Report of “Hello Creative World”, 24 April 2008. By Marije van Eck

The website for “Hello Creative World”, a conference in entrepreneurship in arts and creative education, informed me this event would “show a diversity of interactive tours, challenging climbs, relax cabins, physical training, exciting landscapes, and plenty of opportunities to share your knowledge and experience with a wide variety of Art Schools in Europe”. So, all prepared for an expedition, I arrived at the Dutch Design Center in Utrecht, a former furniture factory. Red and yellow ribbon led me to the Zagerij, where I was invited by the crew into a conference setting, beautifully decorated by artwork hanging from the ceiling. My visitor’s badge, very appropriate, was a Swiss army knife. I was very curious what this day had in store, because my background is not in arts. My drawing has never exceeded that of a ten year-old, and I would not consider myself very creative. I do have an interest in arts and education, and looked forward to hearing different voices and learning new things.

“Hello Creative World” was the result of the project ECCE (Economic Clusters of Cultural Enterprise), which aims to encourage the development of creative SMEs in various regions in Europe. The program started with a screening of the animation “A Fantastic Piano Lesson” by Ton van Rijswijk, which is - fortunately I might say - available on YouTube. A welcome speech by followed, in which the importance and exceptionality of the Faculty of Arts and Economics was explained by Derk Blijleven, dean of this faculty. Peter de Haan of Vrede van Utrecht, which provided funding for the event, explained that arts and culture have always been very important for the city, and they aspire to make Utrecht Cultural Capital of Europe, in 2018.

Keynote Speeches
First of two Keynote speakers, was Anamaria Willis, CEO of CIDA (Creative Industries Development Agency) in the UK. Her speech was perfectly suitable for this event, because her theatrical appearance and enthusiasm were very infectious. A woman with a background in theatre, Willis was all about “making things happen, profitably”. Through anecdotes of her personal success, she emphasized that the key to success and profit in the creative industries is belief. Belief in oneself, and in what one is doing. Teachers at art schools should give their students confidence, courage, to go out into the world and start a gainful business.

Some students will think making money out of arts is wrong, or not important, but Anamaria Willis said that money is needed in order to be able to keep doing what you want to do. There will be many people telling art students they do not know anything about business, but students should be proud of their improvisation skills when it comes to business skills. Because creative people create markets, whereas other entrepreneurs will be successful if they leap into it quickly enough. Willis ended her speech listing quite a few attributes creative entrepreneurs (should) have, among which: integrity, conceptual thinking, networking (local and global), commercial aptitude, and optimism. Confidence, belief, faith in making the impossible possible, and knowing what they are talking about, can make art students successful business(wo)men.

The second keynote speech was provided by Jeroen van Mastrigt, from the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) Faculty of Arts, Media and Technology. His presentation was about the game industry. This is more my field of knowledge. Not a game designer, but having studied games, many examples from his speech were familiar to me, where they puzzled quite some people in the audience. Van Mastright has a history in new media, and is the initiator of the game design program at the HKU. He said there are many things wrong with the game industry, because a lot of companies do not innovate. Also, even though a lot of bigger companies have entered the game industry, they follow a blockbuster logic and focus on making games as realistic as possible. The game designers on the other hand, are young, energetic and innovative, but instead they create what the publisher wants them to create.

Jeroen van Mastrigt emphasized the role education can have in innovating the game industry. Students work, with large companies such as Philips, on innovative games, they create pervasive games and through creating these products they learn many (entrepreneur) skills. Education and research are very valuable to students, and some games created at art school are even so successful, that the students graduate already being entrepreneurs. “Giving kids the opportunity to create games is like not only teaching them how to read, but also how to write”, is how Van Mastright’s described the importance of the game design program.

The Climbs: Two Workshops
After the keynote speeches, the visitors were all invited to choose a workshop to attend. Options for the ‘first climb’ were: “Reflection - Developing Curricula”, “T-Shirts and Suits: Creativity and Business”, “Alumni Development” and “Talent Development: The role of governmental bodies in talent development”. Since everything was new to me, I chose the workshop that appealed to me most and in another part of the Dutch Design Center, I attended the workshop “T-shirts and Suits”. This workshop was moderated by Hans van Dulken of the HKU, and featured a panel of three speakers: David Parrish, an advisor and trainer for creative businesses, and author of the book T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity, also freely available as a pdf; Aileen Gilhooly, opera singer and consultant, and Pierre Gueydier, of the faculty of the arts, languages and history at Université Catholique de l’Ouest in West France, responsible for students’ career development.

