Well instead of belaboring this point or dragging out the I’m-so-busy excuse, I will simply point out that it’s been about a year and a half that I have been settled here in the Netherlands. I love it. I delight in all the cultural discovery that there is for me here. I have fixated in particular on a child star, Danny de Munk, as one of my Dutch cultural investigations.

Danny de Munk was a child star in the 80s. He seems to have floated along, with one failed album in English, but otherwise reigning as the highest-paid Dutch singing star.

One tune from his youth, Mijn Stad (My City), stands out for me. The lyrics for this song are astounding. Here is just a small sample:

Hier heb je alles wat je hartje bekoort,
wat ruzie en inbraak, en soms ook een moord!
Je krijgt op je kanis, je fiets wordt gejat,
maar wat moest je doen, als je Mokum niet had
Want Amsterdam, is poep op de stoep,
en haat in de straat, je bent op je hoede,
vooral ‘s avonds laat,
en Dansen bij Jansen,
kapsones in zuid,
een steen door de ruit!

Which translates roughly as:
Here you have everything your heart desires,
Fights, break-ins, sometimes even murder!
Your bike is stolen, but what would you do, if you didn’t have Mokum.
Amsterdam is poop on the sidewalk, and hate in the street
You’re on your guard
Especially late at night, dancing at Jansen,
strutting in the South,
a brick through the window!

I can’t help but love this child star and the culture from which he springs where a song called “My City” is so equally disparaging and loving. Poop on the sidewalk! An honest appraisal, delivered with that eerie whistle that I find escaping from my lips more than once as I idle here in fine fine Mokum.

Do yourself a favour and watch this great video from 1985 of Danny himself singing about Amsterdam’s crime rate and poop on the sidewalk problem:

Postscript: It’s perhaps worth mentioning where I found this song in the first place. In 2004 I was at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam and heard a presentation by Merijn Oudenampsen, in which, as I recall, he scathingly took down the I AMsterdam campaign. Of course in 2004 I had no idea that I’d be living in Amsterdam in 2011. All those years later, I remembered the presentation, and found that it had been adapted into an article in Mute. In the article, I noticed the Danny de Munk song lyric, typed that into YouTube, and discovered the video above.

 

I’m delighted to announce the successful launch of Constellations, an exhibition co-curated by myself and Karen Gaskill, at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.

Constellations presents four international artists working with sculpture and installation. Minimalist in their approach, all present ideas on remoteness, fragility, disintegration, melancholy, and transience, together creating a profound and almost palatable sadness.

Adopting its title from the patterns of celestial bodies, the exhibition considers the relationship between ideas and the formation of concept. Drawing on the historic usage of constellations as maps or event atlases of the celestial sphere, this exhibition presents a collection of ideas on ephemerality, impermanence and flux in contemporary art. At its very core is an organic grouping of works that when in relation to one another form new ideas and notions, new constellations, each as fluid and volatile as the other.

The works selected are concerned with the fragility and breakdown of content. This instability not only manifests as a dissolution or reduction, but also as a loss of content, a shift in form, or the temporality of an objects’ existence. Each metaphorically deals with the passage of time, creating its own duration, but ultimately brings the attention back to the present moment. The result is an exhibition that in structure and content is all at once timeless, durational and unstable.

The shift from one form to another is most apparent in the ice lamps of Kitty Kraus (pictured above), household lightbulbs are encased in ice infused with ink, resembling small frosty black cubes, which when plugged in cause the ice to melt haphazardly across the floor. The initial sculpture draws murky trails with inky stained water, leaving the often broken lightbulb and its cable trailing, a testament to its ultimate demise.

Surrounded by the slow dissolution of Kraus’s lonely systems, the delicate landscapes of Takahiro Iwasaki (pictured below) respond in their fragile yet resilient form. The mimicry of permanent geographies such as mountain ranges, using delicate and unstable materials such as cloth and pencil lead, create a contrasting, yet equally delicate infrastructure, reminding us quietly about the fleetingness of time and earth’s instability.

The reduction of form is mirrored in the takeaway poster stacks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (pictured below). Durational in nature, the work slowly diminishes, shifting in form as the audience remove the posters and the tangible aspect of the work disappears. The work is evocative of what once was, of death and passing, and the image of the sea on the posters also invokes a sense of timelessness and strength to contrast the melancholy of the diminishing pile.

