Prayas Abhinav from n.e.w.s. joined us all week at DAI. On Monday night he gave a workshop/lecture introducing some concepts that are in vogue: physical computing, rapid prototyping, generative systems etc. He also introduced some tools for organizing and cataloging personal research online, sharing work, open licenses, syndication feeds, etc. and showed examples culled from the internet about how we can come up with ways to question and critique projects and seek out the personal and relevant from them. Individual conversations with DAI participants filled the week about their representation on the Internet. What are the parameters of understanding the tools and the context of being visible in the virtual world? On Thursday evening he showed some of his recent projects and opened them up for discussion.
On Friday we were in Amsterdam at the NIMK (Nederlands Institut voor Mediakunst) where Jaromil showed some of his work and gave us a tour of the exhibition ‘Versions’ and the mediatheek at NIMK. In the spirit of this month’s research we looked at video works in their archive that address issues of movement, or standing still. Selections included: Alicia Framis, ‘Secret Strike Rabobank’, Yael Bartana, ‘Trembling Time’, Sebastian Diaz Morales, ‘Lucharemos hasta anular la ley’ and Guido van der Werve, ‘Nummer acht (Everything is going to be alright)’. Jaromil then gave us a tour of some squats in Amsterdam near the Spui.
After lunch Rick van Amersfoort from Buro Jansen & Janssen delivered his ‘City of Discipline’ lecture. Buro Jansen & Janssen follows the developments within the field of security in NL and Europe and the past 25 years has conducted investigations into police, justice and secret service activities, dealing with all sorts of restrictive, preventive and disappearance measures against those in the margins (fringes) of society. ‘City of Discipline’ uses the antithesis of standing still or moving along as a guide for policy and action. Not only is the government no longer stagnating with its overflow of measures and laws concerning security. Also the citizen no longer remains still – people take action and discipline themselves. Being inactive leads to not only volatility (escapism) but also to not seeing, or better yet, not being seen. Each practice, each society, each action has a downside and we know that civil rights are being violated but we don’t really know because it’s not in the media or it’s just a news flits so we don’t notice. Buro Jansen & Janssen works on the interface of not knowing, but actually does know and shows its work through the ‘City of Discipline’.
