Category Archives: Netherlands

The heart of the Worm

Having caught up everything about the graduation show, now I’ll get to the meeting I had this morning, with Hajo Doorn, director of Worm. I’ll start by saying that of all the meetings and conversations I’ve had about how different institutions work here in the Netherlands, this was by far the best. In addition to offering me a wealth of information, Hajo let me really see inside Worm, as if I wasn’t some random person dropping by, but somehow part of things. I’ll explain that a little better later, but let me go in order.

Worm really is unique–of course every place wants to think that, but usually it’s not true. In this case though, I can’t think of any other cultural or arts organization I’ve ever seen that runs exactly like Worm. First of all, the range of activities is amazingly broad. Events held there include dance parties, film screenings, live bands, sound art installations, electronic/computer art installations, lectures, and educational activities like the recent Piet Zwart graduation. Worm also stands out because of the way they balance their growing role in the community, which gives them more chance at funding and at shaping the local conversation about art and culture in Rotterdam, with still maintaining the freedom of an outsider to take risks and to do things a little differently. That last is no small feat when dealing with civil servants and funding agencies. Finally, Worm is focused on people, inside the organization and those they collaborate with or invite in, rather than on their own institutional status.

This last characteristic was what Hajo most emphasized. But before I expand that point let me back up a bit and first say something about Hajos’ take on the whole scene. The Netherlands is a small country, so it’s not so hard for a group to get started and get some attention. They all compete with each other, which Hajo thinks is productive because it draws more attention to the scene as a whole. But, established institutions try to claim the discourse, which shuts out groups; this means they have to work hard to find a niche and show how they are different. Taking V2 as a contrast for example, according to Hajo, “V2 is big in their scene, but it’s very small scene.” He also commented on how they were not very connected to the local community, or to the open source community. I had noticed the latter when talking to Alex and everyone seems to recognized the V2 is very narrowly focused, the only question is whether they think the narrow focus is a deliberate strategy, or something that dooms V2 to shrinking relevance. Other organizations also seem far more hierarchical; both V2 and de Waag have a clear and seemingly rigid hierarchy with the people on top exerting very firm control over everyone else and having set guidelines for how they do everything. I’d say de Waag is not as rigid as V2, and maybe they need more structure since they have so many community stakeholders.

But Hajo and the others at Worm take it as a principle that they “design for people, not for systems,” which means they have often asked their funding organizations or the civil servants they work with if they really want this kind of report or that kind of procedure, because it will cost so many thousands of Euros to produce. Often, the answer is no, and they find a different way to provide what the funding agency or civil servants need. In fact, while the other organizations I visited explained their goals and criteria, which were all about art, culture, and sometimes the community, I didn’t get as clear a statement from them on their operating principles. Worm has several worth listing here:

  • Energy is the most important quality [of a work or project]
  • It’s all about people
  • Let’s not pollute
  • Design for people, not for systems
  • Challenge the system
  • Try to pay people, even a little

But they try to challenge with a smile, not in a nagging way. Also, note that the Netherlands has worked for a long time with the “polder” model of consensus, which is very different from the way government works in most other countries. Because just about the entire country is below sea-level, and because so much of it is made of reclaimed land, or polders, people had to agree on managing the dikes–at least that’s one story. Regardless of its origin, the polder model basically means that all stakeholders consult and cooperate, even if they are competitors. In the case of arts/cultural groups this has pros and cons. On the one hand, it encourages collaboration and sharing resources, but it also means that no one group can get very much money, so it’s hard for groups to grow beyond a certain point or become international.

In fact, Hajo wasn’t too concerned about this. He thinks that art should be local, and also he’s really into a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, which doesn’t require huge chunks of money and isn’t really consistent with international ambitions. Because he’s always trying to do a lot with a little, Worm uses Linux running on computers that were salvaged, and Worms physical space is made with 80% recycled materials, mostly industrial salvage from the port (of Rotterdam). Along with the Polder model, the Rotterdam context is also very “flat” compared to other cities in the Netherlands, meaning that it’s pretty easy to get access to officials, which helps groups to get started.

Hajo shared a lot of other information–it was a three-hour meeting, including coffee and the chance to listen in as he talked over the success of the Piet Zwart graduation show with Florian (who was there with students making official documentation) and as he talked about possible future collaborations, plans for the building, how to spend out the remaining budget–I’ve never seen another group be so casual, except maybe my own department–maybe that’s why it was so comfortable. Anyway, I’ll post more tomorrow because it’s getting late!

Other interesting graduation projects

There were other good projects too; I posted the too that most captured my attention, which had to do not only with the project itself, but how much the student was right there as part of it, demonstrating or performing. Also, I don’t have good pictures of the others because of how the space was lit and (more often) the way people were milling around and (most often) my open lack of experience trying to take photographs in conditions with high contrast lighting…

But, Piet Zwart is making extensive documentation that I believe they put into both Flickr and Youtube, so I will point to that when it’s posted.

So, after seeing all this and staying really late, I just spent most of Sunday resting and taking the Spido tour, but today it was back to my research. This morning I went back over to Worm for another interview.

Andre Fiore’s Cookie Census

This was another cool project, the Cookie Census. It lets you go to a website and identify what cookies are there and who placed them, and it will also show you the javascripts and little tracking bugs in the page. Right now it’s not so robust, but once Andrea get’s it working just a little more reliably, I think will be a great tool for data-mining. He says he will make it into a Firefox plugin, and I hope he does soon because I would love to see what is going on at the sites I most often visit.

