VJ Pixel and Sander Veenhof were chosen to work together for one month in The Netherlands and another month in Brazil. They will work on their projects from different experiences in researching augmented reality (AR) systems.

Follow their process and progress on the blog.

This project is supported by Mondriaan Fund

The artist in residence is a collaboration between NIMk, STEIM and Sonic Acts Festival. The installation will be presented as part of the Sonic Acts – Travelling Time exhibition at NIMk from Februari 23 – April 15, 2012.

The project is supported by the Mondriaan Fund

NLCuts_Nettime_Spectre

Amsterdam, 17 June 2011

Re: New cultural policy in the Netherlands and the future of Open, Cahier on Art & the Public Domain

Dear friends of Open,

The recent announcement that governmental funding of SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain will be stopped by 2013 means that the existence of Open, as a project of SKOR, is also threatened!

On 10 June, the Dutch Secretary of State for Culture Halbe Zijlstra (VVD) presented the new cultural policy and the measures that are to be implemented in this regard. Under the pretext of economizing, an unprecedented intervention in the Dutch cultural system is being perpetrated. This above all seems to be an ideological modification of a social-liberal cultural policy into one that is neoliberal and populist. The extreme extent of the cutbacks (more than 30% for the visual arts!), the rapidity with which these must be implemented and the radical choices that have been made (whereby the Secretary of State has completely ignored the advice of the Netherlands Arts Council) would appear to confirm this. The new concept for art and culture is primarily aimed at efficiency, market processes and large audience reach.

In the visual arts, not only are fusions being forced and budgets cut in half, but governmental funding of various renowned institutions is being completely stopped. This is not just the fate of SKOR, but also that of the Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NIMK), Manifesta, the Rijksacademie, Jan van Eyck, De Ateliers and six of the eleven prestigious Dutch exhibition institutes. Art journals and magazines will no longer be subsidized.

Open is a groundbreaking SKOR project with an independent editorial team. It is published by NAi Publishers in collaboration with SKOR, and since 2004 has been an esteemed international platform for experimental and interdisciplinary thought on art, culture and the public domain. Open publishes profound, in-depth essays and is not aimed at a wide audience. It is not profitable and has but a small market. It is unique and invaluable. How Open can possibly manage to survive without SKOR in the current neoliberal and populist Dutch climate and its denuded cultural landscape is difficult to imagine right now…

Your declaration of support is urgently needed, and SKOR and Open are calling on you to make a stand against the present, fatal developments. We ask you to sign the digital petitions below before 20 June. And please, forward the petitions within your network!

On 27 June, the new cultural policy plan will be discussed in the Lower House. We will keep you informed.

Kind regards,

Jorinde Seijdel & Liesbeth Melis
Editor in Chief and Editor of Open, Cahier on Art & the Public Domain

Petition SKOR

General petition against the cutbacks in the arts

Relevant links
- Slash & Burn, blog Sven Lütticken (English)
- Platform Dutch art organizations
- Letter by united Dutch art organizations to Halbe Zijlstra (English)

Dear Mr Zijlstra
Dear Members of the House of Representatives

One of the many decisions in your arts policy paper “More than quality; a new vision on arts policy”, is the liquidation of the total infrastructure for new media and art. The media arts & technology sector, which has acquired a place in arts policy in the past 8 years, has been abolished. The socalled ‘development institutions’: STEIM, Waag Society, V2_, Submarine Channel, WORM and Mediamatic are losing their structural funding. In addition to that the Netherlands Media Art Institute, a visual arts institution which also works in the media arts field, loses its government funding. These structural institutional resources will be rerouted into a new Fund for the Creative Industry, which’s mission is to stimulate the social and economic value of the creative industry as a whole.

New media art is an independent art discipline
The existance of new media as an independent art discipline, including artistic production, audiences, (inter)national networks, and events, is completely denied in this proposed new arts policy.

New media art is a discipline which questions and researches the technological developments and challenges of our times, and designs new applications for these issues. It has its own idiom and art practice. It is an independent discipline sustaining independent thematics, international networks of media labs, festivals, publications and presentations. The Dutch model of these cooperating new media labs with crossovers into other fields (social, educational, economical) has been an exemplary model since years. The above mentioned ‘development institutions’ are internationally renowned, part of vast international networks, and contribute to the position of the Netherlands in the fields of new media and art.

