Went to visit the Kröller Müller Museum deep inside the Dutch country side (if that exists) last Sunday. Apart form a walk in the rain through the splendid sculpture garden (an absolute must-visit) we had a short (too little time, must come back in the summer) walk through the permanent collection. One of the works that i really liked was this relief (or however you call this) by the russian avant-garde art group UNOVIS:
UNOVIS - Suprematistisch reliëf
UNOVIS (1921) Suprematistisch reliëf
Apart from the beauty of the work as such i also find it quite intriguing that the design team at sony has apparently been inspired by this work when they came up with the symbols on the buttons of the playstation controllers.
Cubans are probably the global kings of recycling [not in our spoiled western meaning of the word though, they will happily leave their sandwich wrappers and cigarette boxes lying next to a natural pond in the middle of a national park]. it appears that they can prolong the active life of pretty much any vehicle by decennia using a welding gun and some imagination. The many custom build taxis and busses based on 1950’s american cars are the prime example of this, but there are many other examples that do not appear on you standard postcard [such as containers or chairs]. One particular area where these recycling skills are applied are children’s toys:
In a number of cities we have seen boys racing down small hills (or other slopes) on self constructed carts made from scrap wood and industrial ball bearings:
These carts are extremely beautiful in their simplicity and the kids we saw playing with hem exposed great skill in navigating them down the pothole ridden streets of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. The carts are all variations on a basic design, that consists of a wooden rectangle used as a frame. at the back of the frame there are two ball bearings on an axle and above them is a small plank to sit on. the third wheel is attached to a piece of wood that is attached mid-way to one of the sides of the wooden frame with a singe nail or screw. the piece of wood extends beyond the frame on the other side and the carts can be steered by moving the extended part of this ‘front axle’ forwards or backwards.
I spend last weekend at ars electronica speaking at the symposium on a new cultural economy curated by Joi and hanging out with an amazing bunch of people. Did not see much of the exhibitions, but at least managed to see the cyber arts 08 exhibition in the OK center and found another nice CFL for my collection. Most of the works were rather underwhelming. One of these exceptions was ‘Salat‘ by Johannes Gees which was documented at the OK center. Salat (the arabic/quranic term for prayer) consisted of a series of interventions that Gees did in the summer of 2007 in Swiss Cities. He constructed so-alled sound bombs that consisted of adapted megaphones combined with a time controlled the mp3 player that – once activated – would play the pre-recorded call to prayer of the muezzin of the grand mosque in mecca at prayer time.
Gees secretly placed these sound bombs on church towers in Basel, Zürich and Sankt Gallen and documented the reactions by passers by on video. While the work itself is certainly not the most original (apparently similar things have been done before), Gees had the luck of being sued by an overzealous Swiss christian who claimed that he had insulted objects of religious worship (which is a criminal offense in Switzerland) and as a result the police impounded one of the sound bombs and opened a case on him. After a while the public prosecutor came to the conclusion that there was no criminal wrongdoing involved. Now this being a proper legal case the public prosecutor had to write down the reasoning in the document that declared the case closed. At ars electronica Gees had displayed copies of the official documents from the public prosecutor alongside video stills and one of the sound bombs (see picture above). The interesting aspect of the installation is the way the public prosecutor attempts to get a grip on this artistic intervention in legalese. I cant find the text of the documents online but here is a short snippet (in german) that i could reconstruct from one of the pictures i took:
Im vorliegenden fall käme allenfalls die Tathandlung in Form von Verspotten in Betracht . Die Verspottung selbst gilt nach herrschender lehre als Unterfall de Missachtung und beschreibt Äusserungen, durch welche die angegriffenen religiösen Überzeugungen als lächerlich dargestellt werden (Stratenwerth, Schweizerisches Strafrecht BT II Straftaten gegen Gemeininteressen , Bern 2000 §39 N 5). Indem der Angeschuldigte den Ruf des Muezzins erschallen liess, ist eine Verspottung der religiosen Überzeugung des Geschädigten Richard Scholl, welcher gemäss Anzeige an das Stadtrichteramt Zürich vom 13. Juli 2007 der evangelisch reformierten Kirche angehört, nicht ersichtlich. Mithin wird durch das Verhalten des Angeschuldigten die glaubensbezogene Überzeugung des Geschädigten als Christ nicht in unsachlicher weise herabgesetzt oder lächerlich gemacht. Das heisst der Gottesglaube des Geschädigten wird nicht tangiert. Es gilt festzuhalten dass vielmehr sich Angehörige der islamischen Religion, mithin gläubige Muslime, durch die Aktion des Angeschuldigten in ihrer Ãœberzeugung in Glaubenssachen – Achtung vor dem Mitmenschen und seiner Überzeugung in religiösen dingen – hätten verletzt fühlen müssen, zumal der ruf des Muezzins in der hiesigen Geselschaft bis dato nicht zum Alltags- bzw. Ausleben der islamischen Religion gehört. […] Dennoch vermag der Ruf des Muezzins das Durchschnittsempfinden eines vernünftigen Durchschnittsbürgers (sic!) nicht in schwerer Weise verletzen. Ebenso wird durch den Gebetsruf nicht die christliche Überzeugung der Geschädigten tangiert, da der gläubige Mensch in seinem Innersten und seiner religiösen Entscheidung nicht beeinflusst wird.
