This is a pic taken at Krugerstraat, where I did a game at the opening of our exhibition at Expodium. It was really neat, the way people started using the crayons. Neighbours coming out to see what all the fun was about, so I made unexpected connections happen between the Expodium art crowd and their neighbours. I love the comment written down here: Everything does indeed look better in a circle.

Added an RSS feed to my ‘Spelen op Straat’ action blog today, as I mean to do more street actions. Will accompany my right hand man to Berlin and Copenhagen shortly, and crayons will be packed in my suitcases at both occasions. I did a Berlin game before, now it’s time to amplify. I’ve gotten over the idea of me looking stupid while crayoning – I probably do look stupid, but I don’t care. Will be interesting to see how Germans and Danes compare as to this isue of playfullness.

Have to come up with some new designs. New ideas for games. New ideas for lines. New spots. This whole project is just so very interesting – I hope it will lead me in a number of unexpected directions!

Translated a text from Holland Art Avenue about the Polder Cup:

That art and football can go together is proven by spanish artist Maider López, who instituted the Polder Cup. A projecft in which football fields were drawn in Ottoland, near Rotterdam, on the green pastures of the Ottoland polder. The lines bisect ditches, lines of trees, etc. Interested? Play the game at sept 4th 2010.

López: “The rules of the game are in part made by the way the field is shaped. If one changes the shape, the rules change, and thus the game of football as we know it. It becomes a new game, and players have to invent new tactics.” Most important is the new rule: don’t cross a ditch. Another new one: if the ball goes in the ditch, the opponents get to play it.

And a quote from magazine ‘Trouw” today: “Winner was the ‘Polderboys’ team. A penalty in front of an open goal was the clinch. Many players were wet through and through, because a number of slidings ended in the ditches.

Checked the media library – all my pics are still there. So I wonder what happened? Maybe I overran my file space, will check this with the Argeweb people tomorrow. Until then: no thumbnails. Damn!

Later: well, something good came out of it. I managed to make sense of the ‘featured categories’ list – it had a bug but I managed to find a fix for it.  So now I can highlight certain categories in the left hand column, which used to be blank.

Later: a day of near-panick – the Argeweb people managed to get my site lost and wanted me to start from square one. I convinced them that this wasn’t a viable solution as there is one year’s worth of data in here. I had to download the entire site to my computer, then upload to theirs, this has this blog functioning again. Need to upload another 3000 files (mainly pictures) then I can start looking for the missing thumbnails again.

I feel so uncomfortable if I cannot access my external memory. Note: make weekly backups myself!

Much later: tried everything – access rights to the script that makes the thumbnails, acces rights to the /temp and /cache they are stored, to the pics themselves. Then decided to grab the whole timthumb.php script from google code (and thanks again to the Google people!) and upload this fresh version. And whaddoyouknow – now it works. Don’t know why, just know it does. Doing software can be like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. Note: backup!

Note: tried to find a layout I liked better than the present one. No luck: Mimbo still rules!

Dear Everdien,

Don’t know if you can recall me, but i was at maHKU last year as well. You were participating in my friend, Christina’s performance, and you also gave her one of your wonderful “doll”s- not quiet sure what to call- and we made some photos together with her? Anyhow, I just came across with you and your blog the other day..it was wonderful to go through your posts, remembering the last year..Congratulations for your graduation! Best of luck with everything!

P.S. I slept with that “doll” for 4 months, then gave it to Christina before leaving Holland..It was wonderful, i still remember the feeling of holding it in my arms!

Graduation ceremony yesterday – and a surprise: I graduated cum laude (with distinction). Now that is really cool!

Pic shows the dean of MaHKU and the heads of the 5 departments at the graduation ceremony. Klaas Hoek, who heads Fine Art (the one with the glasses)  had a funny little speach prepared for all us Fine Art students – everyone passed, and he told us this was in part due to the support we gave each other this year. Which was nice to hear.

Will spend the next couple of days creating something like order in my workspace – lots of stuff that has been begging me to be thrown away for a long time now. Started today by cleaning out my car. It doubled as a little van carrying all my stuff – and that of other students – all around Utrecht. Now that I put the back seats back in again, it suddenly looks like a family sedan again.

Am going to talk with a company today that wants to hire me as a project manager for nov – feb. Great timing: it gives me two months to make proposals for two art projects I’m thinking about, then I will put my other skills to good use while I try to get backing for the proposals. The things I have in mind I cannot do by myself – I’ll have to organise funding and cooperation and such. Also I’m thinking about doing some more street games. And I’d like to visit a lot of exhibitions, And …..

I plan to continue writing this blog. It has served me well in the past year, and I have grown attached to writing a little every day. But right now I am going to luxuriate in the feeling of having nothing much to do and a lot of time to do it in.

