Ruinism

This project was created for the Strategies in Creative and Performing Arts course of the Creative Intelligence and Technology programme at Leiden Univeristy.

Ruining an artwork to create another is a viable strategy for producing creative works. It creates interesting conversations on what it means for an artwork to be ruined or why that would be the case. The strategy of ruinism steps away from this subjectivity by focusing on deliberating ruining the medium of artwork and using that specific deterioration as a centrepiece of the remade artwork.

Ruinism does not destroy or ruin an artwork, much like how it does not declare whether an artwork is ruined or not. It simply looks at how an artwork’s medium should be used, physically ruins that medium to make it inherently go itself, and uses this “ruined” medium to produce an artwork.

A common trend in ruinism is its high impact on artworks within an entire art genre. Therefore, this paper is structured so that it first looks into a genre of which an artwork is a part of and elaborates on why this entire genre uses ruinism before delving deeper into a specific artwork.

Read more here: the research

Media