Katie Paterson’s two works both deal with space and the universe, and our position as humans in the cosmos is revealed by the works. 100 Billion Suns is a daily colourful explosion of confetti, happening in different parts of the Cornerhouse building each day. Each piece of confetti bears the colour signature of the brightest explosions in the universe. She has shrunk massive events to human scale, and presented them in bursts that will land and be tracked throughout the gallery in unpredictable ways. Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) on the other hand, is a work that transforms Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata using radio waves (pictured below). By bouncing Morse code of the score off of the moon’s surface, errors are created that are reproduced in the version played by the piano in the gallery. The lost information in the score is as a result of some celestial interference, a chance intervention that is not unlike the chance vagaries of the room temperature and floor surface that will impact the final form of Kitty Kraus’ ice lamp works.

The works in this exhibition each work in different ways with form, material, and change. Katie Paterson’s confetti canons are an addition to the environment, while viewers slowly subtract Gonzalez-Torres’ work from the gallery. Kraus’ ice lamps physically transform from 3D to 2D, while Iwasaki’s work plays with scale and form by transforming the idea of a mountain into household materials. The radio waves that Paterson used to send the Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back echo the ocean waves represented on the Gonzalez-Torres poster. Natural materials such as ice, water, soil, and air are present in all the works in either representation or in physical form. The pieces here may be minimal in aesthetic, but they are not abstract, they represent real things, and changes in the real world.

When devising constellations in the sky, people created stories to help understand our natural world, to make sense of it. But these celestial drawings are ultimately arbitrary, fragile, and could be replaced by new mappings or new understandings at any time. The mutability of the works in this exhibition are like the fragile understanding enabled by a constellations’ path. We are drawing edges around materials that we wish to know and to contain, even if ultimately, we cannot. The works in this exhibition provide us with a new poetic template to think about our understanding of time and material.

More info on the show:
Cornerhouse
Sat 25 Jun 2011 – Sun 11 Sep 2011
Mon – Closed, Tue – Sat 12:00 – 20:00, Sun 12:00 – 18:00

 

Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Rhizome recently published a piece I wrote entitled “Moving the Museum Online“. The piece was a critique of the Adobe Museum of Digital Media, and also served as a platform to discuss the concept of online museums, and highlight a few examples that I thought were particularly noteworthy, including the Virtual Museums of Canada, the Museum of Online Museums, the MINI Museum, and Google’s recent Art Project.

In both the comments section on the piece and through Twitter comments and emails, people have kindly been pointing out other examples of online museums that are of interest. Here are three that stood out:

Guggenheim Virtual Museum (vintage: 2001): “The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has commissioned the New York firm Asymptote Architects to design and implement a new Guggenheim Museum in cyberspace. This is the first phase of a three-year initiative to construct an entirely new museum facility. The structure will be an ongoing work in process, with new sections added as older sections are renovated. The project will consist of navigable three-dimensional spatial entities accessible on the Internet as well as real-time interactive components installed at the various Guggenheim locations.

As envisioned by Asymptote and the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Virtual Museum will emerge from the fusion of information space, art, commerce, and architecture to become the first important virtual building of the 21st century.”

muSIEum (vintage: unknown, pre-2009): This online reconfiguration of four Viennese museums “…displaying gender, criticizing the conventional hegemonial ordering of things”, and “bringing out the different storylines that could (have) been told with the same objects from a standpoint counter-acting the cultural hegemony of the patriarchal view”. An intervention that is needed not just in Vienna, I’d wager. In German only.

MIX-m (vintage: 2001 – 2003): “MIX-m stands for MIXed-museum. It is a contemporary art museum that exists both in physical and digital spaces, in localized and networked environments. MIX-m plays with the dimensions of its architecture: a mix between a real museum space (here, the Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain in Geneva) (1:1), a digital space based on the dimensions of its host (1:x) and a model of this game-like environment (1:50). MIX-m has the ability to re-locate itself into this existing exhibition environment, transforming, mixing and extending it into new territories. It offers therefore a variable environment to create art installations. These works, commissioned by MIX-m, can now define and modulate their presence inside an extended space spectrum: physical-digital, real-simulated, localized-networked.”

Read Moving the Museum Online on Rhizome, and join the discussion there or send me a Tweet (@mkasprzak) with your own suggestions of other virtual museum projects that exemplify either the lack in current physical museums (as muSIEum does), an additionality (as with the Guggenheim), or a hybrid space (MIX-m).

…also this came in from @eefski on Twitter: Oneindig Noord-Holland.

