Non-fiction » deVerdieping

Visible Cities #01: Euro Beinat and Ronald Lenz

Juha van 't Zelfde — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:39:42 +0000

The widespread employment and adoption of ubiquitous computing, sensor networks and mobile media into the urban environment have unforeseen implications for how we might come to use networked digital resources to change the way we understand, build, and inhabit cities. Visible Cities presents a revolving programme on how emerging technologies are changing the cities we live in.

After the #00 edition in December 2009, with Micropolis developer Don Hopkins, Visible Cities #01 will present Euro Beinat of the Currentcity Foundation, and Ronald Lenz of the Waag Society.

Beinat is Professor of Location Awareness at Salzburg University in Austria, and Chairman of the Currentcity Foundation. He will explore the dynamics of the city through mobile devices. Beinat works with a.o. Carlo Ratti of Senseable City Lab of MIT, and Aaron Koblin of Google Creative Lab.

Ronald Lenz heads the research department on locative media at Waag Society and is creative director at 7scenes, a startup developing a mobile and online platform that enables people to create, play and share GPS-based games, tours and stories. Lenz will talk about his myriad of projects he is currently involved with.

Visible Cities is organised by De Verdieping in collaboration with VURB. The mission of VURB is to investigate the consequences of the convergence of ubiquitous computing onto public, urban spaces. We are now entering an era where technology begins to weave together the desires of citizens and the services available to them in their environment in realtime. But what does the use of these new systems look like? Visible Cities tries to find the answers.

–

De Verdieping is the cultural project space underneath club and restaurant TrouwAmsterdam. Visible Cities is made possible by the Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunsten and VURB.

Visible Cities #02 is on 3 March. Our guests will be Ole Bouman (NAi) and Maurice Groenhart of Layar.

Tweet This Post

Urbanode

Juha van 't Zelfde — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:08:21 +0000

A while ago, I wrote a brief introduction to VURB here on our site. In the past months, we have met with many brilliant people, started a monthly night in De Verdieping called Visible Cities, and investigated various scenarios in the vast dimension of responsive architecture and urban informatics. VURB founders Ben Cerveny and James Burke recently wrote a proposal for a new project that will “enable a set of environmental services in the Trouw building to be ‘discoverable’ by mobile devices, and controlled by citizens/users through applications on their smartphones.” I wanted to share these words here, because I believe they offer a great view of the playing field, and give a good description of one possible interactive architectural application. Enjoy.

The mission of VURB is to investigate the consequences of the convergence of ubiquitous computing onto public, urban spaces. Often this means understanding how data generated by the environment and its use can be stored and made available as a realtime service built around the city as a platform. However, the transformation of how the digital city and its public spaces are used will not only be about collecting and representing information. Citizens will begin to gain the ability to affect their environment in new ways, using city services the way they would use a digital application in an online environment. Transportation systems, lighting systems, public media hardware like active signage and sound-systems will become objects available for activation, control, and coordination by tools and services that citizens use in their everyday lives. Through collaborative interaction with such tools, users of public spaces can configure them for specific temporary functions and even begin to ‘perform’ space together.

Architects and urban planners have for years attempted to envision how these dynamic systems would behave and operate. In the 1960s, Constant Nieuwenhuys, an Amsterdam-based Situationist artist-architect, imagined a New Babylon made of linked transformable structures that allowed its inhabitants to freely reconfigure their environment to fit their needs and desires in realtime. This Utopian fantasy was certainly provocative at the time, but also held hints at a new relationship between citizens and their context. The citizen can be an active participant in shaping her environment everywhere she goes. Together, we can play our cities like instruments.

We are now entering an era where technology begins to weave together the desires of citizens and the services available to them in their environment in realtime. But what does the use of these new systems look like? It is quite clear that the first step to unlocking these possibilities is the mobile terminal, or ‘smartphone’. Users of such mobile devices have already become accustomed to the access to information that urban-oriented webservices available in the mobile browser provide: maps, transit times, weather information, etc. Even tasks like calling a cab or reserving a table at a restaurant have become like buttons on a remote control for the city. But what about more active uses of service made available in the environment? Applications, supported by new network hardware, more like airTunes, where anyone running iTunes can ‘discover’ nearby speakers and stream music to them wirelessly.

