Too bad! I’m out of  ’Been Out’ – the Dortmund call for projects. After digesting this, I checked the projects that the ‘in’ people entered. Nice plans, great variety as to age, gender, track record. All have to do with the way public space is lived in and looked at. All more or less traditional in the sense that no games, technology or interactive ideas – drawing, sculpture, video, performance. I need to work on my elevator pitch – my text is maybe too academic.

If not in Dortmund, I’d still want to do a ‘hide me – hide you’.  Found a place in Delft that looks promising, could do a pop-up art thing there. Need to think about this some more, also check on material.

This is the young Aldo van Eyck, a Dutch architect, writer and playground designer I’ve studied for my masters thesis. The van Eesteren Museum in Amsterdam does a retrospective of his work at the moment, it is titled ‘the playful city’. I was there a couple of weeks ago – ran a little late that afternoon so I was not able to participate in the guided walk they organise. Will save that for another day, must go before the end of january for they close the exhibition jan 31th.  Anyway, it was fun looking at Aldo’s work again.

Most stuff in the museum I’d seen before. The replica’s of his play furniture outside were fun, though, a challenge to get some good pics. Van Eyck had the bright idea to make the play furniture very simple and non-moving, as this would fire the kid’s imagination more. A rule I’ve tried to follow: keep it simple. And judging from my experiments: this works!

Hey – I’m on the website of 2010 LAB TV – with all the other entries for Been Out. A lot of entries, check below. Hope to make the ‘selected’  category – and nervous about that option, too. Can’t win, can I? Why does being nervous never stop? Nerves should degenerate with age …

More than 200 proposals from all over the world:

This message was published by the organisers of Been Out:

The vacant second floor of Ständige Vertretung, home of the creative network Heimatdesign, becomes an exhibition laboratory: Where once the former regulatory authority did its paperwork, from 3-10 December 2011 five international young artists at the beginning of their career deal with the relationship of art and urban, public spaces. They work on questions that were published in a Europe-wide call for projects this autumn.

Although being initiated as a european project with a focus on North Rhine-Westphalia, the Netherlands and Great Britain, the one-month call of the Dortmund based cultural initiative Bohème Précaire in cooperation with numerous national and international partners attracted worldwide attention: Beside a lot of creatives from Germany numerous artists from e.g. Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Paraguay, France, Poland, Slovenia, Iran, Russia, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Chile and Argentina participated in the call. More than 200 works were submitted per e-mail. All proposals will be exhibited in the online gallery kunst.labor, a channel of the cultural portal 2010lab.tv. At the beginning of November, an international expert judging panel chooses five projects which will be invited to the exhibition at Ständige Vertretung.

Members of the judging panel:
Dr. Inke Arns (Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund)
Amira Gad (Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam)
Dr. Barbara Honrath (Goethe-Institut Niederlande, Amsterdam)
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (Virtueel Platform, Amsterdam)
Duncan White (St. Martins College, London)

In December, the exhibition floor offers a creative, communicative and temporary free space that is open for experiments and the encounter with artistic positions. On every evening throughout the duration of the exhibition there will be events like talks, film screenings, science and poetry slams, workshops, concerts, dj sets, parties and more – presented and organised by the Ruhr Gestalten Magazin.

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Just pressed the ‘send’ button for my Hide Me, Hide You proposal for Been Out Vol.1 – the Dortmund call for papers that landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago.

