Thurs 15th – Sat 17th Dec 8pm departure to… Live Art Speed Date!
I’ll be one of the 20 steward-artists. Come and enjoy the ride :)

… A four-minute long private performance, just for you, just for all of you, one at a time. Not so much festival of one-on-one performance, more an astonishingly varied fairground of intimate encounters to please, tease and perhaps cause unease… In a satisfying way of course.

Live Art Speed Date is about interaction and intimacy, public and private behaviours, and the strangeness of desire. It’s a wonderfully original and playful, socialised mechanism whereby an audience can experience several one-on-one performance pieces and interact with each other along the way.

“Resembles a busy day at the New York Stock Exchange, only sexier” Bellyflop Magazine

“A free-wheeling, wide ranging bashing down of boundaries between form and practice, a celebration of us both as artists and audience.” Tim Crouch

Further information is available from the STK website www.stkinternational.co.uk

A Date with the Foreign is an installation made as a result of a three months artist residency at Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam. An attempt to reenact, reinterpret and redefine the space in between people’s communication.

“… A presentation of works that deal all with augmented reality or mixed realities. I think it is important to first be aware that these kind of works are usually made in collaboration with people from other disciplines, graphic and fashion designers, dancers, visual artists, … usually it’s not a solo process. As reflected in the work of tonight’s speakers, in this field of media work the end users or participants do play a very vital role. Without them, there is no artwork. This as well as the work process is what the four speakers of tonight have in common. Augmented reality is something we may know from advertising, like QR codes in magazines that you need to decipher with your cell phone to get to a product, but the speakers tonight have a different take on augmented reality and mixed realities: they approach it much more from an artistic, political or critical perspective. I think this is very important to notice and be aware of as a counter-voice compared to the more commercial applications of augmented reality…” Anne Nigten

The conductive thread for the evening is the connection between physical and digital space and how it relates to every day life, to physical intimacy, to the individual and collective emotional spaces, and to the way we relate to space and to each other.

In a world over-saturated with data and virtuality, is emotional rescue possible through physical media?

In another layer, how technology playfulness and gaming as a performative art form create new political, cultural and socio-economic spaces in which audiences are co-producers of art through a personalized experience of the media, putting to the test the meaning of interaction in a world over-saturated with information and virtual social networks.

This processes are in tune with a clear current demand: to position art practise, in which everything is possible, within a fabric of technological media, urban geography and out-of-the-museum art expectations.

Yolanda’s work is on exhibition as part of the current RAIR (Residencies Artist initiatives Rotterdam) show Liberty Control on 24-26 Sept and 1-3 Oct at Duende Studios, Tamboerstraat 9, Rotterdam

Foundation Het Wilde Weten is an artist-run space and studio building. Its public programme is made possible by financial support of the Municipal Services for City of Rotterdam, Art and Culture.
Current guest artist Yolanda de Los Bueis is funded by Sala Rekalde.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Anne Nigten

Anne Nigten (PhD) is the director of The Patchingzone, a praxis laboratory where Master, PhD students and professionals work together on meaningful creative content. Prior to her current position, she was the manager of V2_Lab, the aRt&D department of V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is lecturing on research and development in the interdisciplinary field from an art perspective. She is adviser for several media art and science initiatives in the Netherlands and Europe. She completed her PhD at the University of the Arts London (UK), and frequently publishes papers on art, engineering and (computer) science collaboration and software development.
www.patchingzone.net

Yolanda de los Bueis

Yolanda de los Bueis explores new forms of performance and audience interaction in the context of live events.
Her interest is in the capacity of new media to intrude into daily life and the potentiality of interactions between audience, author, mediator and artwork. In a post-authorship Art scene, Yolanda uses evolving technologies and games or the playful as a way to reach an audience that is over-saturated with information. She aims to prompt audiences with a question and provoke a change or shift in their psychological habits.
Yolanda is also interested in the aesthetics of technology itself – the language of broken, fragmented, coded and glitched digital imagery.

Her video and installation work has been exhibited across the world including Madrid Abierto and Sala Rekalde (Spain), Zendai Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai), Canal+ (France), and ZKM (Germany). Her award-winning work has screened in over 50 international video film festivals.
www.spyoy.com

Jan Misker

Jan Misker was appointed project manager at V2_ in 2006. He is responsible for managing projects that have a strong technological and/or scientific aspect, for example involving wearable technology or augmented reality. Furthermore he is very interested in all aspects of contemporary dance. Jan holds an MSc in Cognitive Science and Engineering.
www.v2.nl

Melissa Coleman

Melissa Coleman is an artist working with wearable technology. Melissa’s work focuses on the relationship between the human body and technology. She is inspired by old media, the performative body and sense augmentation. Through her work she tries to forge intimate relationships between people and technology. Melissa teaches Electronic Textiles at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and is coach at the Wearable Senses theme at Industrial Design at the TU Eindhoven. Together with Piem Wirtz from V2_ she founded the E-Textile Workspace. In 2010 Melissa co-curated the exhibition Pretty Smart Textiles, which showcased electronic textiles made in the Netherlands.
www.dancetechnology.nl

Marnix de Nijs

As an artist, De Nijs shows how culture acts upon our senses, and he expresses this in a great variety of ways, making use of continually-changing technology. This allows him to emphasize a new role for the artist that seems to have been established by our developing culture of technology.

Marnix de Nijs will present his ongoing project Exploded Views, an immersive installation in which the visitors physically navigate through an audio visual 3d cityscape. The projected 3d visuals are constructed from images found in web 2.0 databases such as the photo website Flickr. These images reconstruct a 3D model of the city, thus forming a collective representation based on the memories of those who initially took the photographs. The aesthetically designed models will be highly detailed at locations where people are inclined to take the most pictures and less detailed.
www.marnixdenijs.nl

Het Wilde Weten means “it wanted to know”. It also means “Wild Knowledge”. There’s also something about the Wild West…

This residency is supported by Sala Rekalde in Bilbao.