For this project, VURB and partners will enable a set of environmental services in the Trouw building to be ‘discoverable’ by mobile devices, and controlled by citizens/users through applications on their smartphones. These services will most likely include a dancefloor lighting system and various speakers situated throughout the publically accessible space. One of the most interesting aspects to investigate about these types of contexts will be the social dynamics of resource sharing. We will build a toolkit that allows the maintainers of the space to continue to adjust the mechanisms by which individual users compete or collaborate to gain access to the controllable components like lighting and sound. The patterns of use generated by these services over time will be recorded and made available on the web at a later date [by way of analytics applications built through later granted funding] The investigation of methods of dynamic digital resource sharing in public environmental systems is an ongoing research initiative within VURB, and this dataset will provide rich examples of different approaches to making these tool available.

It is our intention that the toolkits produced both for the mobile handset application and the environmental system that makes lighting and sound serves available for network operation will both be made into opensource technology development projects housed at VURB for ongoing collaborative development. We hope that this will be the first of many such installations that investigate dynamic digital service discovery in the urban environment.

Tweet This Post

Time Out Amsterdam’s 2020 Vision Forum

Juha van 't Zelfde — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:41:31 +0000

For its January issue, the Amsterdam branch of the international city chronicle Time Out invited five of the city’s prominent design-minded companies – architectural firm Benthem Crouwel, advertising agency KesselsKramer, arts and leisure consulting firm LAgroup, interior and architectural design company Concrete, and Non-fiction – to present their images of the city of the future: Amsterdam in 2020 (here’s ours).

To broaden the discussion and promote lively debate on the future of the city, Time Out Amsterdam and Non-fiction will be co-hosting a live panel discussion with the participants in the project on Thursday, 28 January. At this “2020 Vision Forum”, designers from each project will talk about how they envision the city’s future, and then Time Out Amsterdam editor Nina Siegal will moderate a discussion between the participating groups and the public.

With contributions from 36 of our dearest friends and heroes, including Ben Cerveny, Nalden, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Saskia Sassen and Winy Maas, our co-created vison of Amsterdam in 2020 appeared in the new year’s edition of Time Out magazine Amsterdam. Read more about our ‘Twitteropolis’ and download it here.

We hope to see you tomorrow in De Verdieping.

–

TIME OUT AMSTERDAM 2020 VISION FORUM

WHEN: Thursday 28 January. Doors open at 19.30. Programme starts at 20.15
WHERE: De Verdieping at Trouw Amsterdam, Wibautstraat 131 (463 7788/trouwamsterdam.nl)
ENTRY: €5 payable at the door. Email us to reserve a spot rsvp@timeoutamsterdam.nl, or just show up (and join on Facebook)

Tweet This Post

Contribution to Time Out magazine out now

Michiel van Iersel — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:52:28 +0000

With contributions from 36 of our dearest friends and heroes, including Ben Cerveny, Nalden, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Saskia Sassen and Winy Maas, our co-created vison of Amsterdam in 2020 appeared in the new year’s edition of Time Out magazine Amsterdam. Download it here.

For the January edition of Time Out (magazine) Amsterdam our office for cultural innovation Non-fiction was asked to give a vision of the city in the year 2020, together with KesselsKramer, LAgroup, Concrete and Benthem Crouwel. Since we discard the idea of a blueprint for the city of the future and strongly believe in the power of co-creation and collaboration, we invited a few dozen of people we know and/or admire to to speculate on the future of the city (of Amsterdam). By juxtaposing perspectives from both in- and outsiders and by combining utopian visions, critical reflections, personal fantasies and (more) mundane thoughts, we wanted to provide a kaleidoscopic view of the future of the Dutch capital.

We had been given a two-page spread (basically two A4 pages) to present our vision of the future and in order to maximise the number of ideas we invited our friends and colleagues across the globe to answer a simple question: “What will you be doing in Amsterdam in 2020?”, in 140 characters. A Twitter-message from the future. As we are moving into the next decade, Twitter is at the very front of communications innovations, and gathering all these tweets into a tweetdeck gives a recognizable and playful collaborative vision of the city (of Amsterdam) in 10 years.

The final result (thanks to our buddies at Vandejong) is a densely packed information-grid, giving an overview of 36 seemingly unrelated opinions and doom scenarios. But upon closer inspection fascinating patterns appear: our participants think that Amsterdam eventually will merge into a bigger metropolitan area, that it will suffer severe flooding, that the historic city centre will become an abandoned open-air museum and that the outskirts will become the new hubs of urban vitality and (re-)development.

In contrast, there are also people who hold a unique believe that by 2020 the city will be either connected to Utrecht by a high speed electro-magnet train, will still lack a new art museum or subway line, or simply will be and stay the ‘same old, same old’.