I guess I should have taken my beer out of the picture; oh well…That makes it so much more authentic as being taken at a real event, where I sat with this project long enough to drink a beer while I talked to Andrea about it.

Appreciative crowd watches Nancy perform "Paraphernalia"

And here you see some reaction to Nancy; this is before we all started singing along with her karaoke of A-ha and Tiffany songs…

The point though is that people were really interested. And those who know them will recognize who is watching, but I guess I will leave them anonymous since this is a candid picture, shot without asking.

Nancy Mauro-Flude presents Paraphernalia

OK, this is Nancy’s performance which I mentioned already. I can imagine a lot of bands or performers that would really like to have something that is not only wireless, but responds to gestures, to position, rather than being just some keypad. And Nancy has personalized the interface for herself, but that also could change, which I think might be even more interesting to performers, to use a tool that really matches their style. Also, Nancy made these tools herself with (I think) just a little help with programming, which means that other musicians and performers could make their own tools as well, without needing an a degree in software or electrical engineering, which to me seems a very liberating development.

Voorhaven, clouded over


Voorhaven, clouded over
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Even on cloudy days, it looks dramatic. Of course this stretch is essentially the historical street left in the city, so any post card that shows and old building is almost certain to have been shot on this street!

A lovely place to walk, and has several cafes, antique stores, and the industrial scrap shop from which the students got a lot of stuff for the show.

Worm bar


Worm bar
Originally uploaded by cuuixsilver

Here is the bar inside Worm; the whole thing is constructed inside a historical building, the structure which couldn’t be touched. So, everything is attached to a free standing metal framework and is all made of industrial scrap from the harbor. It’s amazing. About 4-5 projects were set up in this room later in the day, and they fit in really well.

Ok, back from dinner and more on the party at Worm. I have to say it was a blast, not least because I haven’t had the chance to go out dancing like that in years. First one of th Piet Zwart graduates did a performance, which was really cool. —Nancy Mauro-Flude did a final project:

‘Paraphernalia’ consists of self-built controllers for audio/dance performances that free performers from operating laptops on stage, giving them back their gestural mobility, and allowing both a technical and artistic feedback between music, vocals, dance and technology. (Realized with joystick interfaces, analog motion sensors and modified gamepads in conjunction with the real-time signal processing software Pure Data.)

She did a performance singing with these tools and it was a lot of fun. After that, there was a DJ for awhile and people danced hard, including both the PZI MD staff and the students–how many grad students celebrate with their faculty that way? I drank rather a lot of Budels Honig Bier, but not too much to be ok today.

I got to bed quite late, but got up in time to shop for souvenirs and take a Spido boat tour of the harbor–that was really cool and I will post some pictures from the whole weekend soon. I think tomorrow I might finally have time to catch up on more conference reporting…

After a busy few days, here I am again. The conference in Utrecht was mixed; I saw several interesting key note speakers, including Katherine Hayles and Joanna Zylinska, and I met some very nice, interesting people, including Renee Turner, an artist from Geuzen.org, Yasco Horsman, from the University of Leiden, and Manuela Rossini from the University of Amsterdam. I think though that at both this conference and at New Network Theory, many of the panels would have been better as roundtable discussions.

Let’s see, I’ll comment on the best of the talks tomorrow when I’m not so tired. I still feel pretty washed out because I spent most of yesterday (and last night) at the Piet Zwart Media Design graduation, final show, and opening/graduation party. That was all at Worm, a music/art/cultural space here in Delfshaven. I’m interviewing the director, Hajo Doorn tomorrow, about the Worm is organized. The graduation was really great. Worm is a great space for the students to install their projects, and the projects themselves were quite interesting. Kristina, one of the tutors, made a speech full of advice, and then Florian spoke, starting with the hope that they didn’t regret working with him, since he took over as Course Director half way through their program and had been a hard-ass. It was a startlingly candid statement for a graduation speech! The nicest thing though was how personal the whole event was. There were only nine students graduating so each was individually addressed–maybe it was too personal for some of the students who seemed really embarrassed when Florian made (positive) comments about each of their work and personalities. Then we had some lunch, and then Florian gave another general speech opening the show, and then we all hung around for a few more hours. I talked to several students about their projects; one of my favorites was by Andrea Fiore, called Cookie Census. This project is:

A software platform for the collaborative tracking and annotation of web cookies. Considering them identifiers and actuators of user control, the Cookie Census provides a distributed system for their survey and annotation. (Realized as a combination of a web browser plugin, MySQL database and web site.)

Finally around 7 or 8 I went to dinner with Florian, Josephine Bosma, and her daughter Jasmin. Because the good place we wanted to go was too crowded, we instead had some Roti, which was also good, but my duck had a ridiculous number of little broken bones in it. Anyway, Josephine is an interesting person; I’ve enjoyed reading her articles about digital media, and the art/theory scene in Europe and was happy to meet her in person. Jasmin is also really cool–I hope my girls are as much so when they reach her age.

So, we went back to Worm and the party opened at 9pm. I looked at more projects and had a chance to talk again at length with Mirko Schaefer whom I had seen and briefly met at the Network theory conference. he’s a really nice guy who does a lot of research about open source communities, and is finishing up his dissertation at Utrecht University where he’s a lecturer. Now I’m going to dinner, so I’ll write more later. –and damn, the blockquote has messed up my spacing.