From 16/10/2010 till 30/01/2011 I will take part in the exhibition Tricksters Tricked at the Van Abbe museum. Tricksters Tricked zooms in on the construction of identitity; the ‘designing’ of ourselves, our city, our nation and our museum. The museum is the chapter I will work on.

The exhibition will open during the Dutch Design Week 2010, 23 - 31 oktober and is transformed into a live exposure of various initiatives of artists and designers that stimulate the public to actively join the production of (their own) identity..

NL:
Wat winnen we en wat verliezen we wanneer we een identiteit construeren? Tricksters Tricked zoomt in op het ‘designen’ van ons zelf, onze stad, onze natie en ons museum. Door doelgericht ontwerp maken we identiteit of breken we identiteit. Logo’s, slogans, politieke mooipraterij, mascottes, beleidsplannen: welke kleur laten we toe en welke denken we weg? Wanneer een identiteit wordt ontworpen en zichzelf hiermee uitdrukt, wordt ze kunstmatig. Betrokken ontwerper, organisatie en/of individu zijn hierin richtinggevend; zij geven sturing aan deze uitdrukking van sterke en zwakke punten, van baten en verliezen; zoals make-up een werkelijk gezicht kan verhullen of kan uitlichten. Tricksters Tricked agendeert de spanning in het ontwerpen van identiteit op het niveau van zelf, stad, natie en museum. Ze bespreekt deze tegen de achtergronden van een veranderende wereld. Tijdens de Dutch Design Week wordt het publiek uitgenodigd om ook zelf actief hun identiteit vorm te geven, met wisselende workshops, consults, lezingen en meer!

Met: Kim de Groot, Jonas Staal, Traces of Autism, Joana Meroz, BAVO, Xijing man, Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno, Werkplaats Typografie.

Opening: Saturday, 23 October 2010 17:00

Floating tagcloud + projection of the oilspill twitter tool at Onomatopee:

releasing the tweets

INTERVENTION #02 - 01 JULY 2010 - OPENING@ONOMATOPEE - 20:00

Live Twitter event at Onomatopee in Eindhoven including blue birds and floating tagcloud... You are invited!

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On the first of July I will talk about my project Like the #oilspill and present a floating tagcloud at Onomatopee's project space in Eindhoven. Afterwards we will boost the topic #liketheoilspill together through live tweeting. It all starts at 20:00, hope you can make it and in the mean time... turn #liketheoilspill into a trending topic on Twitter!

INTERVENTION #01
http://www.onomatopee.net/pages/oilspill/oilspill.html

#liketheoilspill is a Twitter topic introduced by Kim de Groot to discuss the livestream as a media form that seems absent of any editorial process. Yet on the other hand shows an overdosis of distributive options such as 'Liking it' through Facebook or 'Sharing it' through Twitter.
The topic is inspired by livestreams of the BP oil spill such as livestream.com/wkrg_oil_spill and cnn.com. The exclusive content that contextualizes these streams are Twitter feeds or comment sections; raw data immediately hits metadata.
Join me in turning #liketheoilspill into a trending topic by twittering your thoughts and reactions on the transformation of editorial processes and the role of metadata such as tweets and comments in the news!
Is the livestream a form of news without editorial process? Or has news reporting turned completely political since the broadcaster can turn it's live channel 'on or off' at any time? Has the Tweet, as a kind of headline, replaced the main article, the reporter and thus some kind of middle ground?
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The image above is a screenshot of the tool I made for this intervention. The tool shows the livestream of the oilspill and next to it, the twitter channels: #oilspill, #bp, #gulftour and #obama, the topic that are mentioned most in the context of #oilspill.
I was asked by Onomatopee to intervene in the ongoing exhibition, The Form and the Frame in which two editorial boards critiqued the editorial design of media such as the Elsevier, Vrij Nederland, De Groene Amsterdammer and HP de Tijd.

Between the 4th of june until the beginning of july I will be working on an intervention at the Onomatopee project space in Eindhoven as a part of the Form and Frame project.

Whereas politics and printed media used to speak with the voice of authority, we are now taking matters into our own hands. For example by continually posting comments online, writing blog entries, or twittering. The authority of the traditional media like newspapers is increasingly judged by what it can immediately provide us with: what we see is what we judge. The classical top-down cultural regulation through dissemination to the masses has become inoperable because of its one-to-many construction without any flexibility for editorial positions.

However, the traditional media can only be judged from the margins, by commenting on articles. Outside of these traditional media, authority increasingly transforms itself from a central organ into a hybrid body of metadata: stacking multiple layers of information, and formed in a decentralized and modular way.

Which forms of opinion are allowed by online media? Does the form of online media permit a sufficient amount of nuance that prevents opinion from remaining an ‘expression of thought’, and the grading of commentaries via the ‘Like’ button? The new construction of online authority includes, among others, the following questions about editorial and visual design:

What exactly is the position of the editor/reader in the metadata game: how does it support the construction of a new type of authority?

What is the form of online opinion?

Which forms of opinion are possible within the decentralized metadata structures?