The magazine just hit the stores, so check it out or contact us if you wish to receive a copy! And please join us for the ‘2020 vision’ event at De Verdieping on Thursday 28 January at 8 pm in collaboration with Time Out Amsterdam, bringing together the contributors and other visionaries to discuss the propability of our predictions…

We wish to thank all the contributors and the people who are still sending us their submissions. We are very happy with the outcome of this collaborative effort. In the new year we will continu this ‘crowdsourced’ investigation into the future potentials and failures of a complex city.

Tweet This Post

Non-fiction in 2009 (and we’ve only just begun..)

Michiel van Iersel — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:45:22 +0000

It has been an exciting first year (in beta) for us at Non-fiction, with projects ranging from social media strategies for the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ and Tropenmuseum Junior, via new concepts for an illustrious canal house ánd an ancient castle to a range of workshops in a.o. Ljubljana and Zürich. Together with our friends at TrouwAmsterdam we opened the temporary project space ‘De Verdieping‘, hosting a wide range of cultural and social events. The year ended with a cover story in Time Out magazine, giving our co-created vision of Amsterdam in 2020. The start of the next decade promises to be even more innovative, collaborative and challenging..

So what happened in 2009?

At the beginning of the year we worked with the renowned Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, the Concerthall of the 21st Century, helping the organization with their public strategy, new media development and visual identity.

In the months leading up to the summer we organized Aura: an exhibition and a series of events in the historic premises of Castrum Peregrini Foundation, where in WWII young German Jews survived in hiding.

Since March we are responsible for the artistic direction and strategic development of a cultural project space, De Verdieping, in the basement of the Berlin-style club and restaurant TrouwAmsterdam, resulting in a series of lively public discussions, art and architecture exhibitions, experimental performances and film nights in collaboration with half the city (and soon the world).

Around the summer working with the Tropenmuseum Junior (TMJ) in Amsterdam to devise a social strategy for their new exhibition ‘Qi of China‘ and an online game that enables children in the age of 6 – 13 to experience a number of key cultural values in Chinese culture.

Halfway through the year Non-fiction relocated its office from the Scheepvaartmuseum (National Maritime Museum) to the former laboratory of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, right in the cultural heart of Amsterdam overlooking Museumplein (Museumsquare).

in July 2009 Non-fiction’s Juha van ‘t Zelfde co-founded VURB, together with Ben Cerveny, design strategist and data visualization theorist and in collaboration with James Burke (Roomware, Narb). VURB is a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems.

Next spring and summer we will be organizing several projects at Duivenvoorde Castle, a stately museum-mansion and unique parkland (see below) near the city of The Hague. We received a request from the organization to make a contribution to their yearlong celebration of the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2010.

In the past four years, we have been organizing experimental music events at Bimhuis, Melkweg, De Verdieping and TrouwAmsterdam. These nights are organized under our electronic music label Viral Radio, which has a regular show on Dutch public network VPRO‘s 3voor12.

In december we visited lovely Ljubljana to give a presentation and a series of workshops for the Access to Contemporary Art Conservation conference, organized by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and kindly hosted by the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana.

Non-fiction’s Juha participated an intimate workshop in Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in his role as editor of Soundmuseum. ‘Audio Art on the Radio’ was organized by the Institute for Contemporary Arts Research of the Zurich University of the Arts, and focused on the question how open, interactive and democratic radio should be?

Recently the Amsterdam branch of the international city periodical Time Out invited us to come up with a vision of the city in the year 2020, so we decided to provide them with a collaborative urban visions by collecting dozens of thought-provoking Twitter-style messages from our friends and heroes from around the world. The magazine has just hit the stores, so check it out or contact us if you wish to receive a copy!

Wow, that’s a lot..

And we even forgot to tell you about Curating the City, our night long interview series with museum professionals and artists about ‘the museum in the city and the city as museum’ during the annual Museumnight (n8), and about our latest publications and our friends, new and old, and about the birth of Michiel’s daughter and Juha’s hobbies.

And what are our plans for 2010?

Now the ‘noughties’ make way for a brand new decade, Non-fiction is gearing up for yet another year of recession-defying activities and intelligent pragmatism. We will continu our exploration of the pro’s and con’s of co-creation, social media, urban interventions, guerilla gardening, data visualization, public accessibility, augmented reality, ubiquitous museums and other innovative ideas that will fundamentally change our lives.

And we will jumpstart the new year with presentations and proposals for such diverse organizations as the local municipality, SNS REAAL Foundation, Binger Filmlab, the Zuidas, PICNIC, ICN, Paradiso, Duivenvoorde and ING. And we are happy to receive more inquiries and invitations, since we can always outsource some of our activities to our man in India.

We will keep you updated on our website and on Facebook and Twitter (and here and here), but please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you are looking for a stimulating conversation, a good laugh or a place to meet kindred spirits.