 

Tropenmuseum

Once a year, Amsterdam’s museums put on special programmes and are open very late in a celebration called Museumnacht. Variations on this simple concept take place in cities across the globe, making it a tried and true model to get people into museums.

I’m a newcomer to Amsterdam, but a hardened culture consumer. I’ve seen this concept done before and know its potential, though I haven’t always had the ideal experience. What makes Amsterdam’s Museumnacht stand out as exceptional are three key things: letting go of the velvet rope, taming the devil in the details, and keeping it local.

Portugese Synagoge

Letting go of the velvet rope:
Amsterdam’s museums are among the best in the world, housing priceless treasures in buildings that are often also of architectural significance. With this in mind, you might expect that there are a lot of measures in place to protect the buildings and artifacts, and the first line of defence is miles of velvet rope, or other obvious measures that set a certain tone. I have found that there are no obvious extraordinary measures in place to protect these buildings and artifacts from the hordes of drunk and merry people marauding through town. Perhaps treating people like responsible adults has had the desired impact, as I haven’t witnessed any events that might make a museum director wish she’d used a few extra miles of velvet rope, either. If extra health and safety measures are being implemented, they are nearly invisible, which has a significant positive impact on the tone of the whole event.

Taming the devil in the details:
The Museumnacht website is good, allowing me to browse other people’s agendas for the night, which gave me a quick head start when planning my night this year. But even if you don’t stumble upon this great feature, which requires a little scrolling to get to, they provide other paths to suggest single events or entire agendas for the evening. The event information is sliced and diced in as many ways as possible: time, location, categories, even a kind of overall mood or “buzz”. Several ready-made agendas corresponding to personality types (urban explorers, art lovers, socialites) also provide a general jumping off point.

In short, the organisers of Museumnacht clearly understood the problem of a great programme packed with details: faced with too much choice, it’s easy for potential visitors to get freaked out and decide to just skip it rather than do a lot of research. Making it easy to jump in to the programme with a particular angle is the only solution, and they’ve done a great job of this.

Keeping it local:
Most of the promotional material, including the programme guide, is in Dutch only. This is a strategic decision in a city where most people speak excellent English and lots of things, even government services, are provided in English as well as Dutch. The cultural riches here are very accessible for tourists year-round. Once a year there is an event really for locals, not tourists, and the language decision makes that clear.

The price tag is reasonable (the 17.50 EUR ticket gets you entrance to everything, plus free public transportation all night), and prices for food and drink at each venue are fair. Also if you hang on to your ticket, you can use it to get into any of the participating museums free on a later date. This nice added perk underscores the local emphasis, and is gentle encouragement to return and explore a venue further.

I went last year (when I happened to visit at the right time), and this year again as an Amsterdam resident. I will definitely be back again next year. That said, it’s important to balance my high praise by noting that of course it is not perfect: the more popular venues (Rijksmuseum, for example) can have enormous queues, sometimes the events are not quite as advertised (the edible insects for sale at De Hortus this year ran out very early, which was a disappointment), et cetera. But these are minor glitches in what is otherwise a well-oiled machine. Other cities would be wise to copy the ingredients for success that have been deployed so well here in Amsterdam.

Pianola Museum

 

Pictured: ASIMO the robot, who I didn’t get to meet in the end. Photo courtesy Ars Electronica.

 

Acetate drawings in a forest clearing. From safle.com.

In 1947 Llanrwst Town Council applied for a seat on the United Nations Security Council on the basis of its special status as an independent town state poised strategically between England and Wales. As someone intrigued by the phenomenon of micronations and the drivers that might inspire a person or group to declare their home a micronation, I have always admired the Llanrwstian pluck, going all the way to the UN with their case.

A couple of years ago, arts agency Safle invited applications for an artists project in Llanrwst inspired by this rich story of attempted micronationhood: “The title refers to the period of independent history of the area and famous historical characters such as Owain Glyndwr, Rhys Gethin and Hywel Coetmor, at which period the town was a rebel stronghold, was burnt to the ground by the Prince of England’s forces and was deserted except for a herd of deer grazing in the square.” In November 2008, windows across the town square were filled with light-based artworks as part of the culmination of this project, which recognised Llanwrst’s aspirations towards microstate status.