I did make a lot of miles this last year. And to stay with the diamonds analogy:  it was a question of grinding and polishing. Being part of such a talented – and ego-driven – group was challenging. The first few months I spent just keeping my head above water. Keeping a diary-style weblog was very important to me at this near-drowning stage. Then I caught on, both on the theoretical side and on the practical side. One of the  things  Klaas said to me in december was crucial: “Art research can speculate“. As I have an engeneering background, speculation hadn’t been part of my professional makeup, really. Once I got this ’speculation’ thing into my system, I never looked back.

My first speculations were about the way perception works in gaming. I’ve been writing about it in my essay and I’m copying it here:

Yesterday was another Open Atelier day. Took the little girl and went early. Had a lot of visitors, FFF mainly and very nice to see them all in this setting. I don’t talk about MaHKU a lot and most were very surprised about the international orientation.  Pic is of the little girl playing my essay.

Lots of kids. If I ever use a ball game as a format again I need to think about better security. No tiny balls – a one year old put them in her mouth. No balls that could bust a monitor & cet & cet.

Yesterday I just made sure there was a grownup there all the time – me, for instance. I had a ball – no pun intended. Kids are just so much more fun than most grownups. I’ve grown over the fear that if a work is attractive to kids it cannot be Art with a capital A.

Shot some film that I’ll have a look at today or tomorrow. Tomorrow is also graduation day – looking forward to it and am sad about it at the same time. Time sped by so fast, it seems incredible.

Am curious about the new crop of students. May get to meet them next friday, there is a get-together or something. Will be interesting to see who enrolled and where from.

My games usually create a sense of unease in grownp-ups, and nine out of ten ask the famous ‘what do I do’ or ‘what is this about’ question. I had one lady asserting that a game cannot be art, as these two are different categories.

I try to talk about the underlying idea of my games sometimes: games as environments to experiment with ambiguity and doubt. In my essay I have expressed it like this: “Games offer an opportunity to think through – and act through – ambiguity and uncertainty. Most of our engagements with uncertainty are distracted, functional affairs – we try to leave the territory behind us as soon as can be arranged. Games aestheticize our connection to uncertainty. They turn ambiguity of meaning and uncertainty of outcome into sources of enjoyment and objects for contemplation. They give us a chance to luxuriate in the unfamiliar pleasures of not knowing for sure who and where we are, and grasp the emotional contours of this state of mind. Through the language of play, games teach us what it feels like to live with doubts.”

I place games in public space, in a spot where no game is expected (this is Experiment no 007) or in an art space (this is Experiment no 005). I try to create a situation in which people doubt what their (re)action should be, in which people can experiment just how much doubt they can stand. Most grown-ups either ignore the game or make up their own rules and goals, in order to ‘know what to do’. Open-endedness is something the human mind seems to avoid.

For me, the ability to handle doubt, to be able to be in doubt is fundamentally  important  -  to just say ‘I don’t know’ and be easy with that. It creates room for thought.

In an earlier post I said that kids are the best experimenters. This seems not to be entirely true, as you can see.

Another observation: when kids play, parents start making up rules. “You can only bounce balls off that wall”, “Only throw the soft balls”. No doubt they don’t want their offspring to break things – which I appreciate – and they can see trouble coming far before the kids even think about things going wrong.

Another observation: the human form is very complex.

Did an Open Atelier today at Asch van Wijckskade  - otherwise known as AWK. Had a constant stream of visitors – mostly FF (family & friends). Not like the crowd at Expodium, but nice. Picture is of one of my friends admiring a work by Alejandro Ramirez, who did a work based on Rotterdam as port of entry – exit for drugs. His research was sparked off by a newspaper article about colombian heroin being found in plastic pineapples that were sent to Rotterdam in a consignment of real pineapples. He created a journalist character and had people participate in deciding what this journalist could do in searhc of this lot of pineapples. Interesting stuff.

He’s projecting pictures taken there on an opaque glass. Which works pretty nice because his pictures are as much about light and shade as about anything else. Missed the sound to go with it – he wasn’t in today to start it and I had no clue how to. Pity he cleaned out his working space – he had it real nice, a research lab in miniature, but chose to take  all that out, leaving a bare table and chair. The room reverted to a non-descript standard office unit, which did the work hanging there no good. Later: saw the pics together with the sound. More layered, even more interesting.

As for my own work: had a lot of players in today, a ball almost busted one of my TV’s. They are made of sturdy stuff, however, so the TV survived. Best comment of the day: “I like it that it is not totally safe, this game”. Sound works better when filling the room, not only the ears, but this also makes it more into an installation. Which is nice, but not totally what I have in mind. It now talks with the work Penny made, that sits across the big room. Her sound sculptures are pretty good!