summ( )n

Vanabbe museum of contemporary art in Eindhoven has launched its 18 month long Play Vanabbe program last Saturday. The museum is known for its experimental and innovative approach in displaying modern art, and also in exploring new dimensions of the relationships between art and society at large. Charles Esche, current head of the Museum, and his crew keep experimenting with new forms and formats of the museum, and the new program is a perfect example of that. It will be based on experience design principles, and include interactive and co-creative aspects, challenging the classical top-down and bi-polar disposition of the Artist and the audience.

The opening itself was quite an event; the ceremony run through an entire building (and it is a very twisted, Alice-in-Wonderland like building) and consisted of multiple performances, presentations, exercises and of course serendipitous encounters of people with multiple forms of art. I really liked the somewhat surreal, Ionesco-style play by Nicoline Harskamp, performed by a collective of both professional and amateur artists.

The play was titled “The Democratic Possibilities of Conflict”, and was in fact a re-enactment of the very opening of the contemporary art exhibition in a ‘large museum’, a massive self-reflective exercise running in real time. Both funny and thought-provoking, it was quite a self-therapeutic moment for many in the audience. I expect more stories about this, and the following evens in, and around this museum in this blog.

Design initiatief not only profiled us on their site – the agency has actually printed a book, called Future Telling, and yesterday I’ve got a freshly printed copy of the publication! It looks like a real book, almost 80 pages, all very nicely designed (btw, the ‘coffee spot’ you can see on the cover is not a coffee spot; it’s a well designed-in detail

We played the game with the agency early last summer, and wanted to share the key insights and experiences at an annual conference of Design Initiatief in October; the conference was postponed till March 2010, but the book went to print and voila, we now have both nice AND useful object.

In addition to the game description and key results (future scenarios for Holland in 2024) it also contain the list of most perspective areas for future innovations; the book is only in Dutch so far, so the audience is bit limited, but Design Initiatief to reprint an updated version of the book later next year, with more information and English translation.

PS: It also smells like a book; we are all digital and stuff…. but nicely – and freshly – printed book will always have their magic.

I attended a day-long workshop about Arduino, at the Mediamatic Bank in Amsterdam; the software part was easy, I used to write a lot of code in the past, but the hardware and electronics was a bit mind-boggling; need to master that in the future! But our trainer, Ubi de Feo was really cool, so the event was not only useful, but a pleasant one too.

“On November 30th, from 17:00-19:30 at BALTAN Laboratories we will officially open The Future of the Lab with a public program. Horst Hörtner, Director of the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz, Austria, will give a keynote lecture to launch the event, which will be followed by an artistic programme organised by BALTAN Laboratories.”

On November 23, the Dutch trend research agency ShootMyFood held its first Food Inspiration Day in the Evoluon congress center in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. The event has gathered 500+ participants and was sold out long before the start, the largest success story for the agency so far.

Clive van Heerden, creative director of the Design Probe program, was the last speaker of the day. He shared with the audience the Philips Design’s approach of exploring possible futures by developing provocative design probes, and also presented three most recent probes related to food: Diagnostic Kitchen, Creative Cooking, and Biosphere.

The last probe, Biosphere, strongly resonated with the talk of previous speaker, Rob Baan, from Koppert Cress. Rob was presenting (in a very multisensorial way) his Architecture Aromatique, a novel approach to producing and distributing ‘natural tastes’. In a conversation during the after-conference party one of the participants regretted when she didn’t find the 3D printed desserts among the offered delicacies. The best feedback you can expect for the ‘presentation of the future’ – “we want this future, now!”

We are currently discussing with Philips Design a program of support for their Design Probes program, which will be using their community as a launch pad. More on that later on this blog.

Design Initiatief, Dutch agency promoting more active use of design and multidisciplinary collaboration for business innovation, placed a large material about our game, Playing Future, which we developed for them and played earlier in the summer. The event was once briefly mentioned (or rather shown) in our blog, but we were a bit restrained to tell all the details before the official publication by DI, our commissioner.

The article is in Dutch, but I hope Otto will help us translating it into English (assuming we are profiled relatively well there Also, as we learned from the DI team, they just published a book(let) with the key insights from the game, and a short description of the tool. The site says that the book is available for download, but I failed to get it so far (and yes, it’s in Dutch too).

Ok, it’s may be not directly linked to the Summ( )n’s core activities and projects, but I feel it is still interesting to share here. We often call ourselves ‘artists’ – partly because we believe that art, and contemporary, modern, post-modern – whatever the label – art is an essential ingredient of the our transformational solutions. But this self-description has a literal meaning too – some of us are musicians and play in a band, some craft beautiful collages and some others – beautiful digital codes.

