May 19, 2014

Dominique Teufen’s disorienting black and white party

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:37 am

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Words may not do justice to Dominique Teufen’s installation Afgelopen (‘Over’) which was exhibited at Nest in The Hague last April, but reviewers sure have tried.

Davos-born and Amsterdam-based Teufen created a room in which a party seems to have taken place, but with a twist—she removed all colours from the room. The result is disorienting as Trendbeheer noticed:

Your senses are being shut down completely. You’re walking in a subtle scenery of deafening silence. […] It is dull, powerful, a feast.

Volkskrant added (PDF):

I saw the remains of a birthday party. Splashes of wine left in glasses, cigarette butts, stale peanuts, empty beer bottles, suffering potted plants, wilted wreaths; it is the morning after—you know how it goes.

That is what I saw. This is what happened. The blood disappeared from my cheeks. A dark blanket covered my mood. I realised I couldn’t remember a single happy moment from my life. The space was dead, as dead as a doornail. […] This had been a Dementors’ birthday party.

And Metropolism said:

You don’t know what you’re seeing. For a moment you feel like something is wrong with your eyes, maybe somebody has been working with black lights. I thought I was seeing light blue and pale red as my eyes were searching desperately for colour. That’s when a circuit in my brain shorted. It could not deal with the fact that I had stepped into a black and white photo. My nose suddenly detected a filthy chemical smell that wasn’t there.

Teufen likes to work with mixed media, photography and a black & white copier, as you might have guessed. There are no plans for another exhibition of Afgelopen in the immediate future. Teufen will be exhibiting other work at the Uno Art Space in Stuttgart, Germany starting 14 June.

(Photo: Trendbeheer/Jeroen Bosch, some rights reserved)

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May 18, 2014

Dutch spaceman Wubbo Ockels dies

Filed under: History,Sustainability,Technology by Branko Collin @ 2:16 pm

wubbo-ockels-jens-nielsen-pdFormer Dutch astronaut Wubbo Ockels died earlier today in Amsterdam as the result of cancer, NRC writes.

Ockels was born in 1946 in Almelo. In 1985 he spent 7 days in space on board the US space shuttle Challenger which made him the first Dutch astronaut.

In the late 1980s Ockels’ reputation took a dive when he caused havoc with private air planes. On 5 December 1989 his plane taxied to a runway in Lille, France, when an Airbus came in a for a landing. The Airbus totalled Ockels’ plane, but curiously everybody got out alive.

Back on the ground Ockels became a professor of air and space technology at Delft University in 1992. He used this position for a great number of sustainable inventions. Together with his students he worked on projects that often involved converting wind energy into electricity, such as a laddermill and an energy-neutral sailboat. He also worked on the Superbus, bringing the speed and aesthetics of Formula One to the world of public transport.

Ockels’ daughter Gean published the book De Zeven Levens van Wubbo Ockels in 2010 (The Seven Lives of Wubbo Ockels). By then he had escaped death five times. And although he had allegedly tweeted he would cheat the grim reaper for a sixth time in combating cancer (“I am Wubbo Ockels, the strange geezer who always finds a way out”), he succumbed to his illness this morning.

(Photo by Jens Nielsen who released it into the public domain)

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May 17, 2014

Unions think up pension plan for the self-employed

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:33 pm

contract-branko-collinFour unions are planning to introduce a pension fund that is tailor-made for the self-employed, NRC reported last Thursday.

The fund called ZZP Pensioen allows for a variable contribution, as the self-employed have a variable income, and the money saved can also be used to cover extended sick leave. The initiators are Zelfstandigen Bouw, ZZP Nederland, FNV Zelfstandigen and PZO-ZZP.

According to NRC, only a third of the 750,000 self-employed in the Netherlands are saving for retirement.

The new fund is still looking for a provider. According to Z24, ZZP Nederland has been in talks with insurers but so far, the insurers want to bundle all kinds of unnecessary insurances with the pensions.

Why don’t the self-employed use existing pension plans? They are way too expensive (in Dutch).

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May 12, 2014

Bearded women calendar from 1997

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:18 pm

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Women with Beards (note: occasional nudity) was an art project that ran from 1997 to 1998 in which every month a photo and biography of a bearded ‘babe’ was added to a website. Ine Poppe and Jetty Verhoeff ran the project and the beards were applied by make-up artist Ellen Wenniger.

The artists write: “In former days women with beards were exposed as an aberration at fairs. In the 21st century female facial hair will be the ultimate of sexual seductiveness.” And elsewhere they add: “Several articles have by now appeared about our project: they raise questions about our playing with gender. We don’t have a cut-and-dried answer to these: we just want to amuse and entertain. Like Jetty said to a Dutch journalist: ‘In my imagination our calendar is pinned to the wall with scotch tape in a garage in Australia.'”

In 2008 the project was part of the Kiki on Steroids! exhibit (again, NSFW) which explored “the world of transgenderism and self-representation on the Internet”. In this exhibit photos of “hairy babes of the month” were displayed almost life sized over toilets and urinals.

(Illustration: cropped screenshot of the Women with Beards website)

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May 11, 2014

Netherlands has second best beer-to-income ratio

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 4:39 pm

beer-income-reddit-adiluReddit user Adilu made this fun map of Europe which shows how many beers the legal monthly minimum wage buys you in Europe.

