Festival of new music in the Hague

On March 15th, there were two performances in the Hague City Hall. The first was Six Pianos by Steve Reich and the second was the hour long piece Crazy Nigger by Julius Eastman which began with 4 pianists (see image on the left) and finished with 12 pianists on all six grand pianos. It sounded awsome.

The festival is a day long event which occurs several times a year. The website is only in Dutch.

And late that night, our work was on the screen for about 20 seconds in a theatre in the conservatory :) You can play in our world here

Our world MAGNETica

is coming along. Eric Kuijl and I have been working on this for the Hague Conservatory ArtScience Research group, "Virtual Communities" for the past month.

Basically we have been learning Cinema 4d and then it was a 3 day crash course in the game engine Unity. It seems quite amazing programme, with just one major drawback. You can only use it on an Apple operating system.


Now all 4 or 5 worlds in our group are to shown on the final night of the
Heiner Goebbels Festival in 5 days. A bit tough, when we can only work on the project at the art school because we do not have Apple computers. But it'll probably work out. Mainly because Wim is so helpful and the class is so small.
In being asked to relate our work to the contemporary German composer, Heiner Goebbels, in some way, I've used images of his head in the forms I've made. So if you look closely you'll see his head repeated on the 'spikey' rods of the spidery flower form. Likewise on the animated cone.

Our idea was to create a world of "attractions" hence the title "Magnetica" for our planet. We have also used sound clips from his composition "Surrogate Cities" for sounds in our world.

3D modelling and a game engine called "Unity"

The Virtual Communities research group that I'm participating in from Feb 4th onwards for about 8 weeks.

A major part of this is learning Cinema 4D. Wim is a fantastic teacher. This image is the marriage of a freeform spine + a sweep nurb.

some home entertainment + an exhibition opening

Leiden, February 3rd:

A number of Leiden Bahais and friends cycled over to our place and our entertainment was to give them creative tasks until they realised that what they were really doing was doing our housekeeping. It was a lot of fun and the fridge got cleaned, the washing put out and the kitchen was tidied up.

For each task, each person received a letter and their task was to work out what the word was.



Then we all cycled over to the opening of U Bevindt Zich Hier at the RAP gallery.

It was very crowded! The curators, Sanne + Jos did a brilliant job on PR, display and the whole look and feel of the show in a very difficult space. The red wall and ceiling is a permanent part of the space.


Daniel Lehan was one of the 12 short-listed for a prize. The winner was a boy who made a skater's map of Leiden. Daniel's work "This makes no sense" is the narrow work in the top row on the left. It had these words printed over a map of Leiden and referred to the fact that having never visited Leiden and not reading Dutch, this map made no sense to him.



Two other London friends
also had work in this show.

Ella Guru's is on the left and relates to her visit to Leiden last year and the discovery that the prilgrim fathers, her ancestors, had lived here before emigrating to the U.S. Elaine Arkell's is the red + blue small print on the right. Her work, The Shift, associates the circular streets and canals of Leiden with blood vessels.
My work is the deep frame in the middle and Sen's is the shrub with the engraving below.

Dick Raaijmakers book launch, appearance + performance

I attended this event on January 27th in the Amsterdam concert hall on the Ij.

Dick Raaijmakers (1930) live on the screen via a webcam from his home, while Arjen Mulder (a Dutch media theorist and one of the co-author's of Dick's new book (Monografie: the website is only in Dutch).) asked him a pile of questions. In one of the stunning auditoriums in the muziekgebouw aan't Ij,

Dick Raaijmakers, one of the pioneers in electronic music in the Netherlands, is mainly known as a composer, who has made numerious installation-performances involving electronic music or sound where visual aspects are part of the artistic production.

I know of him mainly because of a lecture I heard in 2006 in at the Eindhoven Strp festival, given by Kees Tazelaar, where I heard his compositions and saw his revolutionary 1960's animations.

Some interviews with Dick Raaijmakers are here on the v2 website.

Then Raaijmaker's 1979 performance De grafische methode fiets (The graphic methodical bicycle) was re-performed by Bart

See this arts blog (in Dutch) for a series of photos of this performance.

new video starring the kitchen sink

This features music by Waiting for Donald (New Zealand Tahora friends: Mark, Brenda, Robbie + Chris). It is a fantastic funky music cd. See Mark and Brenda's website for some samples.

A low resolution version of the video Kitchen Pythagoras is here.

Video Vortex exhibition at Montevideo, Amsterdam

Two works made an impression on me in the video vortex exhibition, I saw on January 17th.

This image is a detail of P.T.S. (Public Television Sculpture),
the time-based installation of 8 videos seen distorted through 32 prism-like spheres in a circular cabinet by Dutch artist, Jaap de Jonge (www.jaapdejonge.nl)

Beneath these balls, which function as lenses, are eight hidden monitors. The video material was taken from 32 broadcasts, which were made for Park 4DTV (Amsterdam cable television) in 1996. New images and image combinations are created by the 32 prisms, all of which distort the image in some way or other. By pressing a button, the viewer can trigger the sound that accompanies each image.


The other memorable work was the film Flat Earth a film by Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead (view some stills here). It is a journey around the globe using visuals and material found on the internet.

music link of the week: Dave Thorpe Fantastic slide guitar! London folkie.
art link of the week: Simone de Jong Leiden artist who's website I came across