Category: Art

Art worth to travel for or to travel to

Nemesis Machine

Nemesis Machine I56A6627

Nemesis Machine

An installation with input of several data from the London Megalopolis that visualizes how several aspects of city life are monitored already. Think camera’s. think air pollution, think temperature and think traffic and transport moves.

The Nemesis Machine is a miniature city, made up of wires, chips, computer parts, switches and specially designed electronics. The installation shows the current data flow of Smart City London, complete with environmental sensors and surveillance cameras, as well as data from traffic information and environmental monitoring systems. The work responds to the temperature, light, pressure and sound of the simulated city. If something changes in London, it’s registered directly in motion, sound and light in the miniature city of Utrecht. The Nemesis Machine is like the avatar of London and is not only driven by the real city, it is entirely dependent on it.

The Nemesis Machine – From Metropolis to Megalopolis to Ecumenopolis from Stanza on Vimeo.

See Hacking Habitat, a must see event in a former prison in Utrecht.

Curated by Ine Gevers, Hacking Habitat witnesses “the rise of a ‘remote control society’ colonizing and infiltrating increasing realms of daily life for the sake of safety and risk- management. Monitoring cameras and smart gateways are installed everywhere, while we are classified and atomized by automatic face recognition. Software and algorithms define who deviates or contributes too little to our economy.

The installation is by Stanza

Living Unit

Living Unit I56A6630

Living Unit

In a prison not in use anymore in Utrecht currently there is an exhibition named “Hacking Habitat“. Various artists give their vision on the trend to curtail all of our privacy nowadays.
Living Unit is the unit where Dutch artist Maarten Schuurman has put all his belongings. He lives “off the Grid” with these six suitcases where he succeeded to put all his belongings in. The less possessions you have and the more you move around like a squatter, the less control “they” can exercise over you.

Consequently Maarten took back a lot of control. Actually that’s also the theme of the exhibition: Taking back control (or Hacking) of your habitat.

Venice Here we Come

We took off from AMS Schiphol Airport for Venice in June to visit the 2015 Art Biennial there

Platform of AMS airport Schiphol

Take off from AMS airport Schiphol

ING is one of our largests banks here in The Netherlands and had bought some ad space at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Rather than Milan, we took off for Venice in June to visit the 2015 Art Biennial there and to stay a week in the Marche. Thusfar I’ve been a tad too busy to do some furthe reporting, but I hope to change that now.

However, do see my prior posts in relation to this trip about the Lancia Appia, about Monica Bonvicini and the Seabourn Odyssee

Monica Bonvicini

_DSC4601akl

_DSC4599akl

At the Venice Biennial Monica Bonvicini, born in Venice, but living and working in Berlin, had a complete room in the Arsenale with chainsaw installations in concrete with dripping rubber.

The brochure says:

In Bonvicini’s hands, industrial materials are used to create a humorous critique of male power symbols.

It keeps me thinking.

Scheveningen 11 and Scheveningen 90

Scheveningen 90 en 11 _DSC4080

Scheveningen 11 and Scheveningen 90

I took this photo of the painting of the Scheveningen 11 and Scheveningen 90 by Hendrik Willem Mesdag in the Groninger Museum. I’m not sure whether the painting belongs to its collection or not.

I took the photo to use it for a post here about Hendrik Willem Mesdag, an important Dutch painter of the The Hague School.

We have a panorama in The Hague, Panorama Mesdag and we have the Mesdag Collection in The Hague, a small museum which consists of his former home and studio’s, but also of the small museum he built himself for his own art collection.