Paradox: punished for success
Like no other arts field, new media art makes connections to other fields. Its R&D functions are relevant towards the total field of culture, as well as heritage and media. Exchange with science is continually growing, it plays a vital role in the innovation of social domains, and has a large impact on the current renewal of education. The paradox now is that new media art is widely acknowledged and seen as very relevant, but its source: artistic research including its audience outreach, autonomous art prodcution and international network, will now be discontinued.

Project based vs structural
The policy paper indicates a choice for a project based way of working, and for that reason a total cut in institutional funding for R&D. This is a very remarkable way of reasoning as R&D activities need long term commitment in order to be able to develop from experiment to result. It also requires excellent networking and a sustainable infrastructure, including complex relationships to social fields, business and science. The new media institutions like no other have paved the way for such cooperations, and have shown that arts, sciences, business and society in general can work together in meaningful coalitions. International cooperations that have been openend up to Dutch partners also exist thanks to long term policy. With the abolishment of structural support of these new media art institutions, the basis is washed away and it will be impossible in the future to enter into long term commitments. Like European funding for and participation in research and projects, and participation in national research programmes.
A project based way of working interferes with continuity.

Talent development
The new Fund for the Creative Industry is also supposed to work on talent development in a project based manner. This is contrary to the needs of the educational field where there is a demand for structural connections. The new media and art institutions have acknowledged that and play an important role in development of talent and skills through the programmes they have set up together with vocational institutions and universities. They also offer internships and work with PHD students. The very same sustainable long term structures are necessary here in order to be able to structurally work within education.

The way the Fund for the Creative Industry should work!

New media art can only contribute to the mission of enlarging the social and economic value of the creative industry, in case the Fund is enabled to:
(1) issue longer term institutional subsidies and
(2) means are explicitely made available for artistic research, artistic production and audience based activities

We sincerely hope that you will involve the new media and art institutions in the set up and creation of the new Fund, and that the above arguments will lead to the desired adjustments. We will be more than happy to share our views with you, as well as the knowledge that we have in the area of international new media arts policy.

Yours sincerely,

V2_
Waag Society
STEIM
Mediamatic
WORM
Submarine Channel
NIMk

International comment:

New Media Art Organisations in Netherlands lose funding.

The Dutch New Media Art Organisations Steim, Waag Society, Mediamatic, V2_, WORM & NIMK are about to lose all their funding.

The Dutch secretary of state for Culture in the Netherlands, Halbe Zijlstra, has published his policy plan for coming years. In contrast to the official recommendations given to him by the Culture Advisory Board, the cutbacks will not be spread out over a number of years, but will take immediate effect in 2013. The budget for visual art will shrink from 53,3 to 31 million.

Among the more damaging and destructive decisions is the complete cutting of funding for the six leading New Media Art Organisations that produce, distribute and facilitate New Media Art;

STEIM: A research lab and a hotspot that operates in the field of live performance. Its research themes are complexity and improvisation and STEIM facilitates hundreds of artists and scientists every year.

WAAG SOCIETY: Institute for art, science & technology, developers of creative technologies for social innovation, open design tools and platforms for artists and creative industry. Public programme with workshops, conferences, exhibits and challenges. Partner in (inter)national research programmes and incubation programmes.

WORM: Rotterdam based laboratory, venue and studios for film, music and internet featuring concerts, new media events, screenings, production of film, music and software art.

MEDIAMATIC: software art projects, lectures, workshops & screenings aiming on the young generation of artists, designers & tinkerers.

V2_: interdisciplinary centre for art and media technology in Rotterdam, activities include research and development, and organizing presentations, exhibitions and workshops, research and development, embedded in an extensive international network.

NIMK: The Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) promotes the wide and unrestrained development, application and distribution of, and reflection on, new technologies within the visual arts. Since the Netherlands Media Art Institute came into being in 1978 an extensive collection of video and media art has been assembled, to which new works are constantly being added.

These institutes together form the foundation for New Media Arts in the Netherlands and fulfil an important role in the International Network that shares knowledge, exchanges, produces, distributes and promotes various forms of New Media Art. For most of these organisations the budget cuts will mean their disappearance.

The memorandum announced by the Secretary of State today does not signal a new beginning, as he indicated earlier, but simply the end of an internationally valued cultural climate, unparalleled anywhere in the world.

