Non-fiction

Viral music distribution

Juha van 't Zelfde — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:58:36 +0000

Viral Radio is the experimental electronic music vehicle of Non-fiction’s Juha van ‘t Zelfde and Beat Dimensions’ initiator Yuri Boselie (Cinnaman). It has been organising cutting-edge events in TrouwAmsterdam, Paradiso, Bimhuis and other venues across the Netherlands. Its latest interest is investigating new forms of music distribution and interaction via mobile phones, in collaboration with 3voor12 and VURB. Tonight, they organise their monthly night in TrouwAmsterdam.

On this month’s edition Viral Radio presents two artists it has been following for years and years: Dimlite and Jamie Vex’d. Swiss born Dimlite (Dimitri Grimm, 1980) is a master of mosaic textures and imaginative drum patterns. He is one of the most admired artists of his generation and a distinguished performer. His concerts at the Bimhuis in 2008 and 2009 rank among the best given there in the past few years. Englishman Jamie Vex’d (Jamie Teasdale, 1979) has gained critical acclaim as experimental dubstep duo Vex’d. They released the album Degenerate on Planet Mu in 2005, a prescient example of forward thinking bass music. Jamie has released solo works that are closer related to the video game and science fiction cartoons aesthetic of Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. He has created the new avatar Kuedo, that will release its first tracks within weeks.It is one of the most anticipated releases of the year.

The evening starts at 22:30, and tickets are 12 euros. As always, Viral Radio hosts Juha and Cinnaman will play their music straight out of the package. We look forward to welcoming you there.

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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.

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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.

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Is there still a future for classical music?

Michiel van Iersel — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:25:52 +0000

From this year on the annual Three-Day Music Festival in the Dutch city of The Hague will become the epicenter for innovations in classical music: “Is there a future for classical music?“, “How can we engage a new and young(er) audience?” and “what will a concert (hall) be like in the year 2030?“. Non-fiction sets out to broaden the horizon and discover new territories.

For quite some time now Non-fiction’s Michiel van Iersel has been involved in the so-called Three-Day Music Festival in The Hague. This year’s event takes place on March 5 – 7 and is the 7th edition of this annual celebration of classical music. Up to now the overarching theme of this classical music event was ‘Young Talents meet Great Masters’, with master classes, the Classic Express (an amazing mobile concert hall), recitals and concerts in which well established musicians took to the stage with a new generation of musicians.

However, from this edition onward, the festival will focus on innovations in the world of (classical) music performances. The festival wants to play a pivotal role in stimulating cross-disciplinary projects, state-of-the-art facilities, technological innovations, off-site concerts and smart (online) communication tools. The underlying questions are: “how can we engage a new and young(er) audience in classical music” and “what will a concert (hall) be like in the year 2030“?

We will be looking at the most innovative and outlandish attempts to shake of classical music’s boring image and to revitalize this ancient art form. Obviously, we will start by examining the revolutionary nature of the (classical) music itself. What would be the contemporary equivalent of Igor Stravinsky’s controversial and violent ‘Sacre‘, John Cage’s legendary 4′33″ or Karlheinz Stockhausen’s mindblowing (and deafening) ‘Helicopter String Quartet‘?

On our personal shortlist you’ll find Michel van der Aa’s chamber opera One and sound art by people like Carsten Nicolai and Christian Marclay, but also Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s new compositions for the London Sinfonietta as part of the South Bank Centre’s cutting-edge Ether Festival in 2005. Please let us know what your nominees are.

The impact of new and digital media on the creation and consumption of classical music will be discussed as well, from Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking work up to the electric violin and other absurdities from the 70’s and 80’s, via the 3D Tour of Classical Music History that was developed back in 1993 (!), down to recent innovations like the crowdsourced Youtube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and Virtual Maestro, a game on Nintendo’s Wii which allows you to conduct a virtual orchestra.

The concert hall of the 21st century is one of the subjects that will be discussed during a new series of talk shows and presentations in which both experts and visitors will be explicitly asked to pass an opinion on future developments. We will scan the globe in search for brave architectural statements that have fundamentally changed the acoustic and esthetic standards for concert halls and music centers alike. Think of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (0r simply EMPAC) in upstate New York, Zaha Hadid’s billowing Bach pavilion in Manchester, the new Oslo Opera House (in Norwegian: Operahuset) and our beloved Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Amsterdam’s (self-proclaimed) “Concert hall of the 21st Century”.

