One Must Imagine the Camera Rolling
(2025)
author(s): Luca Serafini
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
B.A. Fine Arts
In this research I probe the insides of the camera as a surveillant apparatus. I argue that a camera is not a passive object but rather an entity with agency in space. Questions will come up such as what is the existential condition of the camera? Has it seen too much? How does it feel to roll for eternity in hopes of witnessing an event which might take place over a single frame? Is this obsessive drive materialized as a black dome in a state of despair or bliss? What will be the view from the end of times when the last camera stands still? If the eye-lens is a mediator between exterior and interior and it has agency in our imaging of reality, but cameras and computer vision don’t really sense in images, what are we gazing at and what are they gazing at?
We will get started by coming up with definitions, dissecting the camera apparatus, addressing its correlations with our eyes, tracing a paralel between surveillance and religion in chapter 1. Chapter 2 sharpens the foreground with New Materialist and Media Archeological lens – a sort of macro into its circuits and raw materials. Rotating the focus ring to chapter 3, our eyes turn to a collection of letters addressed to different surveillance cameras I have encountered. Chapter 4 removes its lens, the camera laid bare to a high-powered laser as a novel practice of intra-action. A telescope lens is then attached to the camera in Chapter 5, and we’ll look far into the edges of our time. Finally, a global shutter attemps to scan the whole image with concluding remarks, and fails.
Notes on how to be boringly surprised. Negativity, Affect, Intensity
(2025)
author(s): Carles Hidalgo
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
BA Photography
The thesis seeks to analyze a type of negative reasoning that may arise during specific gay intimate encounters. It does so by relating it to absurdism, failure, rejection and the unimaginable. In order to get there, the paper focuses on the power of affects as incongruent impulses that can lead to unexpected situations. t also addresses the moments after this reasoning, when those intense impulses need a specific management. The research is also supported by an autofictional story that tries to question the inert and, in occasions, disappointing qualities of academic knowledge.
Non-Binary Binary Pixels
(2025)
author(s): Roberto Romano
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
BA Interactive Media Design
This thesis investigates the techno-cultural implications of the internet, through the socio economic and philosophical consequences of the digitally mediated self. The human condition is destined to be transformed. This essay is a fictional presentation of the journey of the self into the different shapes and forms of simulation. What could possibly signify for a body to transcent its shapes and forms? Would it become something more of a human?Or maybe less?
No purpose city : sketching the affordances of informality
(2025)
author(s): Malte Leon Sonnenschein
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
MA Interior Architecture (INSIDE)
In investigating the meaning, tasks, and opportunities of public spaces, this thesis is dealing with those parts of public realm whose lack of infrastructure inhibits their usability. Surrounded by function-driven urban areas, I identify those as no purpose cities within the city. I propose a working method that sketches, models, and experiments with such spaces to test their affordances in one-to-one. I claim that constant change is a necessity for a successful and relevant public sphere, as statically designed spaces cannot live up to the needs of a constantly changing, fluid society. The activist designer extends the experientiality by exploring the direct usability of no purpose spaces. In defining this design position the urgent need for the work of active spatial designers is proven, as they play an agile role in the fabric of urban development processes.
My father, the inmate?
(2025)
author(s): Benedikte Bergh Iversen
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022
Master Photography & Society
In this thesis I will share experiences and memories as a daughter of an inmate combined with substance abuse and mental health problems. This person is my father. Through my own experiences and images, I want to see if there is a possibility for images to make it easier to talk about taboo in society, and personal traumatic memory. I hope for my project to open up this conversation. To let others in this situation know that they’re not alone with their feelings, and that they didn’t do anything wrong.
This thesis consists mostly of in-the-moment writing spurs, with reflections from my own experiences, memories and thoughts.
Mammal Mammilla Mamma
(2025)
author(s): Lotus Rosalina Hebbing
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Photography.
Mammal, a vertebrate animal that was nourished with the milk from the mother when it were young.
Mammilla, nipple of the mammal.
Mamma, where are you.
At the age of twenty, Lotus Rosalina Hebbing had always lived in the city until an unannounced occasion occurred and her parents bought an old farm in the northern part of the Netherlands. There were gargantuan fields embosoming the house. On her visits, Lotus obtained a curiosity for witnessing the growth of crops, but also the demise of the beasts. It couldn’t be coincidental; the amount of times she encountered a dying critter. It fascinated her how she felt identically fallen out of control as the birds that smashed against the windows; an unwillingly lonesome surrender to the external. The carcasses became her comrades and if their bones were to defy the decay, she could find solace in the fecundity of the plains and revive from the objectifications that were pasted onto her by the hum of the city.
A few years later, a collection was made from the occurrences on these acres and contorted to the tale that is bound to fall out of tune. It follows a character known as ‘She’. It has been a long time since She tasted the comfort of her mama’s milk. Attempts of holding onto her childhood were only futile and so She decided to flee to a farm at the end of the world, with the persisting premonition to come near that same milk again. On her expedition to a substitute for alleviation, She encounters sweltering saps, suck stoppers and restless traps. Her observations enjoy fleshly connotations. The head does no longer bother to keep secrets, just like life isn’t hidden on these flatlands.
On her adventures, She invents lullabies that her disappearing mother could have sung to her. There is a suggestion of ambivalence in these songs. Their essence is to lull the awake to distant lands of sleep, but it interprets as a damaged dream. The traces lead back to scapes of sorrow where a melancholic melody alarms what was lost along the way and led to inevitable incompleteness.
A sweet sadness covers the blankets that await. The repeating rocking motion of the lullaby reminds of the tender arms that once were wrapped around her, now forever twisted out of shape.
Fantasized folklore, hysteric nostalgia and shriveled youth meet in the remnants of a music box. The work is making a plea to leave the modern cities, where objectification by surrounding eyes constantly influence the development of the teenage persona, and find consolation in remote lands to discover limitlessly the territories of the self.
