The Maastricht Experimental Research in and through the Arts Network (MERIAN) has selected two PhD trajectories (by Antye Guenther and Marlies Vermeulen) as part of the collaborative programme among the MERIAN strategic partners – Maastricht University, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and the Jan van Eyck Academie.
Antye Guenther will start as PhD candidate at FASoS.
Visual artist Antye Guenther will examine the biopolitics — the application and impact of political power on, as well as the socio-political implications – of neuroscientific imagery and neuroimaginaries. Specifically, she will focus on 3D brain data (re)construction and (re)rendering practices, exploring the various intricate and, sometimes, invisible ways, norms, hierarchies, biases, and (dominant) discourses that are installed in the underlying imaging software, technologies and practices. Guenther will investigate scientific 3D visualisation software and their visual outputs, using auto-ethnographic and participatory collaborative practices for artistic exploration and analysis. Find out more about her practice on www.aguenth.de.
Marlies Vermeulen’s background lies in architecture. She is co-founder of the artistic spatial research practice Dear Hunter (www.dearhunter.eu), and she also established the Institute of Cartopology (www.cartopology.institute) as part of her artistic PhD project. Vermeulen’s research questions the role of place in the everyday, where the role the everyday gets attributed to already existing spatial notation systems. Focusing on the search for knowledge that is not immediately written down or told, but hidden and embodied in the obviousness, her PhD project develops and addresses spatial notation systems to behave as research instruments to document and explore place in the everyday setting. The interplay between both and the tension field that each entail draw the field of cartopology, the overarching topic of this PhD research.
The two candidates will participate in the graduate schools, ateliers, research centres and teaching of the various partners.
MERIAN is a space for collaborative research in between making and thinking. PhD candidates engage in innovative styles of research, utilizing the powers and fragilities of artistic and scientific practices. Their research addresses urgent matters of societal concern apparent in the Meuse-Rhine Euregion. This collaboration between Maastricht University, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and the Jan van Eyck Academie builds on existing expertise from the research, arts and higher education networks in Maastricht. The distinct Maastricht style of ‘research in and through the arts’ is problem-based, methodologically innovative, and focuses on interdisciplinary topics that can fruitfully be. MERIAN is a collaboration between:
- Jan van Eyck Academie, department Research & Education
- Research Centre for Arts, Autonomy and Public Sphere, Maastricht Institute of Arts, Toneelacademie Maastricht & Conservatorium Maastricht of Zuyd University of Applied Sciences
- Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Science and Engineering (University College Maastricht) of Maastricht University (including MACCH (The Maastricht Centre for Arts and Culture, Conservation and Heritage) and MCICM (The Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music – a collaboration of Maastricht University, South Netherlands Philharmonic, Zuyd))
About the image: Maria Sybilla Merian, Rode ibis met een ei – 1699-1700, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