Kim de Groot researches and creates images about metadata culture in which text, image, and opinion are superimposed. Within the context of ‘The Form and the Frame,’ Kim will (re)design several infrastructures for opinion in which the evolution of form and frame through new media will occupy a central position. Starting June 4, she will elborate on above questions as a supplement to the exhibition ‘The Form and the Frame.’

Matthijs Kouw from the Virtual Knowledge Studio (Amsterdam/Maastricht) invited me to give a talk as a part of the workshop: The digital making of art and science at the Maastricht university.

The main thread of my talk was:
The transformation of images turning into network protocols and into units of production and how it inspires me to reinvent existing institutional approaches, such as that of museums, to images. The process of restoration in museums can turn into an inhouse copy culture if only one would focus on the concept of metadata for example...

Matthijs writes in his report on the event:
"Kim de Groot presented her work on the networked image, and presented various configurations and reconfigurations of 'the image' as facilitated and enabled by digital technologies."

Sarah de Rijcke blogs about my work and that of Coralie Vogelaar:
"It is very interesting how their work really embodies the idea that images are not merely tools, but are themselves sites of knowledge production and dissemination."
http://tiny.cc/tjubm

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Other speakers at this event were: Sarah de Rijcke of the Virtual Knowledge Studio in Amsterdam, Peter Peters (Maastricht University, Hogeschool Zuyd) and Ruth Benschop (Hogeschool Zuyd) on Artistic Research, Stijn Verhoeff (Jan van Eyck academie), Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform), Angelo Vermeulen (Artist) and Caroline Nevejan.

Metahaven talks "metadata" with Kim de Groot as she maps opportunities for change in institutional approaches to the contemporary image economy.
For the Copyist, a journal that accompanies the Play Van Abbe, Metahaven interviewed me about my research on image production in Flickr and You Tube and the concept of the operational image. (download the interview below)

Extracts from the interview:

KdG: With my 3D models I aim to show internal hierarchies in the image, by looking at its ‘popular spots’. I try to design the image as a unit of production, and reproduction. Images are permanently (re)produced according to the growing amount of users and tags that are added to it. Comment sections and other metadata categories start to integrate with the image itself. The production and distribution of the image is no longer a preface to the end result, it is part of the image. Definitely, metadata is one of the founding mechanisms behind this transformation

[..]

MH: What is an operational image?

KdG: Museums should think about how art exists as an image, and not only how it should be presented as art. Application means to put things into operation. The image of art offers potential to do this. Corporate art collectors acknowledge this or at least make use of it by using art as a visual brand. What is the potential of the image of art for a museum? I think that considering the artwork as an operational image may allow the museum to design new dynamics around the actual work. The museum could produce series of derivative images, itself based on a kind of information and metadata which only the museum possesses.

Lissitzky Decay

In many ways, Malraux's vision has become much more than true: Taken literally, today's "Musee imaginaire" will most likely be a sort of semantic museum, a virtual collection of all artworks online, eventually re-arranged in an hypermuseum that is perfectly accessible through the algorithms of a search engine or an encyclopedic approach which sets out to categorize all kinds of predominant styles in art. But to the same extent as a great number of artworks get sort of visible and digitally accessible, more and more material needs to be ignored, marginalized and kept away in a status of uncertainty, unclassifiable and unwanted as such. Supposed to be neither an artwork nor archive material, rejected by the depot as well as the library, those pieces refuse meaning on a meta-level, precisely because they cannot be reduced to metadata. Rather than imagining as if there were real access, an imaginary museum would have to intervene into the struggles for imagination itself. Its most precious pieces would be what could have been easily thrown away without anyone noticing it. (text by Florian Schneider)

floor with originals

metadata mobile

website

http://grey19.imaginaryproperty.org


The Grey 19 is based on artworks that float between archive, depot and collection. The floor offers an overview with the 'original' works. This is the basis on which we have constructed the website and the mobile, both build on the metadata that these artworks have gathered while being 'housed' by the Van Abbe museum.

This year's recruitment campaign is based on the idea of 'video messages'. The poster is actually not a poster but a collection of tickets. The still on the ticket is a reference to the online video messages in which staff, researchers and future researchers talk about the jve, applying to the jve, experiences so far at the jve etc. (films are recorded with Florian Schneider)
www.campaign.janvaneyck.nl

The campaign is meant to attract new researchers to the JVE.

More images soon..

Check your mailboxes for the recruitment campaign (poster!) i have designed for 2010

campaign envelop

Saturday 10 April, during the National Museum Weekend, Play Van Abbe Part 2, Time Machines, will open. In this part, utopian museum models of the past and radical historical prototypes will be assessed to find out if and how they can be applied today. How does a museum tell a story through presentation techniques and what are the underlying assumptions? We will be delving into the structure of the museum to examine its foundations, historical and otherwise. The museum reveals itself as a machine that continually produces a past via a mechanism of selection and exhibition: it is a time machine in the literal sense.
http://vanabbemuseum.nl

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Play Van Abbe - Part 2
Time Machines
10/04/2010 - 12/09/2010
Location: Van Abbemuseum
Opening: Saturday, 10 April 2010 16:00

Programme opening
16.00 – 16.30 Speech opening in the auditorium by the major of Eindhoven, Rob van Gijzel and Charles Esche, director Van Abbemuseum
16.45 – 19.30 Tours by special guest guides
18.30 – 19.00 Performance by Spartacus Chetwynd

andré malrauxTogether with Florian Schneider who is invited as guest curator for Play Van Abbe I have been working on the museum model of André Malraux, Le Musée Imaginaire, for Play Van Abbe Part 02. As a part of Timemachines, Part 02 of Play Van Abbe, the Museum Modules section presents four studies based on special museum projects from the past. It will open on 10 April and run until 12 September 2010

Central questions of the Play Van Abbe project are:
What is the role of an art museum in the 21st century?
What are the conventions of a museum and to what extent are we aware of them?
How did they develop and are they appropriate today? Can we make them visible? Change them? Play with them?