Architect and provocateur extraordinaire Rem Koolhaas will be our keynote speaker on Saturday, March 6. The Lucent Danstheater (completed in 1987 and housing the Netherlands Dance Theater) is one of the festival locations, but also happens to be one of Rem Koolhaas’s first completed projects to receive widespread critical acclaim. In the coming years it will be replaced by a new and multifunctional music center in the same location. Obviously we have asked him to elaborate on ‘his’ Casa da Música, being not only his most recent attempt to design the perfect concert venue but also providing a model for other music venues and cultural icons in the 21st century and millennia to come.

We will liven up his contribution with a series of short videos of users and visitors of both the Casa da Musica and the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. We want to know how the buildings function (technically, but also socially), what the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the design are, whether or not they have had an impact on the local music scene and/or international reputation and what lessons can be learned from them?

For this reason we will attend the Portugese premiere of Michel van der Aa’s music theatre work ‘The Book of Disquiet” at Casa da Musica in Porto next week, for a recorded ‘walkthrough’ with our favorite Dutch composer and António Jorge Pacheco, the institute’s artistic director. We will be discussing the building’s design concept and day-to-day functioning from an artistic, social and practical viewpoint.

The final result of these filmed interviews ‘on the move‘ will be shown during the festival, but in the meantime we will keep you updated on our website and on the festival’s blog and through Twitter.

Casa da Música, Porto (Source: The Guardian)

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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.

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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.

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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)

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Laying a new foundation for arts funding

Michiel van Iersel — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:03:23 +0000

Being invited by one of the largest private art foundations in The Netherlands, the SNS REAAL Fund, we had the privilege of giving an hour long presentation of not-to-be-missed trends in the fields of the arts, technology and science, followed by a lively Q&A. For this occasion our host had invited the management and staff members from two other foundations, the VSBfonds and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, in a much appreciated effort to start an inter-organizational exchange of ideas and expertise.

The meeting centered around one question: how can private art foundations stimulate artistic innovation and a vibrant cultural life in the Netherlands in the face of current artistic and technological developments? In our presentation we focused on the forces that shape our world, from the timeless human need for social connection and peer recognition to the unprecedented scale and speed of cultural production and distribution and the unstoppable rise of locative media and augmented reality.

Among many other urgent matters, we discussed the moral and financial implications of ‘digitally born’ art works like Aaron Koblin’s ‘Flight Patterns’ and the ‘commercial creativity’ in projects like Olafur Eliasson’s concept car for BMW. How can foundations avoid a conflict of interest by funding private corporations, without missing out on artistic breakthroughs within the commercial sector? And how can needy artists and cultural institutions benefit from innovative and lucrative consumer-led business models like NIKEiD, an online store for customized Nike-merchandise, and Sellaband, a crowd- or fan-funding website for aspiring musicians?

Our audience assured us that most of these issues had not escaped their attention. Interdisciplinary art projects and public-private partnerships have become very common in recent years. SNS REAAL Fund has supported Streetlab, a platform and festival for young creatives, providing a gateway to (inter)national markets and a professional career. And in Amsterdam, Sellaband and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK) announced that they will develop a fan-funding platform for art projects in the near future.

However, a number of challenges still need to be addressed by both public and private art foundations:

Accessibility: opening up the application process to more people by introducing scouts, outreach programs and a (more) search- and user-oriented website that can be navigated easily and that combines prescribed instructions with user generated folksonomies (tagging).
Transparency: using off- and online tools to inform the public on relevant developments and data, like the number of submitted, granted and refused applications or the output of funded projects in terms of visitor numbers or media coverage etc. with the real-time Dashboard of the Indianapolis Museum of Art as an inspiring example.
Knowledge sharing: integrating and disclosing information that will help improve the quality of applications, such as matching tools for applicants that are looking for collaborators, application forms that leave room for comments and tips for future users, and an online market for trade in skills, money and connections.

Given the (other) priorities and limited capacity of these private foundations, we suggested that they should create a new business unit or satellite organization that could function as an independent think tank and advanced R&D lab and certainly would accelerate new developments. There are various instructive examples of organizations that have set up an experimental counterpart, both individually like OMA’s AMO, Benetton’s Fabrica and Google Labs, or collectively with the n8’s play- and fruitful collaboration with the museums in Amsterdam as as a good case in point.

