Sjoerd ter Borg
area: Digital Art
Key Facts
nationality
Netherlandsarea
Digital Artresidence
Amsterdamrecommending institution
frei_raum Q21 exhibition spacetime period
August 2020 - August 2020Sjoerd ter Borg is an artist and designer based in Amsterdam whose research focuses on the transformations of cities. Through the use of design, fiction and technology he uncovers hidden layers within an urban context, showing forgotten histories, societal developments or even alternate realities. In doing so he reflects on the past, present and future of city developments. In 2018 he initiated the project Aesthetics of Exclusion which researches how we can use computer vision techniques and machine learning to explore and analyse aesthetical styles that correlate with gentrification in large image archives such as Google StreetView images and Instagram.
Sjoerd ter Borg has graduated in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and from the Vacant NL master programme (interior architecture) at the Sandberg Instituut art academy. In 2014, he was selected for the talent development program from the Creative Industries Fund (NL). In 2015 he spent a summer residency Documentary Art at Uniondocs, New York. Places where his work has been shown include the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Art Center Nabi (Seoul), the Dutch Design Week (Eindhoven), Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Northside Festival (New York), Forms Festival (Toronto), Studio-X (Rio de Janeiro) and the Biennale of Urbanism 2013 (Shenzhen, China). He works on several educational projects for the Sandberg Instituut and as tutor of the Master programmes of the Design Academy (Eindhoven). In 2018 he won the Icarus-award for the film Beach Umbrella, a Dutch prize for art works reflecting about technology and society.
Aesthetics of Exclusion
Aesthetics of Exclusion is a collective of artists, designers, coders and scientists that uses computer vision techniques and machine learning to explore and analyse aesthetical styles that relate to gentrification and processes of (urban) homogenization through large image archives such as (Google) StreetView and Instagram.
Aesthetics of Exclusion aims to use these techniques to study the visual patterns of gentrification, an urban phenomenon that is reflected in the removal of communities of diverse classes, ethnicities, races, sexualities, languages, and points of view from central city neighborhoods, and their replacement by more homogeneous groups.
While developing the project in a Covid-affected world, we realized many shops, bars, clubs and restaurants will go bankrupt in these difficult times due to lockdown measures, tourism decline and regulation in the amount of visitors a certain venue is able to receive. In light of the project we are planning to connect data sources that deals with bankruptcies with our own platforms. By specifically monitoring them we are making it possible to see how they in time are replaced by others and specifically what effect Covid-19 has on the perceived scenery and level of gentrification of a specific street in development in one year onwards.
During the residency we aim to investigate the local context of Vienna in relation to the theme of Space of Urgency and in relation to the earlier work of Aesthetics of Exclusion. Using both qualitative and computational methods we are conducting research and developing a proposal for a work in the exhibition.