In Okkenbroek you’ll find four hiking trails with a length ranging from half an hour to one and a half hour. They’ll take you to some of the most beautiful spots of Salland. With the input of Landtonen your walk gets even better.

Several artists, writers and composers were commissioned by Landtonen to make a poetic impression of these walks.View the impression, read the text, enjoy the images invoked. And then follow the same trail. You’ll see things through different eyes, hear with different ears and smell with a new nose. These poetic impressions were made in a limited edition. They are for sale in Noaberhuus Okkenbroek and in Kunstenlab Deventer.

But… because Noaberhuus is closed on Sundays (which are excellent hiking days ofcourse), I was commissioned to design some kind of device to distribute the poetic impressions (including a map) in another way. Could have been a very simple assignment I guess, but I decided it was more fun to distribute them with sound. Partly because Landtonen roughly translates as ’showing land’ but also as ‘land tones’. And partly because of my earlier involvement in Landtonen.

So I took the assignment a step further and came up with four cabinets that play the flute when you open them. All four cabinets are playing a different tone. So when you combine them, you actually have a very basic musical instrument to play with! The construction is completely mechanical and works with bellows, no electricity needed.

As you can see there’s a red, blue, yellow and green cabinet which corresponds with – you guessed it – the red, blue, yellow and green trail. The outer casing is made of beechwood. Since Okkenbroek is a small village located in a rural area where decency (and social control) is still common good, you pay for your poetic impression by putting the right amount of money in one of the canisters on top. This system is used by farmers throughout the area. The same decency should also prevent extreme vandalism. This is why the cabinets are sturdy, but not vandalism proof.

Starting next week I’m working in The Incident Room, an art project initiated and curated by Patrick Mangnus. This first edition takes place in R10, Zwolle. I’m teamed up with video/sound artist Sandrijn van der Horst. Together we have two weeks (January 11-28) to work on a new piece of art in the R10 residency. After that it will be open for exhibition on January 29-31 and February 5-7, 13.00-17.00 hrs. Other participants in this edition are Jeroen Diepenmaat and Sjoukje Gootjes.

Some time ago I went to R10 to check out the place, since I had never been there. It has plenty of facilities and workspace. I aim to use this workperiod mainly for research, since R10 oozes ‘laboratory’ out of every pore. Kind of reminds me of my art academy time. Sandrijn seems to be an interesting and challenging partner in this project. I don’t know him well, but am very familiar with his work, which I selected last year when curating the Ontbos exhibition in CBK Apeldoorn.

At this point I still have no idea what we are going to do next week, but I’m very anxious to find out where this collaboration leads me!

Update 1: I’m documenting our progress on Flickr.
Update 2: There’s going to be a festive finissage on February the 7th with an introduction by Patrick Mangnus and a live performance by Bedhelm and The Stewardess.

Some time ago we sold our old van and got us a new shiny red one. Thus rendering my old linksopdebus.nl project useless. But then the neighbours started complaining. They were actually missing linksopdebus.nl! So here it is now… linksopdebus.nl is back! I stickered our new van yesterday and renewed the website.

The city of Deventer is close to the completion of it’s fiberglass network and claims to be the first city in Europe to do so. In order to get (inter)national attention, a manifestation named ‘Het geheim van licht’ (The Secret of Light) is being organized on Vogeleiland, a small park in Deventer. It should open on November 28, 2009.

For this event, me and several other artists were asked to come up with ideas for interactive art installations, able to stand outside, in public space for about a month. However, the city of Deventer decided not to spend enough money to be able to grab their desired national attention. A crucial mistake, I thought then and know now.

In order to tackle the lack of sufficient funding, the organization of ‘Het geheim van licht’ tried to forge alliances between artists with proposals and companies with facilities, hoping that would bring down developing and production costs. A sound theory, but due to the tight schedule (two months time from start to finish) it didn’t work out that great. At least, not for my plan.

I had an interesting idea for an interactive installation that deals with the conversion and transportation of signals (just like a fiberglass network). In short, a webcam image gets converted into a few seconds of sound in realtime. This sound is then amplified, transported through air, received by a microphone and converted back to an image on a screen. This kind of signal transport (sound waves through open air) unavoidably gets corrupted by ambient sounds. The audience can play with the input through the webcam, to influence (or even compose!) the emitted sounds. Or they can deliberately add sounds to control the final image on the screen.

I discussed my idea with a selection of companies and they all liked it, so I worked out a detailed description, a sketch design and a budget for this proposal. Software development is already very close to being usable for this installation.

Unfortunately, it became clear that the approached companies were somehow unable to put their money where their mouth was… and there wasn’t enough time left for me to find and negotiate alternative partners. My proposal was then also denied by the organization of ‘Het geheim van licht’, because they felt it was too expensive. From their tight budget point of view they may be right. But 6500 euro for a specially designed and developed, innovative, interactive piece of art, able to hold it’s ground in outdoor public space, to be delivered on a very tight time schedule, isn’t exactly overpriced I think…

Due to positive thinking on my part (some would call that naivety), I have now invested a lot of time in a project that’s not going to happen. I’m not getting paid for my work either. But, it was a valuable lesson.

I still very much want to see this installation in action though. And I bet you want that to, because it sounds like a lot of fun playing with this… right? Anybody out there willing to commission or sponsor?

Quatre Mains Aléatoire (my random piano composition by four cd-players) was invited to perform live at the next MOMI-fest on June 12th, in Romein, Leeuwarden. Check this video of the Quatre Mains Aléatoire performance in Kunstenlab. It will be interesting to see how this audio installation holds up on stage in a pop venue…

Rest of the line-up: Phil Mills, TCTW and De Geweldigheid. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing De Geweldigheid (a fusion of Parkside and Jack Meoff and the Lockerroom Lovers) in action.

Update 1: De Geweldigheid was great (as expected)! And Quatre Mains Aléatoire did quite allright too, considering that you can never be sure of anything with those random compositions… Here are  some photo’s.

Update 2: The video below is a short edit of aproximately one hour of random performance. De Geweldigheid played right after Quatre Mains Aléatoire. I added their first song for the sake of contrast…