Photos second Material Assembly: Virtual Estate

The second edition of Material Assemblies took place on 22 April 2026 and looked at the material infrastructures that underlie the virtual presence and digital affordances of the academy. We traced the instruments, servers, cabling, receivers and emitters that form a connected tissue of hardware, and the software that routes and mediates the data flowing through it.  IT staff and facilities team members, who maintain this infrastructure, granted us access to the buildings' often‑overlooked zones: the inlets and outlets, processing units, and storage modules that support the networked organism of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. The Material Assembly workshops are organised twice a year for students and staff. We identify opportunistic entry points into the material chains of the academy and explore the links that connect them. Our findings contribute to the expansion of the Material Library: materials.rietveldsandberg.nl Take a look at the photos below.