The Fold

Reading artefacts of Institutional Topology

Abstract

 ‘The Fold’, is a game-essay informed by a series of in-depth interviews with a number of disparate actors, times, and spaces from the history and present of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. ‘The Fold’ allows us to explore these parts as proximate, centring them around the institute’s original ‘fold’, in 2012, between the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), the Netherlands Institute for Design and Fashion (Premsela), and Virtual Platform, a knowledge institute for e-culture. The form of the game-essay, in 8-bits and 8x8 pixels, attempts to flatten institutional space, removing the experience (but not the haunts) of geometry. As reader-characters then make their way through a disorientating array of spatial and temporal folds they are encouraged to act, see, and think topologically. As such, the provocation is part archeological and part apocryphal, retrieving material, visual, and verbal artifacts and recovering meaning in their deliberate obscurity, attempting to re-examine a past ‘fold’ in institutional space and prompt the imagination of future ones.