The Been Out people have a great website. On it, they discuss what is happening to the cities in the Ruhrgebied: on the one hand there is de-industrialisation, which created a vacuum in the way public space is used; on the other hand the Internet plus the advance of mobile platforms creates new options and possibilities for the use of public space.
In their own words: “public space undergoes an enormous expansion by new technologies in the virtual reality of the internet and the physical world. Privacy becomes permeable. Data protectionists are considered petty nitpickers and spoil-alls when it comes to the global game with identities. Digital networks such as the social web, with their promise of participation in worldwide communication, are alluring stages for those who want to be a producer in a culture of participation. The side effects are exhibitionism, voyeurism and a commercial exploitation which has seemingly already been existing before a new idea makes the stage. Yet, the new media are no longer some toy for the nerds, but have long become a natural part of daily routine, social communication, work – and they have become part of art production, art presentation, and art mediation, too. They promote a global culture of democratic exchange of information which provides people from developing or threshold countries who have access to the world wide web with new opportunities to organise themselves – thus, they are feared by dictatorial regimes. Computer viruses and worms are new tools in the armoury of global conflicting interests. But instead of completely retreating into virtual worlds like the one suggested in computer games like World of War Craft, public, urban space experiences a renaissance in the sense of a place of encounter, of social and political discourse. Instead of perfecting the kind of cyberspace which 80s science fiction dreamed of, digital network media connect the physical space via smartphone or netbook with the ephemeral community of the ever-present Facebook friends – towards a hybrid environment with a lot of hot spots and interfaces. A youth frustrated by the incapability of the old elites to battle the current economy crisis effectively uses the social web and smartphone apps to give their protest a collective voice. The locations of their manifestations are historical plazas in capitals like Madrid or Athens. In some countries of the Arabian world, even governments could be overthrown by using Facebook and Twitter. These young people (when coming from one of the crisis-ridden European countries, sometimes every other one of them is unemployed) use the new media to demand their right to work and a better future and to appropriate public space. According to art theoretician Nicoloas Bourriaud, a flexible person of our days has one crucial question: what is my next station? He is looking for a direction to develop and optimise himself, while he is permanently busy with being himself (Alain Ehrenberg), and running after the promise of the countless things he could be, current cultural practices and contemporary artistic strategies often answer this question by returning to public, urban space, to the community. When the residents of the global village can only react passively to the consequences of international complexities of economic, political, or social kind, they long for an intersubjectively shared culture according to the definition by Habermas. They long for places of physical encounter, exchange, discourse. Street art, flashmobs, interventions, guerilla gardening, parcour, boomboombox parties or adbusting – those are the new practices of contemporary popular culture. The challenges faced by modern man are reflected by the strategies of a contemporary art committed to participation and based on aesthetics of correlating people to others, such as the installations by Rirkrit Tiravanija, the happenings by Christoph Schlingensief, or urban screen projects inviting you to participate, for example. mission . The exhibition laboratory been out invites you to participate in the call for projects by diverse submissions. The submissions should be focused on the artistic interpretation of the following assumptions: Metropolises which were once at least respected due to their economic power such as the cities of the Ruhr are subject to a continuous transformation process. The movement of the heavy industry towards other countries left vacant spaces at many places which, according to a long-term political agenda, should be filled with a strengthening of the following sectors: science, education, service, culture, and creative industry. These vacancies in the cityscape of the Ruhr are often marked by dysfunctional urban surroundings; living and working quarters which had been conceived by the logic of an industrial-based economy are now void of their original purpose. Inner city limits, uniform shopping malls with their omnipresent commercial slogans, and the proliferation of temporary “bargain” shops, and gambling halls are, among other factors, characteristic for urban areas in times of economic crises. 2. Instead of being used for a complete retreat into a virtual present, digital network technologies like social networks expand physical space, becoming tools for a reappropriation of public space as an area for communication, social encounter, and discourse by their users. Conceived by numerous cultural practices and artistic strategies, a hybrid area is generated which combines the possibilities of digital network media with sensual experiences, and at the same time creates new perspectives on urban space and new temporary communities. Parallel to that, shifts and permeabilities regarding the limits of private and public matter will occur in virtual space. Contemporary cultural practices in urban surroundings have the potential to disengage the participating citizens temporarily from their role of being an isolated, passive, and observing consumer of information, merchandise, and services, and to invite them to an examination of their own physicalness, the possibilities of public space, and to dialogues with others. The objective of these participatorial projects is to break up the logic of urban space -which has been generated and marked by everyday routine and predictable, economic rules- by means of creative and not result-oriented artistic interventions. The participants, first being mere, isolated observers in urban space, become emancipated, creative, or reflective individuals, being aware of themselves as part of a citizen community. They represent the opposite model to the passive consumer of omnipresent commercial contents who accepts the surveillance of his movements in public space. 3. questions: note : What kind of contemporary artistic strategies can examine these shifts in physical and/or virtual public space? How does art reflect these cultural phenomena, how does it work with them, how does it treat them, how does it react? How can these artistic strategies help to transform dysfunctional urban spaces into places of communication, community, and discourse again? What does the art of the „Digital Natives“ look like?

I’m responding to a call for projects – re-using a format I have entered for the Berlin Biennale. Never had a response from the Berlin people – shame on them! – so I feel free to amend my project and enter it in Dortmund.  Situated my game at Dortmund Hauptbahnhof – nice touch, no?

CALL FOR PROJECTS AND ARTWORKS
Deadline: November 1st, 2011

Exhibition: December 3rd to 10th, 2011
Ständige Vertretung
Hoher Wall 15
44137 Dortmund-Mitte

International artists and creative minds from the fields of contemporary art, media arts, digital and contemporary culture are invited to submit their works for the exhibition been out, vol. 1. The call is focused on artistic strategies dealing with public, urban space. We are looking for new positions by artists who are still at the beginning of their career. Deadline for submissions is November 1st, 2011. All submitted works and projects will be published online. Five of these works will be exhibited in a group show at Ständigen Vertretung, home of the creative network Heimatdesign (Dortmund), from December 3rd to 10th, 2011. The Call for Projects will be published in North Rhine-Westphalia, the Netherlands, Great Britain and selected other cities. (see BEEN OUT as an approach to the topic)