Department of Search

System D Stress Test (2015)

The Uithof was designed in the 1960s following the U.S. modernist vision of the university campus outside the city centre. In 2014, the monofunctional campus started its transformation into a Science Park, combining the university with student housing, a commercial business quarter, restaurants and shops. A high tech city for the brightest minds. The public space had to become a high-end meeting point instead of the monofunctional transit space between university buildings.

The Utrecht Art in Public Space department assigned Cynthia Hathaway, Carlijn Diesfeldt, and Melle Smets, to research the potential for a public art program. For the first action search program the search team of twelve students from the System D Academy (Sandberg Institute) occupied the 13th floor of the vacant Van Unnik building. The students’ task was to formulate a search topic where the science community could team up with artists.

The public space was put to the test whilst students stayed on campus 24/7 and inside the office buildings. Meanwhile the 13th floor of the Van Unnik building changed into the Department of Search with an intense lecture program of scientists, hobbyists, artists, and journalists about the common ground of thinkering. The offices became studios where students envisioned their ideas of what could be typical search topics.

2015 Giant Corn Field

The second action search was the Giant Corn Field, a communal giant vegetable field at the Utrecht Science Park. The campus has a lot of meadows that function as fire walls between the science departments. These are permanently enclosed by fences and gates, maintained by 325 sheep from the university research farm. The other half of the landscape is for the 70,000 academics who hardly have any space to conduct experiments and hold meetings. How can the grasslands become part of the productive thinkering space, and still function as a fire wall?

The Department of Search squatted the most central meadow and built a pedestrian bridge so everyone could get in. The Giant Corn Field was set up as a competition field to grow the highest corn field in the world. 200 Jala corn plants were distributed to a wide range of people on campus who were willing to compete. The highest corn plant was sent to the National Giant Vegetable Competition 2015. Unfortunately, the scientists lost the battle from the hobbyists. But the connection was made and since then every year the Giant Vegetable competition is organised in the botanical gardens of the Utrecht Science Park.

Zero Foot Print Campus (2017)

To make the Utrecht Science Park a centre of ‘bright minds and better futures’ the campus needs meeting places where people can share ideas. Art can play a key role in creating an inspiring encounter and in connecting disciplines in an unexpected way. After two action research projects at the Utrecht Science Park, the Department of Search got the support of the university to scale up an artistic search program.

For an entire year, twelve artists worked on a search proposal with the working title Zero Footprint Campus, which shed a new light on the campus of the future. The artists got their inspiration from whatever the campus had to offer, from the landscape and the animals that wander around, to the knowledge that scientists produce on site.

In June 2017 the Zero Foot Print Campus manifestation took place at the heart of the campus. The nameless square for one month transformed into an outdoor university displaying a collection of prototypes made by the artists in collaboration with scientists. The public could discover their search results in a public program of lectures, guided tours and workshops.

Publication Department of Search

The Department of Search’s action search ended in 2017. For three years, this artist-run organisation experimented with action search interventions, to explore new forms of encounters between artists and scientists. This book unfolds the findings and speculates on the potential of a shared space to formulate fundamental questions of the future.

The Department’s basic procedure is simple: artists thoroughly search University premises and the spaces inside, around and between the buildings, for clues, cues and ideas they can use. They share their findings, models, and project ideas with local scientists. A search is conducted for shared values and what they may lead up to. Often, from this intensive adventure a wide panorama of potential, a collection of debatable futures, emerges. Unfortunately the University management did not see the value of a shared search program for the future.