Steyn Bergs, PhD candidate at the Arts & Culture Department, Faculty of the Humanities

I obtained my BA in art history from the University of Ghent in 2012. Subsequently, I pursued my interests further at VU Amsterdam in the MA programme Comparative Arts and Media Studies and the ResMA programme Visual Art, Media, and Architecture (now: Critical Studies in Art and Culture), which I graduated cum laude in 2015. After working for a year in the art field, I initiated my current PhD research project. This project, in which I examine the commodification of digital artworks, is a 4-year, full-time research position, fully funded by the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research’s PhDs in the Humanities funding programme.

Apart from my academic research, I publish various sorts of art critical texts (reviews, interviews, essays) with some regularity. From 2016 to 2018, together with Rosa te Velde, I was co-editor-in-chief of Kunstlicht, a journal for visual art, visual culture, and architecture. Currently, I am on the advisory board for Kunstlicht.

My PhD research project is titled Control Copy: Digital Reproducibility and the Commodification of Contemporary Art. It is concerned with the interrelations between the reproducibility, commodity character, and value of artworks. It also looks into how these relations affect artworks’ distribution, circulation, and reception. The research project is supervised by Prof. Katja Kwastek and Sven Lütticken.

More generally speaking, my research interests - some of which are more closely connected to my PhD research than others - include, in no particular order: critical theory, media theory, political economy, the attention economy, aesthetics, art criticism, and (new) media art in the widest possible sense.

Some of the most important "outputs" (publications, paper presentations) of my research are listed on my profile here. For a more elaborate list, or for the full texts, please send me an e-mail.

During the second semester of the 2017-2018 academic year, I taught a seminar (with two sessions every week) on contemporary art from the 1960s to the present, for second year students of the MKDA (Media, Art, Design, and Architecture) BA programme at the VU.

In blocks 2 and 3 of the 2018-2019 academic year, I taught a seminar (with one session per week) called Media Art History, for students from various MA programmes at the Arts & Culture Department.

NWO PhD in the Humanities, full grant for a 4-year, full-time research project, 2016-2020.

Various smaller grants and travel bursaries for conferences.

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