My own part in this game is photography. These days millions of people take pictures, and photography is often seen as a ‘lesser art’. But for me my blog – aman_geld – is a typical case of pure art project, created out fun and our of pleasure to do, and yet somehow powerfully driving me for more than seven years already. The format is deceptively simple, one picture a day, but it also has a much deeper meaning for me. I often call aman_geld’s work ‘perceptual experiments’ or lately – ‘games of transception’.

In the moments like that I used to go into lengthy discussionы what does ‘games of transception’ exactly mean, and why, etc. But today I am lucky – I can just refer you to the newly opened website of the project, aman-geld.com, that hopefully enlighten you om the meaning

The interface is deliberately non-intuitive, instead, it’s a bit enigmatic and puzzling, and invites people to explore and play, enjoying the process, and not only the result. The site will not be only about photography of aman_geld, but tell about other areas and domains where I plan to apply both an approach and resulting visuals. One of them was our installation Walking Backward to the Future< where we actually planned to use aman_geld's works (the task is still to be done, since we had to pull out of the DDW last minute). But there will be more occasions for that, and other ideas from our portfolio.

And another one just coincided with the opening the site - the works by aman_geld are on display in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Perm, Russia:

(As a matter of truth, it was the website that coincided with the exhibition, but this may be also a matter of choosing the right point to backcast from).

I hope we will see a lot of these experimental projects, on- and off-line, and all kind of shades of hybrid-ness in between.

Special thanks to the team of Aextatic, who conjured all that beauty; I hope to play with them further, they’re cool!

A large, complex, multi-part instillation by Philipp Geist, is unfolding at the Kenndy Square, near the bus station in Eindhoven. Both static and dynamic images of the words combined with the light beams, sounds and smoke create an immersive and interactive 3D poetry, inviting people to play and co-create, with the environment and with other people.

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Finally I met Yelena, from CaravanCultura creative agency/consultancy, a long time due contact. Based in Eindhoven, the agency organized a vast array of projects and initiatives all around Eurasia: from Moscow to Almaty, from Brussels to Belgrade, creatively mixing design, technology, cultural studies and art. CaviarRouge was one of the latest proejct in the raw. Held during the Dutch Design Week’09, the forum explored possible developments of the design industry, today and in the future. The event was both playful and practical, and not only left pleasant memories but also opened new opportunities to collaborate and create new values for all its 40+ participants.

There is a strong affinity between the Summ( )n activities, both current and future, and projects by Yelena and CaravanCultura, and I am sure we will summon something very exciting very soon.

PS: As a useful feedback point, I’ve been told that Summ( )n should explain, once and for all, what does ‘summon’ exactly mean in our context. I thought it’s clear that we didn’t mean “an order to appear in court”, but rather a beautiful magical ritual of evoking, or calling something – or somebody – to appear, through spaces and time. Nope, we need to tell this story more explicitly; we will.

Few days ago Otto and myself stopped at the T.A.C., or Temporary Art Center, an independent gallery in Eindhoven. The exhibition that was on display during the Dutch Design Week (and which I still have to write here about) was already dismantled, but there were a few ‘traces’ of it on the walls, including these posters, presenting Eindhoven as the World Capital of Design 2012.

That is not the true fact; yet, at least, as many Eindhoveners would add. Eindhoven is indeed pre-selected, together with Helsinki, and out of 42 other candidates – as a possible ‘capital of design’ in 2012, three years from now. The actual nomination will be announced later in November, and so these posters are a good example of wishful thinking.

But they are also an example of a very strong technique of the ‘futuring’, namely, ‘backcasting from the future’, when the stories are told as if this future has happened already. An interesting approach; there was an article published in the most recent Journal of Consumer Research on this issue, Forecasting and Backcasting: Predicting the Impact of Events on the Future.

According to the authors, backcasting is a more sophisticated technique when working with the ‘futures’:

“The studies also reveal that backcasters consider other information that forecasters tend to ignore. [The] studies show that backcasters expect events to have a greater hedonic impact than do forecasters, largely because they think more about the impacting event.”

In fact, here in Summ()n we plan to apply this tool to our own way of working, to summon the future of Summ()n itself, play with it as if it already happen, and backcast the implications of the developments then-and-there to the activities of here-and-now . We will be telling the stories about these futures here in the blog too!