'Film and Architecture' Lecture and Screening by Jeroen Kooijmans

Friday evening Dutch artist Jeroen Kooijmans presented numerous examples of the works he has made over the years, as well as introducing to the audience the project he is working on momentarily, 'The Fish Pond Song'. The artistic-fields mentioned in the lecture title didn't quite reflect the nature of Kooijmans work; while generally using moving images in a 3-dimensional set-up somehow, the startling new effects he has created with this in his works definitely surpass the familiar notions of 'film' and 'architecture'.

Originally a painter, Kooijmans' first experimentation with moving imagery resulted in his 1994 work 'Work', intended to visually capture the mindset of a workaholic, as well as playing with themes of circularity and repetition.



From then on, subsequent creations both extended and transformed the ways in which moving images can be shown within a moving image itself, such as in the 1997 video 'Train Dance', in which the sun is used as a projector to depict a person on a moving train, with the earth as a screen.



Other works that were shown this evening include 'Floating Gardens' (2001) - a project which originally started out as a fantasy of combining high-rise building with land, but was almost realised during an architecture competition- and 'Fata Morgana (2006) - a short movie showing a regular idyllic Dutch landscape, suddenly brightened in its center, during which the church towers quite unnoticeably transform into minarets.

The end of the lecture was spent introducing the audience to Kooijmans' latest work, 'The Fish Pond Song', a work which has only just been realised, combining both the thematic explorations of prior works (utopia) and new themes (danger), with a physical transformation of the screens (in this case house-like structures) upon which this video is projected. The evening was rounded of with a well appreciated screening of 'New York is eating me & The Cactus Dance', a film that originally started out as a project about moustaches, but after being disrupted by the events of 9/11 changed into an identity-search.

Day 1 - 'Wonderwall - Live Visuals' Lecture & screening by Annet Dekker

Half a screen/The location of the lecture

Following the workshop, we were led up to the roof for a screening and informal lecture by Annet Dekker on VJ Culture. Interspersed with many visually stimulating clips by various VJ-artists, whose projection on a slightly loose screen positioned on top of the bare roof gave a fitting 'grindy' feel to the topic presented, the speaker introduce the audience to the various forms of VJ-ing (the more commercial club-dj versus the performance-art style VJ), the differences between VJ culture in its heydays in the 70s and recent manifestations (originally being part of a youth-movement, it was an artform imbued with ideological messages, which has lessened with the years, to its current status of portraying images as such). As the starry and increasingly chilly Cairene night set in, we were shown as a finale the full video-clip 'Global Groove' of one of the first VJ's, video-artist Nam June-Paik, whose techniques are still being employed today. Watch the first few minutes of this amazing video below:

[Disclaimer: some short lo-fi videos were made this evening of the other video-clips, but unfortunately they were lost in electronic-translation...]

For more works, come by CiC's Video-Library to view both the full half an hour of 'Global Groove' and the other video-clips that were shown!