Interviews Tech Fellows 2025

Alex Walker is a graphic designer and educator based in Amsterdam. His practice explores the space where written language and materiality intersect, through typography and printed matter.

▪️What are you researching in the workshop?

I am creating resources that are useful for artists interested in creating publications and editions. This includes organising a paper sample library; printing various test sheets, sample booklets and guides for different techniques possible in the Rijksakademie print workshop; online directories listing papers, printers and binders, art book fairs and artist-book publishers; and collating useful information related to the economies of printing and publishing.

▪️What have you discovered so far?

The project is largely focussed around improving accessibility of already techniques and knowledge. There have been a few interesting discoveries along the way though — for example, recently I experimented with printing on a folded sheet of A2 paper using an A3 risograph, which opens up the possibility of using the machine to produce larger format publications.

▪️How do you see your role as a tech fellow?

Material exploration is at the core of my practice. Through working as a tech fellow in the print workshop I am able to not only enrich my own design practice through material exploration but also the resources of the workshop itself and the residents and alumni who use it.

▪️What are the biggest questions or challenges you’re working with?

Creating guides and other explanatory materials requires a lot of thought put into the way things are communicated — finding the balance between what is crucial information and what is overly detailed can be challenging.

Dmytro Tentiuk is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, researcher and designer whose video installations and audiovisual live performances explore the boundary between digital and physical realities.

▪️ What are you researching in the workshops?

I’m researching how networked tools can enable real-time musical collaboration across distance. The focus is on developing NetBeat, a plug-and-play device that simplifies online performance and collective sound exchange.

▪️ What have you discovered so far?

I’ve learned that artistic collaboration online depends less on perfect latency and more on intuitive systems and clear structures. Usability and automation are crucial for sustaining creativity under unstable conditions.

▪️ How do you see your role as a tech fellow?

I see my role as creating a space that merges support, collaboration and experimentation, where artists and technologists continuously learn from each other and expand the ways we can create together.

▪️ What was the starting point of this research?

The starting point comes from my work with _mediaklub, an experimental music group I co-founded, and our experience during Russia’s war against Ukraine, when we had to find ways to keep creating together while being separated. Working online became not just a solution, but a way to explore how distance and instability can shape new forms of collaboration and expression.

▪️ What are the biggest challenges?

Reducing technical friction in remote setups, balancing automation with artistic freedom, and maintaining the sense of presence and intimacy across digital distance.

Harriet Rose Morley is an artist based in Den Haag (NL), originally from the UK. Her practice explores the gender and labour politics of technical skill development across art, design and architecture.

▪️ What are you researching in the workshops?

I am formalising a shared resource for artists, advisors and workshop practitioners that documents current approaches to more ethical production from the angle of ecological and holistic sustainability. I look not only at materials, energy use and environmental impact, but also at inclusion, accessibility and social ecology: the ways people inhabit and share these spaces.

▪️What have you discovered?

I have found that sustainable transformation depends not only on material substitutions or infrastructure upgrades, but also on time, space and collective responsibility. Ecological sustainability relies on the human systems that support it; without inclusion, communication and equitable working conditions, sustainable infrastructures fail to hold. A holistic approach to wellbeing and accessibility must also consider material and environmental consequences.

▪️ How do you see your role?

As a bridge between artistic experimentation and technical understanding. I am embedded in the daily life of the workshops gathering knowledge. My aim is to map the overlooked, informal and invisible systems of knowledge that circulate through workshop culture, particularly around sustainability, access and inclusion.

▪️ What are the biggest challenges?

Balancing daily support in the workshop with the slower work of research and long-term change. Much workshop knowledge is informal and easily lost, while issues like limited accessibility and undervalued labour persist. Real progress means rethinking not just materials, but the conditions we make and learn within.

▪️ How does this connect to future practices?

