anton corbijn’s lecture at kabk

17.11.2010

It was my second time to see Anton Corbijn in less than 40 days (yes I’m a lucky bastard), and still I was very excited to see his presentation again. This time, it was for a public lecture at KABK, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Den Haag.

The lecture was presented in the school’s auditorium, and as you might have already guessed it, it was completely flooded by students (and photography enthusiasts perhaps). I arrived only a few minutes after 10.30 (when the lecture started), and I saw some people actually leaving the auditorium because it was too full.

Luckily, due to my small posture I squeezed myself inside and managed to see Anton Corbijn discussing about his photographs.

If the Q&A session at the Shoot-Me Film Festival was more about his music videos, this lecture was more about his photographs.

Some of the photographs that he discussed include:

johnny depp

elvis costello

joy division

david bowie

and of course some Depeche Mode and U2 photos..

He also discussed slightly about the making of U2’s Electrical Storm (which the actress was Samantha Morton who played Debbie Curtis in Control) and The Killers’s “All The Things that I’ve Done”.

 

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key of life

21-23 October 2010

We almost missed the Key of Life because we thought it would be until Sunday, but it was only until Saturday. So on a lazy Saturday afternoon, we suddenly had to rush to the town hall to buy a ticket. Yes, BUY a ticket. Last year (2009)’s Key of Life was for free, so I thought it would be for free for the year after as well. At least the ticket was not that expensive (7.50 for all activities – including one that would transport you to another venue at the other part of the city)

by Susan Aldworth

The ticket was not sold at the town hall, so we went to Scheltema. As we were there, we took our time by looking at the Brainscapes exhibition. One notable series of work was by Susan Aldworth, who made paintings inspired by the work of the brain. Some paintings are really really nice, there were even some which could “change” as you move yourself from side to side, using the same effect as those changing images in your primary school ruler (the ruler of which you use to make straight lines, not school ruler in the term of the headmaster  :p )

see the difference between the image above and below

Another impressive work was by Andrew Carnie, entitled “Time Will Tell”. The works were projected images using slide show viewer (I actually didn’t know what this device was called). I personally like the one which looked like tree branches..

 

by Andrew Carnie

There was also a work by Media Tech alumni Stijn Belle and Sanne Fenema. Their work, called “Het Meest Sexy?” (Which is the Sexiest?) explored which side of a person that they thought was sexy. Visitors could take their own pictures using a camera, and then the application created two pictures, one is both of your left side, and the other both of your right side (mirrored images).

 

At 9 we went to BplusC/Leidse Volkshuis to see several performance by Art Science students. The most interesting one was by Charlotte, Ben, and Matthijs, where people nude backs appeared on holes of a big tube of fabric, and visitors could make various sounds by touching these backs.

 

Get in Touch
by Matthijs Munnik, Ben Terwel, and Charlotte ‘t Hart

The whole event was closed by Bak-Chai, a dance party, game, and theatre piece all blended into one. It was not as interesting as we thought thou, so we went home.

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today’s art

Den Haag, 24-25 September 2010

After missing the previous year’s Today’s Art, I felt highly obligated to attend the 2010 event. However, I was still hangover and tired after going to Discovery the evening before, and I was extremely late coming to Den Haag for the event.

Yet I still considered myself lucky: I didn’t need to pay extra for Olafur Arnalds’s performance 🙂

So most of the exhibitions were already closed (darn), but I managed to see Olafur Arnalds and Structet (a collaborative performance by Art Science students).

by Daan Brinkmann & Nenad Popov

Olafur Arnalds

Structet

a girl danced through as the smoke was spewed

I met Octa at the event and after few drinks we left the venue.

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[smell and art] the presentation

For my presentation I laid down 16 different smells in 16 identical brown bottles (so that people wouldn’t be able to see the colour of the liquid), each accompanied by a card with a question which the player have to guess what smell it was and follow the instruction on the card. If the player answered correctly, s/he will be ‘guided’ to the right track. If the player reaches his/her destination, s/he would be rewarded with a nice smell (I used the smell of soto ayam, a really tasty indonesian dish). However, if the player reached the wrong destination, s/he had to smell some really awful smells.

the layout for my smell project

one unit consists of a smell bottle, a card, and some strips

follow your sense of smell

during the presentation

Other students from the course also made really interesting projects.

Ivan made a stereo smell, combining smell of a tropical plant with Dutch woods smell, creating an inbetween world so-called the tropenbos.

Pablo and Juan made a guessing game which combine smell and sound from every departments in the art academy.

James made a memory game with 9 different smells, using teabags.

Yerry made a matching game, where the player has to match the smell and the character of the people in the photos. One was a sailor, one was a French guy, and one a mediterranean woman (if i’m not mistaken).

Willem made an incense kit, a small pack containing mini incense and a mini match to light it.

Jelle made a smell guessing competition, where players had to guess what smell it was.

The presentation itself was ‘combined’ with meta media presentation, so it really was a nice day full of art presentation 🙂

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[smell and art] the course

I have always been fascinated by smell, and ever since I was 14 or something I started to realise that one of my strange behaviours was that I like to smell stuff. My favourite smell at that time (and even until now) are (among others): the pages of Wordsworth classic novels, warm video (VHS) tapes, and varnished furnitures. And so after more than a decade later, I was excited that there was a course from Art Science program which I could enrol bearing the title: Smell and Art. The course ran for a mere 3 weeks, but it was 3 days a week so I received a lot of knowledge (and enlightenment) about the nice world of smell. The teacher, Maki Ueda is a Japanese artist who currently lives in Rotterdam. She started the olfactory art in 2004 when she was pregnant and she got really sensitive to smell. She visited Indonesia once to exhibit her work (not yet olfactory art thou) and there (in Bandung to be exact) she learnt that the warm temperature and humidity of the archipelago produced a lot of smell because the particles of the objects vapoured easily in that kind of climate.

 During the course we were taught to extract smell and preserve it either using oil or alcohol (we used vodka). We also learnt to make incense and how to use them like in a Japanese tea party (kodo). I didn’t really have much time to blog at that time (the couse was in February, so that means 3 months ago), but luckily Maki kept a blog for the course (in which all the students could contribute) here.

filtering the smell (oil based)

making incense

smell bottles

For the final assignment, we were asked to make a smell game. At first it was quite difficult for me to develop a game in the scope of a sense of smell. Frankly I am a really visual person, and it is really difficult to express myself in other forms of art. But anyway, during a brief brainstorming with Maarten I suddenly got the idea of making this sort of a tracking game, with various smells from Indonesian traditional market.

my sketch of the smell project (photo by maki)

For the game I made (extracted) a total of 16 smells.

18 bottles in total, 16 to use, 2 for spares

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