For 18 months, the multifaceted programme of Play Van Abbe will take the collection and use it to suggest answers to the questions outlined above. It aims to focus not only on the artworks themselves but also on the way we are allowed to look at and to talk about them in a museum. Questions about form and content, copy and original, good and bad are put up for argument. The apparent neutrality of the museum is tested and the relation to exhibiting and collecting art is explored. The history and purpose of art museums in general and Van Abbemuseum in particular are revealed as partial and related as much to ethical decisions about society as to aesthetic choices about beauty and order.
http://vanabbemuseum.nl

e-flux advertisement

Im designing this year's recruitment campaign of the Jan van Eyck academy. This is the e-flux advertisement that announces the campaign.

In a few days the website of the campaign will be online... All is based on video messages i have filmed from the building, staff and researchers.

Last week all the researchers, staff, advising researchers celebrated the opening of 2010 with a great and interesting opening week at the Jan van Eyck. New advising researchers Mladen Dolar and John Palmesino introduced themselves and the whole week kicked off with Martha Rosler, Armin Linke and Anton Vidokle talking about the 'new'.

Here's a summary of my lecture.

What else can an image be? Slices of networked production

Central to my research is the expansion of the concept and visuality of the image with the invisibility of its networked infrastructure, production and distribution which in general i will refer to as image management.
What i think is interesting for designers right now is to approach image management as the underlying structure of design that asks for an interesting and challenging aesthetic parallel. To approach management as an aesthetic involves for example the introducing of fiction into standardization processes that networks are based on.
The exchange between visible and invisible is what i think an image is, a slice of networked production. The production and distribution of the image in various networks is no longer a preface to the end result, it is the image. The image performs certain network protocols, linking people, connecting camera's etc.
Image management involves a decision to apply an image and produce a networked cycle of events.
How is management as a structural and abstract process included in the image as an aesthetic as it is part of the creation of an image?

>>more to read...

The program of exhibition and cinéclub on filmmakers Straub and Huillet. (design by Jack Fisher and me)

Program: 'Of a people who are missing'

exhibition Extracity

Together with Jack Henrie Fisher (also researcher design at the JVE) I have designed the program and some posters for the exhibition and ciné-club on films by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

12 November to 20 December 2009
Extra City Antwerp

OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING is a ciné-club to discuss the aesthetical and political significance of the films by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub for contemporary image production. Huillet/Straub are among the most controversial, uncompromised and yet widely unknown filmmakers of both the presence and the history of cinema. Their films span over five decades and cover a wide range of topics, references and materials from arts, literature, theatre, and music. From November 12 to December 21 2009 OF A PEOPLE WHO ARE MISSING will open as a platform for both, the viewing and making of films. The exhibtion space in Extra City, Antwerp, is structured by five studios which will act as showrooms as well as independent production spaces. Each studio is used in a different configuration of archive material, film excerpts, actual footage and the critical discourse around it. Every Thursday to Saturday one studio will host invited guests and contributors for a series of screenings, lectures and debates.

Among the contributors are: Chantal Akerman, Pietro Bianchi, Manon de Boer, Robert Bramkamp, Giulio Bursi, Barton Byg, Rinaldo Censi, Merel Cladder, Anna Fiacciarini, Jack Henrie Fisher, Peter Friedl, Kim de Groot, Romano Guelfi, Tim Liebe, Armin Linke, Laura Malacart, Sally Shafto, Ines Schaber, Eyal Sivan, Benoît Turquety, Barbara Ulrich, Klaus Volkmer, Susanne Weirich.

Curated by: Annett Busch and Florian Schneider

http://ofapeoplewhoaremissing.net

This is an experiment with making moving object out of the 3D sculptures that represent the evolution of the image, going from a flat plane to a collection of loose modules.

design utrecht manifest by Metahaven

The overload of thumbnails on the iPhone's interface is not images, it is all applications (apps). Apple claims there is "Apps for Everything"; Apps for Working Out, Apps for Around the House, Apps for Going Out, Apps for Managing Money, Apps for Cooks, Apps for Keeping Current, Apps for the Great Outdoors, Apps for Music, Apps for Students, Apps for Mom and Dads, Apps for Work, Apps for Fun and Games, Apps for Traveling. For now this is where the 'Apps for Everything' range ends although I guess that within a month another segment of life will be ‘apped’ and interfaced.

My Image Map research in the JVE yearbook