The students of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK) presented their experimental works during Salone del Mobile in Milan. The focus of the show was the importance of the research process and the interaction between experiences in the virtual and the physical world.

The KABK students from the departments of ArtScience, Furniture Design and Textiles investigated the diversity of new techniques, production methods and research process through the use of furniture, textile samples, videos, live performances and multidisciplinary installations.

ArtScience students created a fantasy world, Cloud Factory, by projecting images onto candy floss suspended in the performance space. People were encouraged to eat the confectionary during the performance. The students involved in Cloud Factory were Hadas Hinkis Maarten van der Mark, Vincent Vijn and Marloes van Son.

Breathe Out, You are in Space by 2009 graduate Thijs Molenaar is a narrative investigation in scale. Following the path of one oxygen molecule, the project consisted of allowing people to travel from the inside the human body and end up in outer space and experience the sounds the molecule encounters along the way.

The Art Cabinet by Melanie Rosalinda Luchtenveld, 4th year Furniture Design student, was another work expressing a modern reinterpretation of a classic art cabinet. In this work the form becomes the consequence of an exploration of the different layers of privacy and ownership of the objects stored in its interior.

At the KABK, fashion and textile are represented together in one Textile Design course programme. The creative processes involved in the course were represented by textile samples and videos. Experiments in knitwear by Serena Huizinga was a study of the forms made possible by seamless knitting techniques, produced with the aid of industrial Stoll knitting machines.

Sajoscha Talirz, a 2010 graduate, presented an enormous book case: Pompous Cabinet. Talirz’s presentation consisted of an intuitive composition of moulds, the outer mould being used to contain layer after layer of solidifying polyurethane. Despite controlling the thickness of the polyurethane layers, the actual form was determined by the material itself.

In another presentation a video by Marcel Kerkmans was inspired by scenarios from computer games and intrigued by the damaged and violent human mind, using violence as an instrument to create pieces of furniture.

Rutger de Regt, third year student from the Furniture Design department, gave a live demonstration of how furniture is produced through the use of self-developed processes with his collection The Happy Misfits. “Everyone is unique and each of us manipulates him or herself one way or another.” says Rutger conducting a live presentation by pressing coloured stools out of EPS. He transforms his idea into a process-based concept for a furniture collection in which everybody is an individual.

Get in Touch was an exhibition by students of the ArtScience department and allowed the visitors to experiment with the human interface. Visitors were enticed to feel the spines of the fabric cylinder-formed installation and, in doing so, to make music with it. It was a piece that was as much an installation as a performance and musical instrument. The students involved were Matthijs Munnik, Ben Terwel and Charlotte‘t Hart.

GenePool by Eric Parren was an interactive installation that explored the topics of artificial life and artificial evolution. Visitors actively participated in the design of a community by evolving their own artificial creature and sending it out into a simulated world to see if it could survive. The project allowed visitors to take part in designing a digital community.

Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK)

Image credits: Cloud Factory photography by Hadas Hinkis

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