Journalism and art, Complementary and collaborative storytelling

Research Café is an informal seminar series where you can learn more about various research methodologies from different senior researchers from Rietveld Sandberg Research. These seminars are open to all students, staff, tutors, and alumni of the Rietveld Academie and the Sandberg Instituut.

It’s nothing new exactly, but more and more artists are employing journalistic techniques – using reporting, interviews, public records, documentary footage, and photo captions to create work that addresses social, economic, and political topics - topics that traditionally fell within the purview of journalism.

Some artists, like most journalists, define their goal as capturing a type of truth, even though one does not usually look to art for factual truths. Art is rich with stories and histories, and art can give important information about who we are as people - our customs, our words, our values, and our beliefs. In this way, art works as a roadmap of our humanity.

So while art meanders beyond verifiable facts – to nourish the emotions - in this session we will explore how artists and designers can understand journalistic tools from how they order their material to narrative storytelling techniques. We will explore how a blurred boundary between art and journalism can do more for truth than a cold, reported view on the world, and how rather an artist’s way of giving a “view on the view,” helps us to question our assumptions about how we perceive the world.