My research shows that sustainable practices cannot rely solely on new materials or technologies. They must address time, labour, access and inclusion within workshop culture. Sustainability is as much about how we work as what we work with. By documenting methods and contradictions across residencies, my research supports more informed, inclusive and mindful decisions, encouraging a shift towards collective and adaptable approaches to sustainable production.

Nadine Ghandour is an artist whose practice alternates between drawing, writing and sculpture. Her work presents stories of unstable architecture, shapeshifting surroundings, and buildings that trap their inhabitants.

▪️ What are you researching?

My tech fellow research, YOU ARE HERE, is a meditation on wayfinding systems, reflecting on the psychological states of searching and the pursuit of extreme specificity. It focuses on references from the Rijksakademie Library collection, thinking through what answers a library built for artists has to offer on navigation. The chapters move through logics of mapping and categorisation at different scales within books, libraries, bodies, and cities.

▪️ How did this research begin?

The research began as an attempt to make an alternative wayfinding guide for the Rijksakademie library. In consulting the library collection and looking for what answers a collection made for artists had to offer, it was clear the material didn’t necessarily provide clarity or clues for efficiency, and at times promoted indecision and distraction. The research for the guide slowly turned into a compilation of excerpts from across the collection and then into a bibliographic essay on naming, searching, finding, and losing.

▪️ How does this research connect to your wider artistic practice?

My wider practice, which alternates between drawing, writing and sculpture, presents stories of fast-forward cities where the pace of life makes it so the surrounding architecture begins to shapeshift, affecting the psyche of the residents. I work with a set of fictional characters dealing with outrageous bureaucracy. One of the characters, who was very present as I was working on this research is the man who can’t make decisions, who happens to work at the roads and transport authority, and was in charge of naming names of all the new buildings, and in this fast-forward city an exit or landmark or bridge materialised every time you blinked your eye, and so you can imagine the city had to dedicate a full time employee to this task. This of course is a source of great pain to him, because it went against every fibre of his being for a name to be fixed. I often think about him as I contemplate logics of order within a library.

Viki Nagy is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Rotterdam (NL). She focuses on ceramics and material exploration, particularly the narrative of the processes involved, off-cuts, and waste. Her work often investigates traditional craft techniques while rethinking how materials are shaped and understood today.

▪️ What are you researching in the workshops?

Even though clay is a natural material, it’s non-renewable, something that’s often overlooked. Today it’s easy and affordable to get clay and start making things, but once it’s fired, it can’t return to its original, soft state. In my research, I explore what happens after the firing: leftover test tiles, failed firings, or forgotten pieces. Seeing these pieces made me start questioning what really happens to all these pieces, and what else could be done with them. How can I reuse failed or abandoned ceramic pieces within the workshop itself?

▪️ How are you supported in your fellowship?

As a tech fellow, I’m supported with time, knowledge, and various resources: a crushing machine, a ball mill, sieves, access to the library, and valuable exchange with residents and workshop specialists.

▪️ What is your aim with this research?

My aim is to find processes that can be done in-house. Another is to develop methods that people outside the residency can actually use, so artists can keep working with ceramic shards even when they no longer have access to institutional resources.

▪️ How do you test the material?

After selecting some promising samples, I test larger batches in different forming methods: hand building, wheel throwing, slip casting, and glaze making.

▪️ How do you see your role?

For me, being a tech fellow means experimenting with the workshop’s existing systems, questioning how we use materials, what we discard, and how we might close those loops. It’s not only about technical research but also about developing processes that others can adopt in small studios, schools, or individual practices, without depending on industrial systems.

▪️ What are the biggest questions or challenges you’re working with?

Processing ceramic waste is slow and labour-intensive. Collecting, separating, grinding, sieving, and mixing usable amounts all take time and space.

▪️ Are you exploring anything alongside your main research?

Bucket Glaze: As a fun side project alongside my main research, I started experimenting with the glaze waste collected under the spray booth. I began testing ways to turn this mysterious mix into a usable and stable black gaze. I first learned about this approach while working in Japan, though I was never shown the exact method, so exploring it now feels like continuing an unfinished story.