Next week in Brussels, a workshop about access to culture in the digital era

The Access to Culture Platform and its working group on Audience Participation are focusing on access to culture in the digital era this year.

Together with its partners, it is organising a workshop on this topic on 15 December at 16.00 at the European House for Culture in Brussels under the title: ‘Access to Culture in the digital era: A citizen’s right‘.

Non-fiction has been invited for a presentation and a workshop on the museum in the age of ubiquitous networks. We will talk about our experience with organising the annual Museum Night in Amsterdam, and working with museums on public events and online communication.

Curator’s talk: The Future of the Photography Museum

Foam, the Amsterdam based but omnipresent photography museum, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. For this occasion, Foam has created ‘What’s Next?’, a project exploring the future of photography. Foam has posed the question of ‘what’s next?’ throughout this anniversary year to a variety of people in a variety of locations.

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Introduction to film at Casla

On invitation of architectural centre Casla, in the Dutch new town of Almere, Michiel will be giving an introduction to the film ‘Concert of Wills, Making the Getty Center’:

“This acclaimed documentary traces the building of the Getty Center in Los Angeles, designed by Richard Meier and one of the most ambitious cultural undertakings of the twentieth century. Spanning fourteen years, from the early blueprints to the groundbreaking to the public opening of the Center in December 1997, the film takes viewers from California to a rock quarry in Italy where the Center’s signature travertine originated. The gathering of creative personalities needed to complete this monumental complex gave rise to conflict as well as consensus, to tension as well as resolution. Concert of Wills looks behind the scenes and chronicles intimate moments of success as well as frustration and heated debates.”

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Contemporary Art: Who Cares?

Following our contribution to the ACCESS2CA seminar at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana (Slovenia) last year, the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN) has invited us to give a number of workshop at this year’s symposium ‘Contemporary Art: Who Cares?’. This international event will take place at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam this summer and is organized for (up-and-coming) professionals, from diverse disciplines, who are connected to the conservation of modern and contemporary art.

The symposium is co-organized by the Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art in the Netherlands (SBMK) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Key note speakers include Stedelijk Museum‘s conservator Bart Rutten, Van Abbemuseum‘s director Charles Esche, Tate‘s Pip Laurenson, artists Eija Liisa Ahtila and Nedko Solakov and various other people from around the world with an interest/stake in contemporary art conservation with a special focus on complex, large scale multimedia installation works.

Our series of workshops will look at how contemporary art conservation can be made accessible to the public and the role of conservators and conservation information in this process. Participants of the sessions will learn about how organisations (in and outside of cultural heritage) are using new media and emerging technologies to engage with audiences. The workshop exercise wil give participants a first hand experience with (online) media, including various social networks, gaming, mobile applications and data visualization.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, ‘The Wind’ (2002) from reel aesthete on Vimeo.

Making things public

We are in Ljubljana at the moment, preparing a presentation and a series of workshops for the Access to Contemporary Art Conservation conference. This is organised by the Netherlands Institute of Cultural Heritage in collaboration with Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and kindly hosted by the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana.

The title of our presentation is ‘Making Things Public’, and it is a further elaboration on the ubiquitous museum. We are making slides like Carsten Höller and Tony Hawke.