We will continue our conversation with SNS REAAL Fund and we invite everyone with an interest in arts funding (intellectually and/or money-wise) to provide us with new and fresh ideas. In the meantime you can see our travels around the world in 80 slides:

View more presentations from Non-fiction.

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Introducing Digitaal Duivenvoorde

Juha van 't Zelfde — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:47:00 +0000

As we stated before, we are preparing a series of projects for Kasteel Duivenvoorde in Voorschoten. One of these projects is Digitaal Duivenvoorde, an aggregate of new media applications and social networking interventions we anticipate to roll out in the near future to upgrade the web presence and accessibility of this 13th century family estate. Duivenvoorde intends to open up its collection of family portraits, historical maps and other documents that have already been or soon will be digitised. It also wants to invite people to explore the various historical layers via cutting edge mobile applications like Layar and Foursquare, using augmented reality and game design to engage with our heritage. The project will furthermore dive into face recognition software to create new ways for people to enter the collection via their own public image on social networking sites like Hyves, Facebook and Twitter. Last but not least, the deeply rooted family tree of Duivenvoorde will be made interactive, embedding it within the common grounds of current self-portrayal online.

This project is in beta now. We will keep you updated on our proceedings. In the mean time you can follow Duivenvoorde on Twitter.

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Can we still trust you?

Michiel van Iersel — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:38:50 +0000

How can banks, museums, governments and other institutions regain a sense of trust from the public? That is the question that lies at the heart of an ambitious project titled ‘Trustville‘.

Initiated by communication agency Vandejong and its idiosyncratic founder and namesake Pjotr de Jong, Trustville encompasses a series of themed expert meetings focusing on new and innovative ways to overcome the credibility crisis that paralyzes our economic and political system.

Non-fiction was asked to join the editorial board of this interdisciplinary research project and the forthcoming book, which will be published by Valiz later this year. Surrounded by professionals from totally different backgrounds, including an advisor to the World Bank and a young labor union leader, we found ourselves rather optimistic about the current state of affairs and future perspectives.

OK, we don’t wanna downplay the impact of wrongdoers like “Bernie“, the Bushes and Kanye, but luckily we meet more and more trustworthy people and organizations everyday. Like the man who runs Amsterdam and the lady we recently heared talking about the ‘Just City‘, or the museum that opened on time and within budget and the bank who helped us setting up De Verdieping.

Being an office for collaborative actions, co-created visions and crowdsourced sollutions, we feel the obligation to provide sufficient counterweight to the skepticism that dominates the news headlines and the hearts and minds op people nowadays.

Gated communities, fenced off companies and Firewalls.. You don’t want to go down that road, because you might end up in Lars von Trier’s hellish Dogville. Or even worse, the city of Trussville, Alabama or better know as ‘The Gateway to Happy Living‘. What a difference one letter can make..

Instead of a small dead-end town we prefer a place where people still communicate and connect with one another, whether it’s Amsterdam, Twitteropolis, Wikicity, Farmville or our own interpretation of Niketown. So we don’t have to travel very far to reach Trustville. We just have to help other people opening up their eyes, and it’s right there in front of us.

We’ll keep you updated on our journey into the known..

Still taken from Dogville (2003), directed by Lars von Trier

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Nike launches True City application for iPhone

Non-fiction — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 11:14:40 +0000

Today Nike has released True City, an iPhone application that promises to make ‘the hidden visible through the knowledge and insight of Nike Insiders.’ Six European cities – Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, Milan and Paris – have been selected by Nike, and in these cities 5 individuals – so called Nike Insiders – will share their personal experiences and favourites on this special app.

In Amsterdam, these 5 people are our friend and recent celebrity blogger Nalden, wonky LeLe frontman Pepijn Lanen, hip hop duo La Melodia, art director of design agency Momkai Harald Dunnink, and Non-fiction’s Juha van ‘t Zelfde. Have a look at screenshots and read more about the project here.

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Amsterdam Creative Metropolis #1

Juha van 't Zelfde — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:38:14 +0000

We have been invited by the city of Amsterdam and the alderman of culture Caroline Gehrels to participate in a series of public discussion and open brainstorms on the future of the creative industries in Amsterdam. Tonight is the kick off, at 20.00 in Pakhuis de Zwijger in the Eastern Docklands. We hope to see some friendly faces.

Amsterdam Creative Metropolis #1 | January 13 | starts 20.00 | Free entry

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