11th Aug: Our final and 4th jam session inside a sculpture

Photo: 4 August, Koen on clarinet, Toroa on book, Sen in thought.

Jam session between 2 and 4 p.m. on August 11th at Breestraat 46. This will be our 4th and final jam session in the gallery.

Watch a 5 min video clip of the July 15th jam session. Besides the sculpture "House of Worship" (more photos) you see in the image above there is also a 6 min video, 50 small drawings (along the windows) and a relief sculpture as well as work by 41 other artists in the gallery. >> Galerie de Pieter
Breestraat 46
Leiden
Last weekend, Saturday + Sunday, 11-12 August
1 - 5 p.m. (On Sunday work is removed from 4 p.m. onwards)

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.

March 24th: women + technology

I received an invitation to announce The Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Find out more at findingada.com.

For me personally, this is easy, since I'm so obsessed about technology myself, but recently I was invited to give a paper at a conference in Bremen on gender and ICT and there I met many amazing women from Costa Rica to the Philippines and quite a large number of women came from Scandanavia. In the spirit of openness that I'd like to think is a feminine characteristic (yes, men have this quality too :) most papers can be read or downloaded here. And so this blog is dedicated not only to those who organized this conference but to all (the men as well! - feminisim works to address gender imbalance afterall) who attended and participated in the
5th European Symposium on Gender & ICT
"Digital Cultures: Participation - Empowerment - Diversity"
University of Bremen, Germany, March 5 - 7, 2009

Now you might ask about the connection this image has with all of this. This is a reworking of a design for Kath Tait's song "Leaky Umbrellas" I recently submitted for a London show on artworks inspired by music. Made using photoshop and illustrator and a rather old mouse (I still haven't gotten around to using a pen) on my trusty computer, Huianui. Yes in our household we personalize our computers!

In making the pledge to mention some women involved in technology, I came across the pledge for praising those over 40. Being over 40 myself, well that's easy too :) Actually 40 seems so young since I'm closer to 50, but there's a lot of good work being done by us over 40 year olds. Here's a link to Kath's music as one example:

And I had a look at some of the responses to the Ada Lovelace Day.
See Suw Charman-Anderson's blog about why she created this pledge.
UK artist, designer, educationalist, Christine Wilks made a flash animation, Binary Kitten (who's blog has some interesting links) posted about LornaJane one of the women in PHP women, which I must check out, since PHP is something I would like to get at. Roxanne wrote about Sandra Lerner, co-founder Cisco Systems and mentioned a number of other contemporary woman involved in technologies. Nice it was about someone living, Ada Lovelace, one of the world’s first computer programmers, died at the age of 36 in 1856. I loved bone's blog on Laurie Anderson.
And if you want more the list of blogs is here.

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

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.