The workshop focused largely on the gap between creative people and business people. Making money is something that a lot of artists will consider ‘impure’. David Parrish tries to bridge this gap through his trainings and his book, which aims to make business theory accessible to many people. Learning about business will give creative enterprises more strength. Concern that arose, creative people will be forced into business molds, was done away with, because it became clear that the advisors, who have a background in the creative industry, always ask the creative people what is important to them, so it is not always about making as much money as possible. Pierre Gueydier spoke about a program at his university where product design students are facilitated in finding a steady job, because often creative designers are only hired on a temporary or freelance basis. The added value of a designer for a company was discussed, and a workshop participant mentioned that these people can help the company not only create beautiful products, but often also care for the environment and can help create sustainable products.

After lunch, I attended a second workshop. Available were: “Business Start-Ups at University”, “Work-Based Learning”, “Entrepreneurship: Art or Experience?”, “Research in Education” and “Internationalization of Art schools”. Because of my university background, in which I rarely create, but always research, I chose the ‘retreat in a mountain cabin’. A small group of people attended this workshop on education, hosted by Giep Hagoort, Professor of Art and Economics at HKU. He is the author of the book Art Management: Entrepreneural Style and chairman of the research group Art and Economics, currently engaging in research of cultural SMEs in Utrecht.

Giep Hagoort mentioned that research is not a hot topic at the HKU. I can understand that, because the HKU is not a research school. A workshop participant of the Willem de Kooning art academy in Rotterdam faced the same problem. Students are starting up their own creative businesses as part of the educational program, but no one is doing any research on how these businesses are developing, so she was interested in starting up a research group. Lack of research, by students and teachers, on the one hand, is a problem. The kind of research that needs to be done, is also an issue. Organizations that provide funding want to see numbers, while research in arts will not often provide statistical data. Funding in itself is a big issue as well. What kind of research can you do, who can you do it with, will funding be provided if the research is interdisciplinary? These issues I believe are very serious, but also very common in all fields of research, and it will take a lot more for them to be solved.

During lunch, I spoke briefly with Derk Blijleven, who spoke during the introduction of the event. After telling him about my interest in new media, and my research in online video, we spoke about YouTube, and he asked me if in my opinion a graduating art student could say that they did not want to associate with YouTube and therefore not publish their work on the platform. I was attempted to leave that decision to the student, but what Blijleven told me next was this conference in a nutshell: No, a student cannot ignore a platform like YouTube, because of its massive size and influence, because an art student is a marketer, and needs to be noticed, and needs to be aware of what people, the potential consumers of their art are doing. “A Fantastic Piano Lesson” was viewed 44,366 times on YouTube. Hopefully that will give the art student the courage to make their art work profitable.

This year, Impakt festival, an annual media art festival in Utrecht (NL) had a Web 2.0 theme: YourSpace.

"(...) what exactly are the quality properties of these new structures and how do they relate to existing social contexts? Are Hyves and MySpace about social networking or are they merely platforms for vain self-exposure? Is a blog a public diary or a valuable contribution to the social debate? And what is the meaning of a festival now that makers can reach their audience through YouTube in an increasingly simple manner?"
- fragment from the general festival introduction, by festival director Arjon Dunnewind

With a combination of events, screenings, programs around invited artists and by guest curators, and presence on various social networking sites, Impakt chose a slightly different approach than their usual set-up of screenings, exhibitions and talk shows. The whole idea of what a festival can be in times of what Impakt referred to as 'Society 2.0', was addressed at the opening debate: The Future of Festivals. Various curators and festival organizers debated if the Internet challenges the function of the festival, bringing people together and share interests, recommend creative products (with expert curators and festival programmers), etc.
The panel discussion, which took place on one of the hottest days in Utrecht ever, was moderated by Chris Keulemans, and included curators from the New York Underground Film Festival, which recently presented its final edition and will find a follow up in Migrating Forms, Submarine Channel, Tank.tv and Version Festival. The conclusion was that where the Internet is very important in community building and contextualizing your program (or even the heart of a program like tank.tv), the actual get-together is very important for people to start collaborating, exchanging ideas, and giving the network a boost. The advise to festivals was to also make sure that the festival is visible throughout town, instead of choosing an exclusive attitude of either obscurity or elitism. Use all the space you can get your hands on, and make sure you distribute your work for free or really cheap. In the end everybody will benefit from the exposure, according to Ed Marszewski from Version Festival.

