Celebrating the KNAW’s 200th Anniversary

We marked this anniversary with an installation presented by the VKS at the 8 May celebration at the Beurs van Berlage. The installations was developed around the work entitled Poser, by Constant Dullaart.

The installation articulated a fascination with social interaction and the possibilities of digital and networked media that is shared by the VKS and Dullaart. It emphasized practice and performance in relation to digital media, to social roles and to cultural rules.

In this installation, group photos, retrieved via Flickr were projected in a studio setting in such a way that the artist (and numerous participants to the evening) attempted to take on roles in these images.

This project was aimed at exploring new forms of interactions and of communication about the work we do at the VKS. Unlike a paper, a publication or even a poster session, this was very much an ‘event’, a concentrated period of interaction around the technological infrastructure of the installation and around the social gathering of the employees of the KNAW at the Beurs. This intensity was quite distinct from the usual way of communicating around our work, much more like a performance than the usual scientific communication. This made for an unforgettable evening, which left me with new insights about what we are doing at the studio and about various unsuspected talents of colleagues (there are some budding actors, talk show hosts and roadies in this building). Oh, and also with an aversion to the colour green, which I had unwisely been planning to wear.

This event came together through the generous contributions of Constant Dullaart, Dafna Maimon, Jeannette Haagsma, Charles van den Heuvel and colleagues of the VKS and Trippenhuis.

Visit from Ximena Alarcon

We had the pleasure of welcoming Ximena for a lunch and a chat today. She is an ethnographer and sound artist, based in the Institute of Creative Technologies, in Leicester. She spoke with us about her plans to further develop the project that was at the heart of her phd, a virtual installation about sounds and memories of the London Tube. She will be exploring the commuting experience of users of the metros of Paris and Mexico City. She has many ambitions for this new phase of her work, among them, reworking the virtual installation to integrate various aspects of it, and create the possibility of links with its counterparts in other cities.

We discussed several aspects of the project, for example, the way sounds and memories can be represented differently (textual vs aural), the linearity of commuting and the non-linearity of the installation, as well as the relation between autobiographical experiences (life courses) and memories of the Tube and the tension between soundscapes and visual material with the predominantly visual paradigm of webdesign.

Personally, I was again quite intrigued by the Ximena’s approach to fieldwork and to her installation (she had presented a small part of her project at the VE workshop last year). Her project to understand and represent experience are not based on brute force (obtaining thousands of sound samples) nor on appeals to authenticity of her observation as the all-knowing fieldworker. Rather, her way of working is highly iterative: gathering material in the company of respondents, talking to them at length, going back to them with the material gathered, reworking it, gathering once again the respondent’s reactions to the transformed material, making it part of her installation. All this work constructs a very rich version of experience that requires a lasting, growing research relationship, and one that draws beautifully on the reflexive potential of respondents.