Please join us for the opening of the new year in De Verdieping with a special sound performance by our dear friend and multi-instrumentalist Machinefabriek on Wednesday 6 January at 8 pm. And later that month, on Thursday 28 January at 8 pm we are hosting the ’2020 vision’ event at De Verdieping in collaboration with Time Out Amsterdam, showcasing different perspectives on the future of Amsterdam by KesselsKramer, LAgroup, Concrete, Benthem Crouwel and… Non-fiction.

Drive and shoot straight on New Year’s Eve!

Tweet This Post

De Verdieping starts 2010 with Machinefabriek

Juha van 't Zelfde — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:40:30 +0000

Machinefabriek live at Aura in Castrum Peregrini (photo: Jelle Spanjaard)

On a Thursday night in September in 2006, multi-instrumentalist Rutger Zuydervelt performed under his moniker Machinefabriek on the 700th birthday at the Oude Kerk, the oldest building of Amsterdam that is located in the heart of the Red Light District. It was a night I organised when I was still working at the n8 foundation, the collaborative museum platform that works for the Amsterdam museums. This was the beginning of an ongoing love affair with one of the Netherlands’ most productive and imaginative young composers and musicians. Since this concert we have worked together numerous times at the Bimhuis, Lantaren/Venster, Castrum Peregrini, and once even in my appartment in Amsterdam, together with Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard. Machinefabriek, a natural improviser who never performs the same work twice, and has an Olympic amount of releases and bootlegs swerving around. Even when I write, Michiel is listening to his music (and while you are peeking at his Last.fm account, have a look where Machinefabriek stands in my top artists list).

So it should not come as a surprise when we announce that the first artist we have asked to perform in 2010 is our dear friend Machinefabriek. We will celebrate the opening of the new year in De Verdieping with a special performance on Wednesday 6 January at 8 pm. We will also celebrate the proud fact that we have been granted a generous 2-year financial support from the Amsterdam Art Fund to upgrade the organisation and become a more professional cultural institution. The support enables us to notch up our activities and broaden our reach. We are delighted about this and look forward to inviting you to more adventurous programmes on the Wibautstraat in 2010.

We look forward to seeing you next Wednesday and toasting on the new decade. In the mean time, follow De Verdieping on Facebook and Twitter. Drive and shoot straight on New Year’s Eve.

Tweet This Post

Architect John Lonsdale at Rijksakademie Beamclub

Juha van 't Zelfde — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:23:14 +0000

On the brink of the 2009 Open Studios at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, architect and 2001 Prix de Rome winner (with his project ‘Shifting Horizons, Towards a non-Deterministic Urbanism’) John Lonsdale will visit De Verdieping for the Rijksakademie BeamClub. Lonsdale will talk about his activity of the last years, mapping the ‘Mudscapes of the Netherlands’ whereby he strives for the reconciliation of architecture with landscape. He sees a future where humankind can live in a sustainable way in newly created wildernesses or mudscapes.

The Rijksakademie BeamClub is an initiative by artist and Rijksakademie resident Sarah van Sonsbeeck and De Verdieping, the cultural project space in the basement of TrouwAmsterdam that is programmed by Non-fiction. It is a night where artists present works that inspire them in their own practice. Previous speakers have been Hans Aarsman, Nicoline van Harskamp and Ben Cerveny.

Tweet This Post

The networked museum marathon

Juha van 't Zelfde — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:48:17 +0000

Here is a first reaction after our 5 hour interview marathon that took place during last Saturday’s Amsterdam museumnacht. We first would like to thank all our guests from the various institutions, our visitors in De Verdieping, and the n8 organisation for kindly letting us participate in the 10th museumnacht. We are very happy with the start of this ongoing discussion on the (changing) role of museums in 21st century cities, and the influence of networked urban environments on museums. We will take our time to write up a summary of the event, and hope to update soon.

Tweet This Post

Curating the city, a museumnacht marathon on metropolitan museums, responsive heritage and the city as cultural platform

Juha van 't Zelfde — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:45:12 +0000

Doug Aitken's Sleepwalker was projected on the exterior walls of the MoMA

This Saturday the 10th annual museumnacht (museum night) will be organised in our hometown Amsterdam. Non-fiction will take part with a special marathon on museums and the city, in their basecamp De Verdieping. A wide group of institutions, designers and thinkers will join us at the table to discuss how pervasive urban museums are, and how the city can become a interactive museosphere.

The programme starts at 7 pm and goes on to 12, after which Viral Radio will take over with wall-surpassing bass and rhythm collections compiled by Juha & Cinnaman with Mamiko Motto. Outside, the facade of the building will be used as an urban screen for the duration of the museumnacht by students of MediaLAB Amsterdam. Inside, artists Amie Dicke and Sarah van Sonsbeeck will host the workshop ‘Build your own mobile museum’.