For Thorbecke – the spiritual father of the Secretary of State Zijlstra, or at least of his party – the policy was the result of a long-term vision. He saw the political manager as the designer of the age, who interprets historical lines and develops a vision for the future on that basis. Compared with his predecessor, the measures proposed by the Secretary of State pale into insignificance. They choose short-term results which do not take into account historically acquired benefits and social developments.

One prominent Dutch collector called the Secretary of State’s memorandum a new “iconoclasm”. This comparison is striking and appropriate. The field of the “visual arts” is crippled in and by this memorandum, with fatal consequences for the public.

We live in a culture of images. Knowledge and information mainly circulate in the form of images. Art, and the visual arts in particular, are the perfect field for teaching us to deal with things we do not yet know and providing us with unexpected visions and horizons. The visual arts relate in a self-conscious and critical way to the ubiquitous image. Therefore it is incomprehensible for a government which wants to prepare its citizens for a promising future to decide to remove the part of the social system which guides the public in this respect. The extremely hard approach adopted in relation to the sector of the visual arts (a reduction from 53.5 million to 31 million) is not supported in this memorandum by either logical or factual arguments.

Amongst other things, the Secretary of State has decided:

- to halve the budget of the Mondriaan fund;

- to drastically reduce the number of presentation institutions in the BIS from 11 to 6. The institutions which are no longer in the BIS cannot go to the Mondriaan fund either, and therefore have no chance of survival;

- to no longer provide any subsidy for art magazines;

- to put a complete stop to the government subsidy for functions which are now carried out by biennial Manifesta, SKOR | Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte (Foundation for Art in Public Spaces), the sectoral institute Premsela, Virtual Platform, the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk);

- to put a stop to financing post-academic education for artists in the Ateliers, Rijksakademie voor beeldende kunsten (Royal Academy for Visual Arts), European Ceramic Work Centre and the Jan van Eyck Academy;
to only support the continued development of 50 visual artists who have proved themselves as top talents in the next four years;

- to halve the individual basic stipends and working grants for artists, and to COMPLETELY stop the present subsidies which serve to provide an income.

The direct and immediate effects of these measures for the PUBLIC which wants to see and experience contemporary art are catastrophic:

The makers, producers and artists form the basis of the cultural infrastructure. After all, with no artists, there is no art. No subsidies or insufficient subsidies for artists to focus professionally and full time on creating work means that there will be no innovative work.

No post-academic education means there will be no growth of new artists who excel and can represent the Netherlands abroad. Removing this function will immediately lead to a reduction in the provision of Dutch presentation institutions, so that the Netherlands will lose its competitive position. This will result in the total impoverishment of the art market in the Netherlands and to a weaker position of the Dutch galleries on the international art market.

A minimal number of presentation institutions means that the new art will not find its way to the public and will remain locked up in studios and warehouses. The Dutch and international public in the Netherlands will not be able to see any innovative art.

Removing an institution such as SKOR means that the presence of art in public spaces – democratic and by definition “anti-elitist”, because it is accessible to everyone free of charge – will decline.

Closing an institution such as NIMk means that a valuable, partly digital heritage – video art and film art and media art – will become fragmented and will no longer be accessible to the public.

The innovative part of the field of the visual arts, which also determines the international image of the creative Netherlands, cannot survive without a financial injection from the state.

The current cultural system which was definitively torpedoed today has produced artists and curators who are currently making an international furore and are, amongst other things, a focal point in the current biennale in Venice – the world championships of the visual art

For example, the work of Navid Nuur has pride of place on the front cover of the official catalogue of the Venice Biennale. Like Amalia Pica, who lives in the Netherlands, he is taking part in the central exhibition Illuminations. Their colleagues, Praneet Soi, Yael Bartana, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Han Hoogerbrugge, Aernout Mik, Libia Castro, Olafur Olafsson, Edwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, play a major role in the pavilions of India, Poland, Denmark, Roma, Iceland and Dropstuff respectively. The Dutchman Guido van der Werve can be seen at the same time in the context of the Future Generation exhibition, where the Ukrainian Victor Pynchuck is showing the way to the talent of the future. It is not only Dutch artists who are a glittering presence in Venice this year; their fellow curators are also prominently present. No fewer than five curators working in the Netherlands are furnishing pavilions this year. The Marres director, Guus Beumer, is responsible for the Dutch pavilion, the BAK director Maria Hlavajova is doing the Roma Pavilion, the freelancer Maria Rus Bojan is doing the Romanian pavilion, the SKOR director, Fulya Erdemci, is doing the Turkish pavilion and the Appel tutor, Henk Slager is doing the Georgian Pavilion.

