The fourth edition of  the Non-fiction week notes makes it a tradition. That is mainly because of the fact that the number four seems to be an important one: four members of Beatles, Olympic Games and World Championship is being held every four years, there are four terrestrial and four giant gas planets in the Solar System, mammals have four heart chambers, all insects with wings except flies have four wings and most importantly four is the atomic number of beryllium. We hope that this edition of Non-fiction week notes will be as interesting as the aforementioned facts about this great number. Enjoy the reading because we do it just 4 you.

Besides Juha, Boris and Adéla, Joske Koning, who collaborates with Boris, joined us too.

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We are currently doing a mouthwatering research into food, food industry, sustainable farming and agriculture and much more of this interesting stuff (more info later), so I want to ask what was the best food you ate this week?

Juha: The truffle ravioli at Dauphine was my culinary highlight of the week. And in great company of our good friend Johnnie Lonsdale it tasted even better!

Adéla: During the first half of the week I was at my parents place in the Czech countryside being treated as a princess, eating seasonal food like grapes, plums, mushrooms, apples. It is a great feeling to pick plums or apples from the same tree you used to pick them 20 years ago. They are still as delicious as they used to be before.

Joske: I should say the gambas at Cafe Amsterdam, but it wasn’t the maincourse what was the best. It was the soft camembert. Although it was so young that it looked like sauce, the cheese tasted like mould cheese.

Boris: My friend Erik Spande, the owner of Chocolatl, has expanded his armada of chocolate with the addition of an amazing new chocolate bar.  The biologically-dynamic Zotter Scotch Whiskey “Highland Harvest” bar is an unbelievable marriage of fine scotch whiskey and chocolate, bringing together my two largest consumable obsessions.  I have a bar at the office, so if you’d like to try a bit… But op=op, or when its gone its gone.

As everyone knows from the last week notes, we have officially and definitely moved to a new office (Gabriël Metsustraat 8, see the picture above). Now, after some time spent here, use three words to describe it.

Juha: Quite a view.

Adéla: Red-grey-blue

Joske: Livingroom, not-finished-yet (I hope that won’t change), touchscreenwindow.

Boris: Home, Epicenter, Panorama

Besides trying to create/keep the tradition of the week notes we are also aiming for setting up regular Friday Non-fiction drinks. Why people should join us and what can they expect?

Juha: People should come for the view, the drinks, the food, the guests, the conversations, the music, the occasional YouTube video we force people to watch because it is so good, the balcony, and because it is going to be one of the rare buildings on Museumplein that will be open.

Adéla: The new office is great and we want to show it to everybody. As much as it is our working place it should also be a meeting place, because being in a company of nice people is one of the milestones of Non-fiction.

Joske: It’s my first time and I’m writing the weeknotes, so I don’t know yet. but I guess I will like it because I’ll meet people working in a complete different scene then I know.

Boris: Great people, great conversations, great ideas, great booze, great view.

Philosopher’s corner: Is keeping traditions reactionary? (This question comes in connection with setting up/keeping two new traditions of Non-fiction: the weeknotes and Friday drinks.)

Juha: No.

Adéla: I like keeping traditions and more than that I enjoy creating traditions.

Joske: Whenever you keep on giving it another shape, a tradition that already exist it’s a way reflection, which you could possibly forget.

Boris: Yes.  But this not mean that we should blindly throw away all traditions, but I would like to advocate being skeptical and fault-finding, and not blindly protecting all traditions.

Artist’s corner: One of the meetings we had this week was with the architect Lada Hrsak who was speaking about her fascination with maps. Choose one day of the last week and “draw” a “map” of the day.

Juha:

Adéla: I spent some time thinking about this question. I have a love-hate relationship with maps. Cannot read them at all, but like looking at them. This is mainly true after today visit to Het Scheepvaartmuseum. I have never thought ships, whales, globs and maps could be that interesting. I am sure that our fellow visitors must have thought that me and my friend we ironic while standing over an atlas from the 17^th century and scream enthusiastically “this is so cool”. Unfortunately, now I feel a bit overmapped to draw some, so I can only recommend you to go and see some masterpieces in the museum.

Joske: To be honest, I get frustrated and lost everyday. I live here since three weeks. When I’m on my my bike I forget to notice where I am, the good thing is that I cycle the wrong way and dicover strange places like Diemen. I’ll send you a picture of my bike. A big love and symbol for my exploration of Amsterdam.

Boris

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!

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