin to pass over. I had tuned the satellite into a big speaker. It would start beeping. I asked people to think about the space that they were in at that moment and what happens when listening to something 500 miles above our heads. As the satellite passed over, the sound faded away.

We went downstairs, and I asked them to map out all the different things that they heard during that first listening exercise. And oftentimes it was just this huge mess of, like, diagrams and lines and stuff like that. But when people begin to place themselves within the map, it becomes super interesting because some people can put themselves as dots, really precisely positioned. And other people will draw themselves around everything. We took three or four minutes per exercise. And while they were making these maps, I was on my laptop decoding the sound into an image so that they could see the image that the weather satellite had just made of us from above. The images the participants made of themselves and the one made by the satellite were at odds, because you can’t see yourself in the satellite image.

RH: How would you identify all the different ingredients of doing research in this specific example?

BE: For me, it usually starts with having an interest in using some sort of technical hardware or device. This time it was an antenna that you could tune into any kind of frequency. I start out just trying and testing it, playing with this one piece of technology. And then afterwards I begin to imagine its potential. For this project, the data points that I became most interested in were the other people’s way of experiencing the situation and the drawings that they made. I really love the idea of taking things that could be considered just tools and then transforming them into something that could also be considered an artistic output.

RH: You are also highlighting that these tools which may seem to create objective data are actually not so objective, even when they are used for their original purposes.

Are there any other activities related to research that you engage with at the KABK?

BE: I co-founded Mushroom Radio (with Jack Bardwell and Esther Vane), and I’m still involved in an advisory capacity. At the time I was looking at peer-to-peer networks and ways of sharing knowledge that don’t have to go through all these different dependencies that we rely on now. It became a thing where we were interviewing people around the KABK about extracurricular activities that they were doing that weren’t recognized by the academy. And we also wanted it to be an archive of that particular time during which we were studying. Because you have this four-year rollover of students where, as soon as the fourth year leaves, a whole body of experience and knowledge is gone. We wanted to find ways to pass that along to the next generation. So Mushroom Radio was a few different things at once. It was an archive. But it was also a research tool. And it also spawned a few other radio stations I’ve been involved with since graduating.

RH: How is the Mushroom Radio archive accessible to the current students?

BE: Everything’s recorded and uploaded to a Mixcloud account.

AT: Mushroom Radio makes a very significant contribution to the research culture at the KABK. We use it quite often with the Research Group. We did that show called The Research Question where we paired up each tutor-researcher with a student to trigger a different kind of conversation about research.

RH: How do you experience research as part of the KABK’s culture and how do you think it could be improved?

BE: I’ve experienced it as a student, as a tutor, and as part of the Design Lectorate Research Group. As a student, I felt that my department was very supportive of research. Because we were given an elite set of tutors, all of whom had great research practices, and we had the time and space to do things. What I struggled with, was trying to get the support of the institution itself. With Mushroom Radio, for example, there was never any recognition of what it was, and quite often, it would just be forgotten about or not supported in any way. So, it always had to be self-initiated and self-maintained which, as a student is fine, but as a tutor, it’s less so, I think. The Graphic Design department gives tutors four hours every week to work on the content of their course, to read and talk to people and figure out what the course could become. So that was super helpful. But what I miss is a way to find out about and discuss each other’s research within the department.

I was also thinking that the workshops could be made more accessible for tutor research. Not everyone can have access to all these tools and equipment in their own private studio so it would be nice to think of the KABK as a hub for making. I only know about what’s possible because of the Research Group. But it would be great for all the other tutors to also be able to have that same knowledge of what’s possible here.