Kendal Beynon is a UK-born artist & writer currently situated in the realm of experimental publishing in Rotterdam, NL. She aims to rediscover an alternative online landscape through subversive design and community building, while also examining the ruins of our digital past. Highly skilled in editing through a Journalism degree in the UK and existing in the art publishing world since 2015. Kendal studied music journalism and graphic design, and in 2022, she received her MA degree in Experimental Publishing from Piet Zwart (thesis: Cyberhotels and Other Tales of Forgotten Virtual Worlds). When she's not rummaging around in internet fragments, you can find her at @tr0pisms, or organizing the Rotterdam based Zine Festival @zinecamp.
HYPERTEXT HOTEL - Hypertext Hotel is a network of rooms and passages, a collective endeavour, a co-authored text, an appropriated myth, a place of secrets and transgressions, a narrative structure, a mood, and a premise for an exhibition. The project borrows its title from a virtual space for collaborative writing set up by Robert Coover in 1991 for his workshop at Brown University, and it takes the then-emerging genre of 'hypertext fiction' – one of the earliest examples of electronic literature – as a starting point to think of an exhibition as a collective work of interactive fiction, where different scenarios and readings are not only permissible but inevitable. The ambition to do away with narrative linearity goes back to the pre-digital literary experiments, but it was hypertext fiction that first dared to abandon the old medium and harness the potential of the nascent computer technology to that end. The collaborative, do-it-yourself attitude of those involved translated into hypertext fiction's characteristic rudimentary visuals, and the post-cold-war techno-optimism into its unique emotive quality. These values and aesthetics are now looked back at with a mixture of condescension and desire. Hypertext Hotel also taps into the hotel's reputation as a place of secrets and transgressions, which has been established in film and literature, especially in the (neo-)noir genre. While these two genres might appear dissimilar, hypertext fiction being a digital native forking its way out of linear storytelling and noir – a pulp paperback following a tried-and-true narrative arc, they meet somewhere in the vaporwave rooms of cyber-hotels. For the duration of the project, the delightfully postmodern interior of Clovislaan 87 will be transformed into the lobby of Hypertext Hotel. From there, the visitors can access the physical and digital infrastructures and explore the works of the hotel residents: Henry Andersen, Kendal Beynon, Bartek Buczek, Shelley Jackson, Daniel Jacoby, Peter Lemmens, Stuart Moulthrop, and Alicja Melzacka. The heterogeneous body of the exhibition is held together by the soft tissue of hypertext fiction, which was co-written on this occasion, and which invites interaction from the visitors.
Zine Camp ’21 & ’22 - Zine Camp is a 2-day festival dedicated to zines & DIY self-publishing to help facilitate socialisation, collaboration, and the building of the community. This is embodied by the open workspaces that include free basic zine-making materials and copy machines for everyone to use. The workshops, book stalls, talks, and events make up the varied program to give space to learn new tools and techniques, while also keeping the medium of self-publishing current with new methods & approaches. The festival is always free to join, with the emphasis put on the exchange of knowledge and skills. We invite makers both locally and internationally in order to connect these communities so they can flourish and grow. Running in the first weekend of November in Rotterdam, Zine Camp is an annual festival that aims to strengthen the link between designers and makers within the field and offers a platform to share their publications and skills to a larger audience.
Virtual Gardens: Cultivating Care through Reclaimed Digital Environments - A portal that cultivates care through reclaimed digital spaces. Offering an alternative landscape for all your online needs, the concept stems from a rising displacement from current big tech spaces and platforms. Inside the Garden OS, you can discover a path into an underground and subversive way of being online. If you are feeling disenfranchised from the standardised platformisation of social media and the surge of algorithmic content, retreat with Virtual Gardens to a newly cultivated world harking back to Web 1. This is a space where we can creatively express ourselves with experimentation and play, and, most importantly, agency.
Virtual Gardens aims to give visibility to the many self organised communities online who subvert and play with web capabilities through giving autonomy to users, bringing us back as creators as opposed to consumers.
Bureau of Forgotten Futures - A poster project displayed in the window of De Buitenboel in Rotterdam allowing viewers to rediscover early virtual communities and platforms.
EMULATE - A 3D virtual gallery space designed by myself & Matthew Harris to give local Brighton artists a place to display their works.
