new 2 minute video by Sen and myself

This is our submission for a call for videos to celebrate Europe where at least 50% of the video utilizes EU archival material.

We decided to contrast stills from our own travels with that of their footage, on theme of Europe as a place for exploration into new territorities - a Europe as a compass or clock, a place without borders or with changing borders.



You can also view this on their website in a larger size




A compass tells us that every direction has its possibilites.
We have taken the theme of a 'compass-clock' as a way of showing our personal experiences with diverse European cultures. The video starts at zero for us, the Netherlands our home for the past 20 years and then turning clockwise, snapshots of us and our children flash by against various modes of documentation to create a dance between the personal and the public record.

The music is a remix of music by friends of ours: Sandy Hoover (U.S./U.K, with credit to Los de Abjo (Mexico), and Kath Tait, U.K. www.kathtait.com) who like us were born outside of Europe but have spent decades enjoying the opportunities of living and working in Europe.

"Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends."
wrote Maya Angelou.

The footage we have selected from the European Commission audiovisual archive contrasts fleeting moving images of Europe in various ways to show aspects of European life-worlds, such as shots of cities, institutions, some projects supported by the European Social Fund (ESF), as well as historical events, with still images of our family in locations such as the Hague Peace Palace, Legoland in Denmark, Oulu + Helsinki in winter, Estonian, Latvian + Lithuanian towns, Polish + Czech mountain tops, German streets, Italian waterways, the Spanish sea, Luxemburg, Belgian, French + Irish churches and views, and ancient Scottish stones.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
Marcel Proust.

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.