In the end the case against Gees was dropped but he was ordered to pay CHF 900 in legal costs because he ‘could have asked for permission’ before placing the sound bombs. As if someone would have given him that permission…
For some reason i never managed to write about manifesta7 after having visited 3 of the 4 locations on the opening weekend back in mid july. not sure what to say of the overall exhibition but it included a number of really interesting and beautiful artworks. my favorite among them was Tantalum Memorial – Residue, by Graham Harwood together with Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji. Is a memorial/intstallation to the Congolese people who have died as a result of the coltan wars. Regine over at we make money not art has posted a short description of the installation:
This installation is constructed out of an old electro-mechanical 1938 Strowger telephone exchange, discovered amongst the remains of the Alumix factory. Seen from afar it looked like it does belong to the ex-factory. An old telephone switch forgotten for decades. The switches are reanimated by tracking the phone calls from Telephone Trottoire – a social telephony network designed by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka in London. The TT network calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their phone number. This builds on the traditional Congolese practice of “radio trottoire” or “pavement radio”, the passing around of news and gossip on street corners in order to avoid state censorship.
The same location (the ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano) also hosted the first ever installation by my good friend Lawrence Liang: Pandoras Index consists of a filing cabinet filled with index cards referring to various aspects of the debates around, cultural production, intellectual property and piracy. Having known Lawrence for years some of the drawers appeared to me as elaborate attempts to replicate parts of reasoning (or parts of his brain) in a series of index cards. probably only makes sense if you know Lawrence or if you are really familiar with the topics he addresses, but i liked it quite a lot (again, more pictures are available on my flickr page):
We saw ‘Quartet: A Journey to North‘ by Amir Reza Koohestani & Mahin Sadri at the Bellevue Theatre tonight. Quartet tells the story of two murders in contemporary Iran through the intertwined narratives of the two killers and two witnesses.
Definitely reminded me (both in terms of stage setup and narrative) of the works by Rabih Mroué. Also one of the video stills looked almost exactly as this pictures i took in Abyaneh last fall:
Looks peacefull but while we were enjoying the play a newborn Eurasian Coot was drowning in the canal outside of the theatre under the eyes of the helpless parents. R.I.P little fulica atra!
The fabulous electronic performance arts venue/center/place/non-place [it is hard to describe what this place really is] steim in amsterdam is in danger of loosing it’s funding. over the past years steim has received funding from both the dutch ministry of culture education and science and the city of amsterdam. for some reason (probably because they never go there or because their idea of culture is quite limited) the advisory bodies for both the ministry and for the city of amsterdam have decided that steim should not be supported under the upcoming (2009-2012) 4 year plans for culture (yes they do still have soviet style 4 year plans for culture here in the Netherlands).
Needless to say this would be quite a bad thing to happen. steim is one of the very few places in amsterdam that are unique and even if it caters to a ‘niche audience’, it manages to bring in a remarkably diverse set of artists from all over the world that have made it one of the best places in town to hang out and broaden your horizon. for steim the loss of structural support would probably be quite devastating and the steim crew is calling for support:
Things are not well at STEIM. We are in the danger of losing our structural funding from the government, based on a review from the advisor board which called us ‘closed and only appealing to a niche audience’. The outlook isn’t exactly bleak, but at the moment our future is unclear.
As we see you as an important friend and colleague of STEIM, we would like to ask you to help us present our case that we are connected to a diverse network of professionals and that our work has significant influence on both a Dutch and an international community.
Some people find them unpleasant, but low-energy lightbulbs are a necessary innovation. Their presence in our lives explain the PLUMEN’s designers, “should be seen as an advantage to be celebrated by drawing, sculpturing, or scrawling in the air with light. The bulbs should not be viewed as an afterthought but instead as a centerpiece. then people might begin to buy these bulbs through genuine desire rather than mere moral obligation.”
Not sure if i buy this tear-jerk bullshit about genuine desire to buy a lightbulb, but at least this prototype has managed to get into the New York MOMA where the PLUMEN is currently on display at the ‘Design And The Elastic Mind‘ exhibition (extremely annoying flash site, that takes forever to load!).
CCTV Birdbox – designed by Céine Shenton ‘Big bird is watching you’ is a birdbox that looks like a CCTV camera. It works just like a dummy camera, but on closer inspection, it offers a great refuge for birds in need of a new home. Inside the box is a little camera that films the activities in the nest, so that avid nature watchers can watch the flighty comings and goings.
The CCTV Birdbox it is a competition entry, vote for it here
update [25 May 08]: not as nice as the brid house ones but also quite lovable: CCTV cameras as mirrors.
Speaking about silliness of the struggle against terrorism, it seems that a bunch of people in Boston have teamed up to celebrate the one year anniversary of the aqua team hunger force LED ads bomb scare in the only sensible way, that is by putting up lots of LED art up on the streets, walls and bridges of boston:
This is interesting – it seems that a group of artists have celebrated 1-31-07 in their own way and have created a series of political themed LED art sculptures and (you guessed it) placed them all over Boston. […] Get there before the robots do. [via make check out their site for many more photos]
meanwhile... is the personal weblog of Paul Keller. I am currently policy director at Open Future and President of the COMMUNIA Association for the Public Domain. This weblog is largely inactive but contains an archive of posts (mixing both work and personal) going back to 2005.
