Gouda in the world

Plans for our next intervention in Gouda

An intimate and intense immersive experience: A mini mobile studio/party on wheels: It is a 15/30 minutes trip in a caravan through the neighborhoods of Gouda. The caravan is indeed a mobile studio in which the public (a small group of friends or people that is around) will be invited to come to have a drink in a short party trip around the city. Each section can have different form of interactions: through music, dance, act or interview. The green screen will be displaying the images of different places and monuments of the world, with weird objects and landmarks from gouda.

the CamERAMICS troup

CamERAMICS

The performance CamEramics, in collaboration with the GoudA Museum, played with the idea of the evaluation of ceramics antique objects that people brought to the museum on that day to be evaluated. Having as personages, a mix of aliens/astronauts/researchers/scientists/clown/ anthropologists, the performers, with their measurement instruments, walked around the museum's courtyard and the market square, approaching the public to measure the emotions of their beloved objects. For that, Mark and Vincent developed a software that associated colors to pre-made sound samples, so that, on the performance, when the object was video recorded, the sound of its colors were emitted through the small speakers. Meanwhile, the images and sounds were displayed in the gateway of the museum.

10 april - ideas for the library event

The idea now is that there is a photo booth on the ground floor of the library where people is invited to scan their favorite book and became part of a virtual book club. When the book is scanned there is made a picture of the person that is registered on the website connected with the number of the book. Only at home people that scanned their favorite book on the library can find back their picture on the website and decide whether they want or not to register themselves on the book club.

meeting with Dick last week

On the meeting we had with Dick last Tuesday he talked about the role of culture on our contemporary society, pointing out the changes that had occurred on the last few decades by the development of the communication technology.

He said:

Culture used to be a sector of the society, like economics, politics, ecology, healthy, and so on.

The role of culture has changed on our contemporary society. The process of producing and giving meaning to human activities, that was the function of the cultural sector on a recent past, is now spread over a wide net of communication in witch the common citizen is able to share all sort of information in a constant process of configuration and reconfiguration of meaning.

What does it means in a local level?

Every city has their physical cultural institutions. They have to adjust to the new reality we live with the rise of the virtual environments. How to reconfigure the role of the cultural institutions in order to make it possible for them to cope with these changes?

How to redefine their way to relate with the society?

What we will have to find out is what is meaningful to be done on the city. For something to be meaningful doesn’t means that it has to be meaningful for everybody – can be just for a certain number of people or community.

It’s important to find the interactions between people from Gouda and the institutions, the streets, the houses and the cafes. Network implies that there are nodes and they are connected to another nodes. And in this sense it’s important to know witch are these nodes.

There are already some communities on the city, how to connect them? Which relationships we can find between then, or how to make it visible? How to specialize the citizens on the things they are interested on?

What can the institutions do on this direction?

The big question is how information produces meaning.