The achievement of these artists and curators were made possible due to the existence of a cultural system which has cherished experimentation, innovation, the development of talents and an international focus up to now, and made it possible (financially). They were able to develop their work and their practice due to investments by the state of the Netherlands. These investments are now bearing fruit and showing results in an “export product” of which the Netherlands can be proud. This system is recognized and celebrated all over the world because of its efficiency and future-oriented approach.

The Secretary of State’s memorandum shows that the cabinet is thinking only of what is producing immediate results today, and not about what can generate “value for the future”. We all know that there is not only a today, but also a tomorrow. We would like to see that in tomorrow’s Netherlands there will be still be a great deal of contemporary art and historical heritage which can be seen frequently. We hope that the Lower House shares this desire and will oppose a policy that looks only at today.

The boards of directors, managements and representatives of:
De Zaak Nu – on behalf of the presentation institutions
SKOR | Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte (Foundation for Art in Public Spaces)
NIMk – Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst (Netherlands Media Art Institute)
The post-academic institutions – de Ateliers, Rijksakademie and the Jan van Ecyk Academy
The collector Martijn Sanders and the patrons Maurice van Vaalen and Rob Defares
The artists’ action group, ‘Schuilen in het Rijks’

We Are Forests is a new participatory sound work that used everyday and emergent mobile technologies to ask, ‘What would you whisper into a stranger’s ear’? The project resulted in a sound work that used mobile technologies to create a shared yet intimate connection between strangers in physical space.

The project was developed through a shared residency, supported by Pervasive Media Studio, Netherlands Media Arts Institute (Amsterdam, NL), 5daysoff festival (Amsterdam, NL) and Kitchen Budapest (HU).

Duncan Speakman and Émilie Grenier used their cross-European shared residency to develop We Are Forests, a sound work that used mobile technologies to create connections between strangers.

As part of their residency, Duncan and Émilie kept a blog to document the progress of their project over the course of 3 months. From initial experiments to final tests, the blog provides insights into the development of the project, and the varied methods techniques and methods employed by both artists in their practise.

Émilie Grenier is a Canadian artist who uses technology to produce sound experiences that encourages users and audiences to focus on their surroundings. Duncan Speakman is internationally recognised sound artist who has created a number of works that physically and emotionally engage audiences in public spaces. Both artists have previously collaborated on the creation of subtlemob, a series of soundwalks that created filmic experiences for audiences in public spaces.

Related Links:
We Are Forests

Arjan Scherpenisse

Artist in Residency by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk

Naked on Pluto is developed during a shared residency at NIMk, BALTAN Laboraties and Piksel, between June and November 2010, by Dave Griffiths, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk. The project is licensed Copyleft. The research and development process is documented and can be followed on http://pluto.kuri.mu and http://facebook.com/is.so.convenient. The game can be played on http://naked-on-pluto.net

“You are 4.3 billion kilometres away from the nearest human, what would you like to do?”
Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure Game on Facebook. You wake up on Pluto, in a city under the rule of Elastic Versailles revision 14, a corrupted Artificial Intelligence and former entertainment colony. It used to be the Las Vegas of the Solar System, a true paradise for consumers and corporations alike. Until something snapped… What happened and how to escape?

Versailles is a capital of convenience, a non stop 24hr zone of endless pleasure, provided by Pluto’s huge entertainment corporations. Amuse yourself and your friends for hours on end collecting meaningless tokens, talking to our bland robots, or simply relax and take in the staggering conformity of your new home. Take absolutely no notice of the areas you aren’t allowed to go into, even if it were possible to break out of the zone around the Palace, why would you possibly want to – or indeed why change the core structures of this world when they have been so excellently taylored to fit your every desire?

The game explores the limits and nature of social networks from within, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is tolerated by the companies that own them, carefully documenting this process as we go. Story and play are combined with an investigation on how exposed we are on social networks, and how our data are being used.

Naked on Pluto is also part of the international touring exhibition Funware, opening November 12 at MU Eindhoven.

