Simon Pummell

What is the Piet Zwart Institute?

It’s the post-graduate institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University. It’s an English language institution, very international, all the courses are taught in English. It recruits very much around the world and has an international student population.

What department are you in?

It’s a small, new department – we started in September 2009 – Lens-Based Digital Media. We’re partnered with a course called Networked Media that’s been running for about six years, and which established quite a reputation amongst the kind of hacker/coding/internet art community, but which never planned to extend out into new kinds of image making. So now they’ve partnered a new department with it.

It comes under the Media Design Masters, and there’s a Fine Art Masters, and you yourself work as a filmmaker and animator. How does the programme sit alongside or across those things?

It’s explicitly been set up to try and address the kind of extremely fluid borders between both media and, if you like, genres.  So, for example, the fact that photography’s increasingly used in moving image and installations in various ways; or the fact that filmmakers are increasingly moving into galleries to make installations.

One of the premises of the course was that using digital media, using all kinds of digital tools to process and manipulate your images, means that the distinctions between still images, film images, and animations have just become completely defunct, basically.  It’s just a sliding scale that you can operate in…

So we’re talking about developing a terrain with a set of very simple concepts:  looking at sort of 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D as ways for people to address organising the forms they use, rather than traditional genres.

The website talks of “the continuum between techniques”, but is there a continuum in practice as well?  Is it that you’re not so much drawing individuals from different kinds of practice but that an individual can engage in a range of practice?

Absolutely – attracting people who actually want to work across those boundaries.

It seemed to me that for the last two decades there’s been a growing number of people constantly operating at the boundaries of fixed definitions, be it animation, be it low budget features films, be it fine art.

It’s a very fluid area where people can work in flexible ways, making choices about optimum ways to shape particular projects. They no longer have to define their careers by a mode of distribution.

And is that also reflected on the way the world has changed?

I think so, very much. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam showed a piece by Saskia Olde Wolbers, a Dutch artist who lives in London. The pieces were incredibly beautiful, but in the gallery, to show the work, they had basically set up a very simple pseudo-cinema. It had a single screen with a bench to watch and speakers on either side.  And you watched it absolutely as if you were in the cinema.

Now those pieces were showing in a modern art museum but in a way, that’s a distribution decision. They could’ve been at a short film festival, or an animation film festival. So it seems to me the divisions are very fluid and volatile between those things.

We’re trying to help people negotiate that conceptually, before they hit that in reality.

Ten years ago I used to teach at the National Film and Television School and from a lot of the teaching you would have thought that everyone was destined to work at Ealing Studios, or headed for a life at the BBC when they left. But all that infrastructure was already in complete chaos by then. So people were hitting the ground and they were in total shock.

Are people destined to work in a particular career now or do they have more power and choice?

Probably simultaneously more power and more choice, and more vulnerability. I think a difficulty of things being so fluid is that probably – as part of your practice – if you’re an artist coming out of a Masters Degree at the moment, is to have some strategic understanding of this shifting media landscape. But that’s very difficult to negotiate without having consciously thought about that.

When I was at film school 20 years ago, you didn’t have to do that because if you were fortunate you’d start to make work for Channel 4, or another powerful media institution, and by default it would be sort of like artist’s television or some other clear strand: documentary, fiction etc. And then there was a hugely powerful distribution mechanism that put your work in a certain place, a clear context. You could be very focussed on generating the most interest in the content that you could.

But now you actually need to make choices about where that content’s going to go.  So you do have more power – but you know, it’s also possible to experience that as sort of more unwished-for responsibility – it’s a burden as well. I’m not a great believer that we’re all inevitably, immediately, more empowered by this highly fluid digital landscape.  I’m not totally convinced by it, you know. You can put your work straight on YouTube but as to whether anyone will look it is another issue.