Tjebbe van Tijen

Tjebbe van Tijen (* 1944 in The Hague , Netherlands ) is a sculptor , performance artist , curator , net artist and media theorist who lives and works in Amsterdam . Van Tijen has a keen interest in history and the storage and transmission of knowledge. This interest led to the fact that many of his works of art and multimedia projects were developed in cooperation with archives and libraries and using their works and knowledge.

resume

Tjebbe van Tijen studied sculpture at art schools in Den Bosch , Haarlem , Milan and London from 1961 to 1965 . 1968–69 he did project work for a documentation center for "Art, Society and Technology" at the Stedelijk Museum , Amsterdam. 1973–93 he was curator of the Documentation Center for Social History, University Library of Amsterdam. 1988–91 he was one of the co-founders of the Foundation "Europe against the current" and its exhibition curator for alternative and experimental design. In 1991 he founded the "Imaginary Museum Projects". from 1993 Multimedia Advisor, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

Works

The work Orbis Pictus Revised, created with Milos Vojtechovsky and others, is particularly well known . With this work, the idea of Johann Amos Comenius' work Orbis sensualium pictus was taken up in 1995 and an interactive installation was created that shows how people have tried over centuries to explain the world with pictures and what changes certain terms and their representation have undergone. The elementary term "child breastfeeding" was initially explained with pictures of large families and wet nurses, but later with pictures of baby bottles. Z. B. also made the change in the world of work, from simple farming activities to modern large-scale operations. Part of the installation is also a virtual bookshelf with the help of which the visitor not only becomes familiar with Comenius as an ingenious classification system, but also the further development of the representation of the respective topics in later works, e.g. B. in the 17th and 20th centuries. The interactive installation can be experienced in Karlsruhe at the Center for Art and Media Technology.

Many other works can be viewed on the Imaginary Museum Project website.

Web links

• Imaginary Museum Project website
• Texts by the artist
• The ZKM about the artist
• Example of the media theoretical work: The lecture Ars Oblivivendi by van Tijen at the Ars Electronica 1996 (German)