The MADtech study programme educates artists from the related fields of media performance, fine art, design and technology. The combination of these fields refers to overlapping artistic practices, which include emerging media, visual and performing arts, and experience design. Students of the programme seek to achieve a deeper understanding of and higher level of specialization in their artistic practice. They wish to do artistic research into subjects related to the fields mentioned, which involves exploring the use and application of media and technologies from an artistic perspective, creating virtual or actual objects that allow a connection with the environment and the processing of data from the environment, and that perform processes and/or visualize results of such processes. Technology is not seen as an end in itself, but it is also not only used as an implement. Participants artistically explore a wide range of technologies to interpret, imagine and change the human ‘interaction’ with a transforming world. The students work with these technologies with a tinkering mentality: tinkering in the sense of deconstructing, adapting and reconstructing existing structures by working and experimenting directly with them, with an open-ended outcome. The students have the opportunity to playfully and
experimentally explore and investigate new technologies and to recontextualize old ones – in short, they will become ‘media performers, artists and designers doing strange and unexpected things with technology’.

The graduate of the Study Programme MADtech demonstrates

Making, Performing, Designing, Conceptualising
• artistic work and projects that contribute to the fields of media, art, design and technology, operating at the forefront of the working field.
• a body of work which is rooted in and can be related to a personal artistic vision and system (consisting of a personal set of artistic goals, sources of inspiration and theoretical starting points).

Experimenting, Innovating & Researching
• the ability to gather meaningful material and sources relevant to the own artistic practice, by means of a well-documented research process.
• results of experimental and practice-based investigations into methods, devices and concepts that critically examine the technologically mediated relationship with society.
• the ability to independently investigate the own content (motives, topics and themes), used technology or working methods for the purpose of developing the work.

Theories, Histories & Cultures
• the ability to position, by means of a written thesis, the own artistic practice in relation to existing and new theories and ways of thinking concerning the related and developing practices
• of media, art, design and technology, as well as to broader cultural, social and theoretical contexts relevant to the work.
• the ability to contribute with the developed work and thesis to professional knowledge concerning the related and developing practices of media, art, design and technology in particular and the international art practice in general.

Technical, Environmental & Contextual Issues
• the ability to deal with technical, programming and contextual issues in the realisation and presentation of the Graduation Programme in such a way that technical issues contribute to the creation, realisation and expression of the own artistic concept.
• full awareness of and ability to work with site-specific and other environmental and contextual issues in the presentation of the Graduation Programme.

Re-thinking, Considering & Interpreting the Human Condition
• the ability to reflect critically, both in the thesis and in a public presentation, on
- the semantic possibilities of the own body of work.
- the personal working methods and development.
- overcoming problems of stagnation in the working process as a whole.
- the way technology can be used and artistically explored to
• interpret, imagine and change the human interaction with a transforming world.

Communication, Collaboration & Interdisciplinarity
• the ability to present the graduation work in a careful and well-considered manner in a public presentation.
• the ability to present an artistic vision in a written and illustrated thesis using a form that is appropriate to the work and research framework.
• the ability to discuss and indicate in clear terms, both verbally in a public presentation and in writing through the thesis
- the artistic choices.
- the artistic aims and theoretical starting points of its own work.
- the desired position to assume with regard to general and professional audiences.

Initiative & Enterprise
• to take full responsibility for the development, realisation and presentation of the Graduation Programme.