Tickets are available through n8.nl, make sure you get them soon: the previous 7 editions sold out before the start.

–

Programme:

19 – 00 Interview Marathon >> with Michiel van Iersel and Juha van ‘t Zelfde
We will navigate through the night together with our guests, visitors, Hyvers and Twitterati, to try to articulate the future of museums in the city.

19 – 20 MyMuseum >> Blikopeners, Zichtbaar Afwezig and Urban Screens
Students of the Rietveld, Sandberg, UvA and HvA will talk about appropriating, editing and remixing the museum.

20 – 21 Museums And The City >> Stedelijk Museum
Curators Bart Rutten, Leontine Coelewij and Marten Jongema will look back at Stedelijk in de Stad and will look ahead towards a new Stedelijk Museum.

21 – 2 The Mobile Museum >> De Appel, Platform21/Supermaker, NIMk, Mediamatic
Representatives of various art institutions in Amsterdam will talk about their transient adventures in pop-up structures and mobile pavillions.

22 – 23 The Digital City >> VURB, The Mobile City, Nationaal Historisch Museum, Habbekrats
Now things will get unphysical, with VURB and The Mobile City talking about urban informatics and the city as an interaction platform. The Nationaal Historisch Museum will talk about being a distributed museum, and design firm Habbekrats will elaborate on how cities are embedded in (music) videos on YouTube.

23 – 00 Museum = City >> everybody everywhere
How will the museums in the future inhabit the city? How can it go beyond its walls? What is a museum without a building? How can visitors become users and producers of a museum? Can a city be a museum? These questions will be addressed in the round-up discussion with all logged in.

00 – 05 Viral Radio x Beat Dimensions >> Juha & Cinnaman and Mamiko Motto.
Rhythmculture, bass experimentation and computer improvisation to ground the night after such abstraction. With Amsterdam’s digital duo Juha & Cinnaman, and the one-woman social music revolution Mamiko Motto.

Tweet This Post

Monthly film night The Great Dictators

Michiel van Iersel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:34:10 +0000

The Great Dictators is a new monthly film night at De Verdieping, the cultural project space of TrouwAmsterdam, focussing on ‘the vanity of evil’. Each night centers around one absolute ruler, both past and present, and shows how tyrants and populist leaders are (re)presented in (documentary) films. Non-fiction’s Michiel van Iersel is curating this series.

# 00 | Wednesday, September 16, 2009, Wibautstraat 127, doors open 20:30h | film starts 21:00h

The Great Dictator (1940)

The Great Dictator is a comedy film directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin. It was Chaplin’s first true talking picture, and more importantly was the only major film of its period to bitterly satirize Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Chaplin began filming in September 1939, one week after the beginning of World War II when the United States were still at peace with Nazi Germany. He finished filming almost six months later. In his autobiography, Chaplin stated that he would not have been able to make such jokes about the Nazi regime had the extent of their horrors been known. After 1945 it took over twenty years before any other films dared to satirize the era.

In this movie, Chaplin plays Adenoid Hynkel, the great and autocratic dictator of Tomania. He was satirizing both Hitler and Nazi Germany. Chaplin also plays a second character, a Jewish barber, who is an Adenoid Hynkel look-alike. Hynkel’s rival is Napaloni (a mixture of Mussolini and Napoleon), dictator of Bacteria (Italy).

Almost every scene in The Great Dictator is perfect: the iconic globe dance, Hynkle’s poorly-translated address to the Tomanian people, the musical shaving scene, an upside-down airplane, all capped by Chaplin’s heartrending final plea for peace.

The film was sent to Hitler, and an eyewitness confirmed he saw it twice. Chaplin, after being told Hitler saw the movie, replied: “I’d give anything to know what he thought of it. Several similarities between Hitler and Chaplin have been noted and may have been a pivotal factor in Chaplin’s decision to make The Great Dictator. Chaplin and Hitler had superficially similar looks, most famously their toothbrush moustaches. Furthermore, the two men were born only four days apart in 1889.

Join us for the next GREAT DICTATORS film night on October 14, starting at 20:30h
Focus on Idi Amin Dada (1925 –2003). Commonly known as Idi Amin, he was an African military dictator and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He is portrayed in various books, films and documentaries, including General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974), Raid on Entebbe (1977) and The Last King of Scotland (2006).

For more information about De Verdieping and about upcoming activities and more, please check De Verdieping website. And why don’t you follow us on Facebook?

Tweet This Post