Biographies
Dave Griffiths was raised on an early education in weaving, bell ringing and 8bit computers, and is now dedicated to changing the world with free software, live animation and noise. He works as a self employed artist/programmer, mainly working with the FoAM art laboratory and performs as part of slub – a livecoding band. He creates installations, open source software and teaches workshops around the themes of games, music and the lisp programming language. Past work includes computer graphics for games, feature film special effects and machine vision research for Sony’s EyeToy group.

Marloes de Valk is an (software) artist. She studied Sound and Image at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague, specializing in abstract compositional computer games, HCI and crashing computers. Her work consists of audiovisual performances and installations, investigating machine theatre and narratives of digital processes. She has participated in exhibitions throughout Europe, teaches workshops, gives lectures and has published articles on Free/Libre/Open Source Software, free culture and art (a.o. in the Contemporary Music Review and Archive 2020. Sustainable archiving of born digital cultural content). She is editor of FLOSS Art (OpenMute, 2008) as well as the Digital Artists’ Handbook (folly and GOTO10, 2008). She is a former member of artist collective GOTO10, and has helped develop the puredyne GNU/Linux distribution and make art festival. She is currently collaborating with Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths on a social gaming project.

Aymeric Mansoux is an artist, musician and media researcher.
In 2003, he founded GOTO10 with Thomas Vriet, a non profit organization and artist collective, with the goal to promote the use and support of free software in electronic music and media art creation. Aymeric has been active in the collective until 2010 and initiated several projects such as: ‘make art’, a yearly international no nonsense festival for software artists using and writing free software; ‘Puredyne’, a popular live GNU/Linux distribution for creative media and the ‘FLOSS Art publication’, the first collection of essays on FLOSS and digital art production.

Since 2009, he is mentor and co-supervisor of study for the networked media branch of the Media Design and Communication Master of the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL). Aymeric is also an MPhil/PhD student at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, researching online art and design communities, free culture licenses and resources, and distributed collaboration.

by Sonia Cillari

Performative electric-field sensing and sound environment (performance duration: ~ 2 hours)

Co-produced by STEIM and Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam and Claudio Buziol Foundation in Venice.

Supported by Fonds BKVB and Optofonica Laboratory for Immersive ArtScience in Amsterdam.
Sensitive to Pleasure is a work about conflict, an intimate piece in which the artist emphasizes her controversial relationship with her own work in front of the public.

Cillari stands outside the door of a dark Ambisonic cube, where she grants entry to only one visitor at a time. The cube features her work, a naked female (the ‘creature’), which reveals the sound of its body when in contact with other human beings. The physical interaction between the creature and the visitor is linked to the artist’s body via electrical pulses, provoking a strong physical experience in her which is painful but might also be considered pleasant. Cillari uses the visitor to gain a physical experience about her work.

The intimacy between the visitor and the creature inside will not be documented in order to guarantee intimacy and allow the visitor to fully experience the work through involvement and exposure. Cillari wants to explore ways in which visitors may interact with the creature knowing that their behavior causes a strong physical reaction on her outside the cube. At the same time, she explores the notion of voyeurism within the audience, watching her while she ‘experiences’ her own work of art.

A path of lights guides the visitor to the entrance of the cube; the lights’ subtle changes reflect the encounters between the visitor and the creature, enhancing the sensuality of the work.

Sensitive to Pleasure is homage to Pygmalion (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, X), the sculptor who falls in love with a statue he created. This work deals with an inverted relationship of control between the creator and his own creation. The physical connection between them represents keeping each other alive, a metaphor of mutually dependent relationship.

Sensitive to Pleasure connects with Sonia Cillari’s latest research of working with and exploring the Body as Interface.
Project credits:
Hardware interface development: Stock
Environment programming: Ulrich Berthold
Ambisonics sound design and implementation: Maurizio Martinucci (aka Tez)

Annette with offline Avatar

Annette Wolfsberger (NL/AT), is an Austrian-born producer, curator and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her areas of interest include media arts, as well as contemporary and popular culture. She works for a diverse number of cultural organisations, including Sonic Acts (NL), Virtueel Platform (NL), NIMk – Netherlands Media Arts Institute (NL), Kontraste (AT) and Trans Europe Halles (TEH). She also regularly contributes to publications on new media policy and practice.