'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.

Freedom of Creation Workshop - Part II

The Video-Library

The morning after the night before, the workshop continued on with its explanation of the use(fullness) of free software and the open source/linux movement. Jaromil especially emphasised the importance of privacy on the web, as he showed in a few seconds how full (real-life) adresses can be obtained from (virtual) IP-adresses. Additionally, the many hubs that lie on a user's path to the internet are vulnerable spots that can be compromised, and may result in your communication being obtained or obstructed. To stress the importance of keeping your data safe, Jaromil mentioned a few cases in which insecure data of influential people had been sold to third parties to be used, without their consent. The participants, including myself, were then shown the ways to ensure optimal privacy, against these type of actions, in the Dyne:bolic Operating Server, primarily by 'nesting'.

The rest of the workshop soon spun into a political Q&A on the economy in which open source operates. Participants were slightly confused when they were told they were welcome to sell their free Dyne:Bolic CDs to friends and families, without having to give the creators a share of the profits. Nevertheless, Jaromil ensured us that while copy-right as such isn't relevant in the open source movement, as everyone is free to create, use and distribute sofware, creators still get credited for their adaptions.

Motivated by the liberatory and ideological motivations underlying free software-creation, the group collectively expressed its desire to put the workshop into practice somehow during the national strike that will take place this Sunday. To be continued..