Category: Art & Culture

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Art & Culture My Projects

Introducing Club Karlsson


Club Karlsson* is a private club and co-working space in Amsterdam. The Club is made up of individuals from the culture and technology communities. We are cultural hackers.

At this point in time in the Netherlands and the wider EU, culture is undervalued and is being dropped as a priority of government, in order to keep up appearances of fiscal restraint.

Our reaction to “culturele kaalslag”** is to make things happen now. Our mission is to produce a programme of activity that will include exhibitions, screenings, networking meetings, parties, workshops, and more. We do not seek public subsidy, our intention is for our activities to fund themselves.

Club Karlsson is Ine Poppe, Sam Nemeth, Mart Van Bree, Menno Grootveld, and myself. We are having our first event open to the public in our big, beautiful space on the top floor of Keizersgracht 264 during Museumnacht in Amsterdam on Saturday November 6, from about 10pm onwards. Subscribe to our Twitter feed and become our fan on Facebook to be in the loop about our programme. Hope to see you during Museumnacht, I’ll be there at the end, after midnight.

* — What, or who, is Karlsson? A mischievous character with a propeller on his back, as good a mascot as any!

** — “culturele kaalslag” is a term being used to describe the current climate for arts support in the Netherlands. “Kaalslag” literally translates as “deforestation” or “clearcutting”.

Categories
Art & Culture

Reporting live from the Poeme Numerique Masterclass

I am delighted to be the official reporter/blogger for Baltan Laboratories’ Poeme Numerique masterclass, a week-long investigation into audio-visual content, interaction design and generative principles by a group of Netherlands-based media artists, designers and architects, led by 3 international masters: Golan Levin (US), Philippe Rahm (CH/FR) and David Rokeby (CA). The Masterclass kicked off today, and I’ll be posting my daily observations at the Baltan Laboratories website, so get it into your RSS reader! The first post is now up and available to read.

Now, some visual goodies from the three masterclass leaders:


Categories
Art & Culture My Lectures

Forked Identities, Mentioned-and-not-mentioned, Authority, and more

This year I was delighted to present at PICNIC, as part of a panel on the future of cultural criticism. The panelists engaged with the topic of journalism in the cultural realm and how it is changing in the face of “everyone’s a critic” in our digital age. The main points that I addressed were the binary of mentioned and not-mentioned in contemporary art criticism (concept courtesy of Boris Groys), how authority is built online, and what I call “forked identities”.

I think my points on mentioned/not-mentioned and building authority are pretty clear from my presentation (embedded below), but to elaborate on “forked identities” a bit: I have about 5 Twitter accounts, 9 friend groups with varying access to my profile on Facebook, and 2 public blogs plus many other websites that I contribute to now and again. In each of these situations I am presenting a slightly different facet of myself. This is just how it is in our contemporary communications environment. I want the ability to communicate my most colourful opinions to a close circle of 7 friends on Twitter, while highlighting only my professional achievements on my fully public Twitter feed with over 500 followers, or this blog. My identity has been forked into several sub-identities, which is (of course) not unlike how I conduct myself in varying social situations in real life.

Here is my Prezi (I added a few slides to it after the fact, to assist in comprehending it, as I thought it a bit opaque as a stand-alone without these modifications):

All the news that’s fit to … on Prezi

Categories
Art & Culture Technology

A Report from Repair

Meet ASIMO in Deep Space Rhizome has just published my report from the most recent Ars Electronica festival, with the theme of “Repair”, in Linz, Austria. There was one point I couldn’t find an elegant way of making in the article itself, but I’ll make it here: the conference programme was quite lacking in diversity, which is difficult to pardon in this day and age (2010, ferchrissake). Anyway, check out the diversity-rant-free piece on Rhizome.

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