Chris Keulemans, moderator of the afternoon, complimented the New York Underground Film Festival with actually ending their activities when they felt they had lost touch with the format of the festival. That's a brave decision indeed. The future of festivals seems bright, as long as everybody knows what a festival is about: hanging out with interesting people and seeing new things. The panel was inspiring in the sense that all these (young!) people were very open to changes in the field, and even though everybody of course struggled with funding they just organize stuff anyway.

The opening night featured short presentations by all the curators of the festival programme, including a short statement and a screening of a film or fragment. Small selection: Former INC researcher Marije Janssen, who worked with us on The Art and Politics of Netporn and curated the C'LICK ME festival, was invited to make a program on online identity and sexuality titled Multiplicity of Desire. Migrating forms, the former New York Underground Film Festival curators, showed the bizarre film Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me, by Ryan Trecartin (USA 2006, 7:00), from their YourSpace screenings program You Are What You Eat that touched topics such as branding and recommendation systems. Klaas Kuitenbrouwer introduced the festival edition of the Sunday School ('Zondagsschool), titled PetSpace (which i worked on a one of the curators), about representations of animals in new media, and the relations between man and animal (as seen from the animal's perspective).

Worth mentioning was the graphic design by Lava, as well as the on-site rating system Gifted, created by NetNiet which was fun. Every visitor was given a badge with an icon (that looked a bit like a space invader) and a number. After installing an application on your mobile phone, or going to the website, it was possible to rate visitors according to the question of the day. The rating had mild real-life consequences. A low-rating could for instance mean that you would not get a piece of rye bread with your coffee, instead of a cookie.

Check the Impakt leaders by Lava on YouTube: http://nl.youtube.com/user/ImpaktFestival

On April 8, writer, journalist and former director of De Balie Chris Keulemans presented Eric Kluitenberg's new book Delusive Spaces. Below is the full text of his presentation.

"The first time I realized this was not just another postmodern Internet geek, dressed in black and locked behind his computer, was on a summer night in Belgrade, 1997. One of Radio B92’s young activists was walking me towards their provisional studio. She asked me for names of people she could invite to give lectures about tactical media to their crowd. ‘And not,’ she said in that quasi-cosmopolitan, blasé little tone so typical of savvy Belgradians at the time, ‘not the usual suspects like Geert Lovink and Eric Kluitenberg.’ Wow, I thought, if Geert and Eric are already so famous here that they’re regarded as old news, that a girl like this even pronounces their complicated names as if she discusses them every day, these guys must have made quite an impression in parts of Europe that were still hardly familiar in Amsterdam back in those days.

If there was ever a place where it was attractive to believe that the physical and the digital were two different and separated spaces, it must have been Belgrade in the late nineties. In between the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, Milošević’ oppressive regime was omnipresent. You could smell the atmosphere of fear, hatred and intimidation in the streets. B92’s ability to create an expanding network of alternative music and information, through radio and internet, was impressive. While the real world of politics and everyday life was uglier than ever, the new media scene in Belgrade seemed to be the perfect example of how digital revolutionaries could thrive and really matter in their virtual oasis. This was the dream, at the time, of media activists all over the world.

Eric Kluitenberg was an early sceptic. His new book, Delusive Spaces, includes a few texts from that period. ‘To consider these domains, the physical and the virtual, as distinct is simply absurd,’ he wrote at the time in a text on the so-called new freedom, ‘and it does not assist with understanding what the emergency of these technologies actually signifies for the individual or for society.’ His wake-up call came early and it was serious. ‘It is much more straightforward to see the embodied and electronically mediated as two aspects of the same experiential, social and political reality. In other words, to assume one ‘hybrid’ reality that consists of both physically embodied and electronically mediated elements. Such an approach foregrounds the hybridization of most common spheres of everyday life, where the contradictory logics of physical existence and electronic mediation continuously affect and confront each other.’

This tension between his scepsis about the liberating myth of technological progress and his irrepressible belief in the potential of new alternatives is the driving force behind this book. And an impressive book it is. Impressive, inspirational and, I hope, influential.

Eric is, as many good listeners and avid readers are when they turn their insights into a book, a generous writer. He salutes the media activists from the Baltics, the Balkans and elsewhere who have inspired him along the way, sometimes simply by their heartfelt shouts coming from an audience during one of the many workshops and events he organized or addressed over the past years. And he pays respect to the great thinkers and artists of earlier times who influenced his analysis of media, culture and technology. Not just by quoting and interpreting them, but by arguing with what they have to tell us today. Even if you would read the book just for the critical dialogue with the likes of Lewis Mumford, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, it would be more than worth your while. Thanks to this book, I will never be able to think of archives again without thinking of Foucault, of machines without Mumford, of the unholy trinity of capitalism, technoscience and avantgarde without Lyotard, and of brides and bachelors without Duchamp.

