Monday 2 June 2008

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.

Sunday 4 May 2008

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.

Saturday 26 January 2008

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.

Thursday 24 January 2008

Monday 21 January 2008

going on

We are on this brainstorm. It’s still very open. We are thinking about how people can collaborate with the institutions, how the institutions could be collaborating with each other. Last Thursday we visited once more the museum, the archive and the library to try to figure out the fundamental question of each of them. Why they want to change and what they want with it? Later we had an on-line chat: Hereby, you have a synthesis of what came out of the discussion:

The museum is eclectic in its collection; it shows they are open for changing and experiments. The archive seems to have a lot of treasures in side shelves inside buildings. They want to have more audience, with time and interest to go further on their researches. It is often through publications and external exhibitions that a wider public can see the contents of the archive.

So…one of the main questions is: How to create lasting connection with visitors?

The collaboration between the three institutions can really create an interesting flow … the people who go to the archive to research add new content to the museum and find background information in the library. Apparently they have plans to collaborate on an educational level and have the building of the chapel in front of the archive rebuilt to this purpose: a place were an educational / contemporary art space would be housed.

Last skype meeting we had the idea to start something very VERY simple like a cultural space, like a cafe and show some things, let people come…and then see what unfolds from that. The chapel seems to be an ideal location; it’s a building they are familiar with. But it is however a building site - mud floors, no electricity, although it would not be impossible to get the space up and running. We are starting an inventory of suitable spaces so if you have ideas Lyndsey will add a section on the blog to start to compile this info - so empty buildings/ community centre etc. for user access...

Marc brought some ideas about possible ways to do something with objects in museum, what opened a new brainstorm. Could be to tag the objects (rfid, or just visually) and let visitors add other data (stories, thoughts, photos) to them that subsequent visitors can view and comment on. These whole set of meta-data could also exist online or in another (virtual) space (kind of web2.0) in the physical world. It also applies to the archive. The museum already does that from an expert viewpoint, but the audience could also do it from a personal perspective, with objects/situations from THEIR everyday life. Perhaps we could fill the empty text board by that, or replace them with lcd screens. We could also think of an augmented reality tour through the museum, while the tour the visitor would pick up the meta-data (audio/video clips) on a handheld or wearable device as he pass the art-objects. Could even be with the visitors’ own mobile phone or something extravagant as VR-glasses. Could also be drawings/notes or other paper based work left by previous visitors in the card- holders. We could also mount small devices with proximity sensor next to the objects or just a pair of Bluetooth headphones. In some cases mobile phones would be enough already, but headphones have the advantage that you have hands free and can just listen to stories that other people had to say about this/that object. In the library we could place a device that reads the already present rfid tag in the book, and displays audio, video that other people attached to this book. "the object as a key to the data".

We are thinking of a meaningful project in general and about how to make people really WANT to join it. It's obviously important to contextualize the artworks and make it more interactive. We have to make it a good experience. Both context and experience can co-exists and interact.

For now we can fantasize but very soon we will have to come to reality, it means, thinking about all the aspects of practicality on the project. Still, for Tuesday 22, we have an assignment to make our personal ideal fantasy project for Gouda. I thought about a festival and an art residence program sustained by the three institutions and with the support of the local government. It would be based a Lab in Gouda and the artists would stay for a period to develop an art work witch would stay on the city as part of the cultural acervo of the city. It could include urban art, installations or performance, as well all kind of electronic art.

Wednesday 16 January 2008

night dreams

Yesterday night at home we (chris and me) had another brainstorm. Wild ideas about transforming the city itself in a museum and to value the touristic potential of it. I think we have to think about how to connect the past and the present, tradition and contemporaneity. Could be nice to find the daily life spectacle of Gouda, the alive performances that just happen on the streets.

welcome to mirella's blog

a space for our discussions at the cuultur lokaal - patchingzone