This elegant art project is only one chapter in a series of artistic tributes to Llanrwst’s struggle. 80s Welsh punk rock group Y Cyrff wrote “Cymru Lloegr a Llanrwst”, a song commemorating these aspirations, which has become a Welsh anthem of a sort:

I discovered long ago that my interest in micronations was far from isolated. When I was in Helsinki on a curatorial residency at NIFCA some years ago, I picked up the catalogue for a meeting of kings, presidents and representatives of “self made” countries that occurred in Helsinki in 2003, as part of a micronation summit at MUU Gallery. Susan Kelly’s talk was very insightful, revealing that if “democracy is about ‘shape shifting’, and not about being able to count up the heads within a particular pre-given ‘shape’ or constituency, there is a need to imagine and experiment with other practices and modes of belonging. Perhaps we could say that the micro-states de-familiarise the masking Russian doll and provide tools to imagine, recognise, make understandable or legible this complex ‘here-ness’”.

There’s something wild and speculative and wonderful about the idea of removing oneself from the constraints of the various spatial identities we find ourselves defined by (and you don’t even necessarily need to be in the crossfire of two cultures at odds, like the English and Welsh borders clashing near Llanrwst). The idea is so appealing that Wired recently released a cheat sheet on how to start your own country. Perhaps the most revealing bit of the surprisingly banal article was revealed in a quote from Carne Ross, the fact that the process of developing nationhood is “profoundly political.” To anyone who has started any new venture with a degree of visibility, this notion of “buy-in” and how profoundly political it is comes as no surprise. The desire to take the boundaries of a new venture and escalate the ambition to that of a genuinely recognised state, is more surprising, fascinating, and in some cases, understandable.

 

An sample of Jeremy Bailey's artwork for In-Site Toronto.

In-Site Toronto is a series of newly commissioned work that will be presented on the portal pages of several wireless internet hotspots in the Wireless Toronto network until the end of 2010. Artists Dave Dyment, Swintak, Jeremy Bailey, Fedora Romita, Willy Le Maitre and Brian Joseph Davis have created works that will be automatically displayed when users log in to their Wireless Toronto user account at designated hotspots. The project was launched on March 31, 2010 in partnership with Spacing Magazine. The project was produced by media arts organisation Year Zero One, was curated by myself, and was produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The downloadable, printable, shareable e-catalogues that are available at each hotspot were produced using bookleteer by Proboscis.

Now, go out, use your free Wireless Toronto account, and discover some art that relates to the place where you are and our contemporary digital age.

View In-Site Toronto in a larger map

 

Firstly I mentioned BeautifulCity.ca, a campaign to introduce a billboard tax in the city of Toronto, with the tax money distributed to art and culture projects. They were very successful in winning the first battle, which was implementing the tax, but now they need people to speak up once more in favour of how the budget is actually allocated. Check out their Facebook event for more details on how you can help this terrific project.

I also mentioned Ile Sans Fil, the wireless community group that I used to work with, that built a grassroots infrastructure in Montreal that is wildly successful. They were also pioneers of using their infrastructure as a platform to distribute art and community content to their users. They have been so successful at building infrastructure and in their advocacy work that wireless internet infrastructure is now an issue in the Montreal municipal elections.

Last but not least, I mentioned Manchester Open Data City, a huge initiative by FutureEverything. FutureEverything is leading the advocacy around making Manchester the UK’s first open data city, by identifying data that can be made available, and looking at issues of data interoperability, quality and management. I’m programming the FutureEverything conference this year, and can tell you that Open Data and its implications for citizen participation and creativity will be a hot topic. Hope to see you in Manchester this May for FutureEverything!

 

powerof8.org.uk

On October 12, the third This happened Edinburgh event will take place at the Wee Red Bar. Our exciting line up includes: Peter Pratt, Michael Salmond, Sarah Drummond & Lauren Currie, and Paul Rodgers & Euan Winton, and Anab Jain.

Tickets are available now at this site. Be fast — last time tickets sold out in under an hour! The event is sold out! If you want to follow all the This happened Edinburgh news, become a fan on Facebook, use the #thedi hashtag on twitter, or just keep an eye on the This happened website.

 

Image of Nuage Vert by HeHe, taken by Niklas Sjöblom

This year’s Futuresonic festival has some very tasty highlights, ranging from a Philip Glass concert, to a bubble-blowing contest, to the world premiere of Beuys’ Acorns by Ackroyd and Harvey. The festival kicked off last night, the conference is running today, and you can find me as one of the invited special guests who will be giving my take on the Environment 2.0 Art Exhibition with my own tours, MK-style! The exhibition is mainly based at CUBE and “…includes artworks that make visible and tangible the outcomes of our actions at a local level, artworks conceived as social interventions, and artworks which arise out of a sustained engagement and dialogue between artists and scientists.” See you there!