In its generosity, this book at times becomes almost like a message without a sender, an open form of communication where everyone contributes and no one claims authorship. It becomes an exercise in common knowledge, in the sharing of resources – a very unusual, and almost impossible thing to say about such a static and linear medium as a book. But of course, in a book that opens by recalling the lesson that Lyotard learned from 20th century artistic avantgarde – every image conceals more than it reveals – you are tempted to go and search for the identity of the author who hides himself so skilfully behind this generosity. What does the book tell us about this guy who holds the deepest suspicion for what fascinates him most, the technological culture that man creates and inhabits?

He is a man without a cellphone. He regards the right to disconnect as a fundamental human right. He met the love of his life during a series of artistic interventions in Moscow’s public space that restored his confidence in the subversive potential of art. His neverending curiosity is only outdone by that of their dog Savva. He is an unflinching democrat, who takes it as a given that the only sane world is one that is governed by the voice, in all its occasional insanity, of real people. He is a man so serious in his awareness of the violence within the machine, that his rare, sly little jokes strike you like a fist. He is so in awe of the human imagination and desire to reach beyond the boundaries of language that he confines himself to a style of writing that looks almost modest, crisp, unlyrical. And finally, like the vegetarian owner of a hamburger joint, he is a man immersed in media culture who has this thing for the unrepresentable.

Is that a way out, an attempt to escape the tyranny of representation that we live in today? No, it’s a way in. Let me explain. The three domains that Eric tracks and connects throughout this book – capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avantgarde of the 20th century – share, again in the words of Lyotard, ‘an affinity to infinity’. They are all obsessed by that which we cannot conceive or imagine, while we know and can prove that it exists. Infinity, although we can understand it to be real, is by definition urepresentable. And it is there, in the realm outside of what we can see and even imagine, that Eric locates the desperate battle between art and power. ‘Power today,’ he writes, ‘is vested not in the ability to connect and become visible, but in the ability to disconnect, to become invisible and untraceable, at will. This is the paradox: under conditions of complete media transparency, decision making retreats from the public sphere altogether. Agency today is located outside the domain of visibility.’ At the same time, precisely because of this predicament, he asks of art to find its own position on the outside. As a critical force, as an act of electronic civil disobedience, to open up ‘the infinity of all possible alternative modes of how the new hybridized social spaces could be constructed.’ The outside is a last resort, the last place that has not yet completely surrendered to the domination of power, capitalism and technology. In other words: ‘If anything, the incorporation of everything, even our biological bodies, into technological, functionalist and utilitarian systems in the real-time society described in this book, asks for a fundamental critique. Such a critique, however, requires an outside, an external point of reference from where it can be launched.’ To make a difference inside the system, you have to start on the outside. So the fundamental question, to which this book is dedicated, must be: ‘Is it possible to define an ‘outside’ to these utilitarian systems of complete determination, or societies of control, as Deleuze has named them?’

And yes, in the final chapters of this book, Eric does manage to reveal a glimpse of this outside. It’s a stirring experience to read these pages. The crisp, unlyrical sentences open up ever so slightly to an excitement barely contained. Like the painter Barnett Newman, he offers a crack in the surface, a split that tells us life has not come to an end, that history does not inevitably lead to just one next step, but to innumerable possible next steps.

Although he starts out modestly in the first chapter, not claiming any methodology or central hypothesis, there is a strong and thoroughly educated undercurrent to the book. He will always prefer the unknown over the existing order, the deviation over the system, the imaginary media over the clock, La Mettrie over Descartes, the open-ended commons over the finality of war, the chaos of democracy over Virilio’s politics of immediacy, jodi.org over youtube. But a summary like this doesn’t do the book justice. Like any serious work of art, its multitude of stories and ideas cannot be reduced to a single message. In between its author and his glimpse of infinity, it leaves the reader a wide open space to explore, to study, to enjoy and to enter into critical dialogue. Let me finish by saying that I will never be able to think of anything digital again without thinking of Eric Kluitenberg."

- Chris Keulemans, 8 April 2008

Report of 'The Map is not the Territory?! Mapping as critical artistic investigation', 16 April 2008 at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, by Sabine Niederer.

