In this guest lecture, curator and researcher Marijn Bril explores how systems shape the ways we navigate everyday life. Looking beyond technology as infrastructure, she considers how rules, routines, classifications, interfaces, and expectations influence our behaviour, work, and understanding of the world.
Drawing on her curatorial projects, including How To: Living Through Instructions (Garage Rotterdam, 2026) and Out of Office (IMPAKT, 2023), as well as her ongoing research at the Alex Adriaansens Residency at V2_, Marijn looks at how artistic practices can expose, challenge, and reimagine the systems we move through. A central question is; what happens when complex relationships are reduced to models, measurements, or instructions? And what gets overlooked in that process?
The session concludes with a practical diagramming exercise in which participants map a system from their own everyday lives and experiment with ways to disrupt or redesign it.