It turns out the well-paying beer-loving countries are the Germanic ones—no surprises there. The minimum wage of a Belgian buys you 1028 pints of beer, whereas the Dutch can purchase at least 761 pints with their monthly salary. Germany comes in third with only 521 beers.

Adilu based their pint prices on a crowd-sourced database aptly called pintprice.com, according to PolicyMic, which has a thing or two to say about purchasing power and minimum wage if you’re interested.

(Illustration: Reddit user Adilu)

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May 5, 2014

Rise and fall of a Netherlands theme park in Japan

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:36 pm

huis-ten-bosch-japan-veroyama

Michael Palin once said (as quoted by Spike Japan): “There is something almost transcendentally surreal about seeing a woman dressed in a large white bonnet, dirndl, black stockings and clogs riding a bicycle and at the same time playing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on a trombone.”

Huis ten Bosch (Hausu Ten Bosu) is a theme park near Nagasaki “more than three times the size of Tokyo Disneyland and still bigger than Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea combined”. Its theme is The Netherlands – all of it. Many of the famous buildings of the Netherlands have 1:1 replicas there that function as hotels and betting houses.

The park was built during an economic boom and consequently opened during a crisis. It has struggled ever since. Spike Japan visited it in 2010 and wrote an engaging, meandering and well illustrated three part ‘long read’ that will keep you entertained for an hour or so.

Softened by the passage of time and the accumulation of research, Huis ten Bosch is now in retrospect my most beloved example of a favorite kind of place, one like Seagaia that clings tenaciously by its fingertips to the cliff of life, against all odds. Of one thing we can be certain, though: until Huis ten Bosch, the greatest artifact by far of those crazy eighties years, finally fails or flourishes, the boil of the Bubble will not have been lanced from the body of Japan for good.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

(Link: Metafilter/MartinWisse; photo by Veroyama, some rights reserved)

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May 4, 2014

Proposal Base is a public art factory and exhibition space

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:06 pm

proposalbase-flickrIf you are an artist or somebody with artistic aspirations but lack the means to make your art a reality, a new initiative just north of Arnhem promises to make your ideas come true.

Proposal Base lets you pitch ideas for public artworks to be both built and exhibited at its location in the wooded hills near Arnhem. If a proposal generates enough funding and doesn’t break a small set of rules (it may not pollute, be racist and so on), it will get built.

There seems to be two catches. One is that the area will only be reserved for this purpose for a few more years and the other is that visitors aren’t allowed except during events.

Currently the site shows a list of sample proposals. A Street View-like Flickr page shows a map of locations where you can imagine your artwork. The folks behind the project describe themselves as a 3D printer for art projects.

(Illustration: screenshot of the Flickr page; link: Trendbeheer)

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May 3, 2014

Measuring rain with smart umbrella invented by Rolf ‘MacGyver’ Hut

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 11:32 am

umbrella-55laney69Rolf Hut from Delft University of Technology wants to turn umbrellas into devices that help scientists measure rain, BBC reports.

Apparently measuring the old fashioned way using rain gauges has become too expensive. Dr Hut’s umbrellas will be outfitted with a piezo sensor stuck under the canvas to measure vibrations caused by falling rain and with Bluetooth capabilities.

The inventor told BBC: “Eventually every umbrella would come with this technology, or at least premium umbrellas would. And if you wanted to be involved, the moment you opened the umbrella, it would start sending data to your phone which uploads it to the cloud.”

It strikes me that there are all kinds of statistical problems with this idea. You’d first need to know when owners use their umbrellas. Some people may stay in during heavy rain regardless of whether they own an umbrella or not, some will use umbrellas in drizzles, some will use umbrellas in the sun.

In fact for a moment I thought this was a belated April Fools’ joke, especially considering the ‘uploading rain to the clouds’ comment above, but apparently the umbrella was presented in a Pooh bear prototype form to the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union which took place last week.

Dr Hut says on his university profile web page that his colleagues have dubbed him the ‘MacGyver scientist’ for coming up with innovative ways of measuring weather using off-the-shelf technology.

(Link: Bright, Photo: 55Laney69, some rights reserved)

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May 1, 2014

Cycling in Utrecht, video by Morten Koldby

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 3:20 pm

cycling-utrecht-morten-koldbyDanish photographer Morten Koldby shot this video of Utrecht over the course of a few weeks in March.

The historic inner city of Utrecht has many traffic calmed streets that are closed to cars but open to cyclists.

(Photo: crop of the video)

April 28, 2014

Philips sells home entertainment division to Gibson

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:10 am

Dutch electronics giant Philips has taken the last step in shedding its home entertainment division.

None other than the equally iconic American manufacturer of guitars, Gibson, has decided to take over the division, after an earlier attempt to sell the division to Funai from Japan allegedly failed. Gibson will be paying 135 mln USD for the business and will be paying separately for being allowed to continue using the Philips brand, Z24 writes.

The Philips home entertainment division excludes the television division, which Philips already sold to TPV from Taiwan in 2012.

When Philips was still a manufacturer and not just a brand, it invented things like the compact cassette, the CD, the ghetto blaster and even electronic music. More recently spin-offs operating from Philips Hi-Tech Campus (formerly known as Natlab) were working on e-paper displays. The company remains active in lighting, home appliances and medical equipment.

(Photo of the first Philips colour TV from 1964 by Philips, used with permission)

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