After traveling to Rotterdam with my new INC colleague Margreet and a friend, we arrived in a packed room at the PZI. Bureau d'Etudes had just started presenting their fascinating layered maps. The focus of their talk was on information visualization as a strategic tool in unfolding facts and figures about complex political topics, in what they refer to as an "artistic and activist practice". After mapping the French food industry, from agriculture to meat and vegetable food products, Bureau d' Etudes published a newspaper that was distributed amongst researchers, activists as well as farmers and others working in agriculture and food industry. The newspaper, called "La belle au bois dormant" (The beauty in the sleeping forest), features their complex map of the "systeme agro-alimentaire", which comes with two full pages of legend: one for the acronyms and one for the symbols used on the map. As Florian Cramer, host and organizer of the event pointed out: sometimes maps are not simplifications, they can just as easily be complications. A project that Bureau d'Etudes is working on at the moment is called Mapping the Laboratory Planet, which the artists described as an "open source database for mapping the laboratory planet with a geographical and critical approach." It's not working yet, so let's wait and see at: www.laboratoryplanet.org

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Figure 1: Bureau d'Etudes presenting their 'agro-alimentaire' map

The second speaker was Theo Deutinger, a Rotterdam-based Austrian architect that makes maps and cartograms to produce "snapshots of globalization". These snapshots varied from funny illustrative work (like the ideal European consumer, depicted in most popular European brands) to poignant work such as his map Walled World, in which he shows the world's remaining separation walls (which were reinforced after 9-11, according to Deutinger ), on an America-centric world map. Inspired by Peter Sloterdijk, this map shows "der Weltinnenraum des Kapitals", in which 73% of the worlds income belongs to 14% of the worlds population. In 2004, Deutinger produced the work: European Central Park, in which he depicts Europe as one big city, with the Alps as its central park.

Figure 2: European Central Park, by Theo Deutinger, www.td-architects.eu/

The Swiss artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud presented their fascinating project Zone Interdit, a collaborative project in which users can collect and describe footage of military zones all over the world. All countries block the military zones differently on their maps: Germany covers them with a green patch, France just shows a cut-out. And because Google Earth buys satellite pictures, they sometimes show the message that a certain area is unavailable for a zoom in, and suggests "try zooming out for a broader look". The artists started collecting pictures of military zones in newspapers, magazines, on websites, in army's pr materials, on soldiers blogs, and soon other people started adding to the database. Their collection of Guantanamo bay pictures is now so extensive that they managed to base a 3D walkthrough model on it, which is available on the website and also open for editing and adding. The crown on their work must have been when their site was temporarily down and they were emailed by a UN security official asking them when the site would be available again.

Figure 3: One of the 3D prison walkthroughs available at www.zoneinterdit.net.

After this project presentation, Florian Cramer pointed out the very thin line between mapping and modeling. Of course the two meet in the case of Zone Interdit. But mapping is doesn't have to be realistic in its form, and however Google Maps mashups are immensely popular, they do have a counterpart in the type of information visualization that is free of the geo, or free to scale the geo (a done by many cartographers, including Bureau d'Etudes and Deutinger).

Figure 4: Organizer Florian Cramer, head of PZI MA Media Design Research.

After the three presentations, Michael Murtaugh presented a couple of student projects. A good example was given by former PZI student Todd Matsumoto (who presented his own work), who's simple and very effective project showed 'media bombs,' massive media attention such as around Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl. After scraping the New York Times for 11 days in May 2004, during the period of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the news articles he found were enough to create a rich timeline. He put the articles in a chronological order, using the dates mentioned in the article. Impressively, the timeline starts in 1950 and ends in 2005 (whereas the news articles were from 2004), clearly showing a few media bombs about 9-11. A full pdf of this graph can be downloaded here: Media Bombs.

Other projects, shown by Murtaugh, all well worth mentioning:

• Roxana Torres' Personal World Map: www.personalworldmap.org (currently developing a new version!)
• Shahee Eilyas' Framing Leaders: http://shaheeeilyas.com/framingleaders/ and
• Map of the Maldives Blogosphere
• Michael Murtaugh and Open Source Publishing (OSP) are working on a project for Bamart in Brussels, making various visualizations for their database.

Related to this last project, Murtaugh gave a very enthousiastic presentation of the open source svg editor Inkscape with which everyone can be a mapper. After seeing all this, it seems a thin line between information visualization that simplifies a massive data set and makes it readable, and the complex maps that are that are so beautiful to look at but sometimes really make you want to see the data set to interpret it. Sometimes 'zoom out for a broader view' seems like good advice after all.