2015
Today’s Art on Sea Concept : Petra Heck & Collective Works Contributors: Ali Demirel Evelina Domnitch Dmitry Gelfand Enrico Gaido Lotte Geeven HeHe Natalie Jeremijenko Germaine Kruip Lisa Park Helmut Smits Staalplaat Soundsystem Interviews: Petra Heck Translation: Texty Design: Collective Works Made possible by: TodaysArt The Pier Print: NPN drukkers We would like to thank all artists for letting us use their sketches and ideas for this publication. All copyrights reserved to their respective owners.
Today’s Art on Sea
2015: Today’s Art on Sea by Petra Heck en Peter Zuiderwijk
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Pier as its surroundings that attracted the artists: the surrounding sea, the sky and the beach. [...] They wanted to re-harmonize the relationship between man and nature.’ 2
‘ZERO on Sea’ On 25 September 2015, its exactly fifty years ago that the international art exhibition ‘ZERO on Sea’ was meant to launch on The Pier in Scheveningen, the seaside resort of the Dutch city of The Hague. The organizers of ‘ZERO on Sea’ wanted to show the optimistic and revolutionary approach of avant-garde artists of the 1960’s. During a walk along the Scheveningen sea shore, Henk Peeters and his fellow German ZERO artists developed wild plans about what one could do with the sea.1 Participating artists included Yayoi Kusama, Hans Haacke, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker, Arman, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, the Dutch Nul group and many others. However, this ambitious project was never realized.
At the time, The Pier was a brand new modernist structure. It was the successor of ‘Het Wandelhoofd Koningin Wilhelmina’, a wooden pier from 1901 that was directly connected to the Kurhaus, a large concert hall / hotel in the heart of Scheveningen Bad. At the end of this first Pier, a pavilion was built where you could see theatre plays, listen to music concerts and enjoy acrobatics. During the war, the Germans built a massive defensive wall on the beach, the original Pier was abandoned, burned down and demolished at the end of the war. After the war, during the ‘wederopbouw’ (the reconstruction period), the new modernistic Pier was built a bit north of the original Pier. Designed in concrete by the Rotterdam architects Maaskant, Apon and Dijk, the new Pier opened its doors in 1961. ‘Unlike the traditional Wilhelminapier, Maaskant’s creation wasn’t a posh boulevard, destined for walking and drinking a cup of tea in a café-varieté. The new pier was to be a place for popular entertainment, a popular recreation spot. But it was not, as happened in England at that time, turned into a fairground cramped with stalls along the edges, so one couldn’t see the sea’. 3
ZERO artists wanted to eliminate all traditional artistic tools and concepts and make a new kind of art that would be an expression of the contemporary world around 1960. It was the time of the space age. As John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural speech in 1961: ‘Together, let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths’. His words called out for innovation and collaboration. ZERO stood for a new and optimistic start within art. On the Scheveningen Pier, out in the open, the elements, art and exhibition space would merge into one giant, total work of art. The choice of the venue for ‘ZERO on Sea’ was more or less coincidental, writes Caroline de Westenholz: ‘It wasn’t so much The
Even though it had been a coincidence that The Pier was chosen as a location for ‘ZERO on Sea’, it fitted the event rather well. As a journalist 76
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in Algemeen Handelsblad wrote in 1965: ‘Just look at the pier, that crazy concrete funnel, it is ZERO art in itself, sort of ready made.’ (4) The Pier reflected the times. It was new, a promise for the future and quite literally a breath of fresh air. From the tower, on a clear day, one could see almost 17 km into the distance; an enormous, inspiring vastness.
giving The Pier a makeover, it will still take some time for people to forget all the cheap entertainment and truly rediscover its initial beauty. In the 1980s, The Pier was renovated and turned into an ‘all weather experience’. The whole pier was covered to extend ‘the season’. A boardwalk on the top remained, but overall the pier turned inwards.
The optimistic and revolutionary plans for large scale outdoor art projects on The Pier did not come out of the blue. Especially Otto Piene and Heinz Mack were very much into large outdoor, land-art kind of projects. Otto Piene produced several Sky-art projects with large inflatable constructions and a huge 600 meter long rainbow for the 1972 Olympics. Mack started his Sahara project in 1959, in which he tried to create synergy between art, infinite amounts of sand, sun and air, by mirroring columns and reliefs in the desert. A lot of artists on the other hand tried to retrieve the natural and cosmic space inwards and to reduce it by mechanization. Otto Piene for example created ‘The Proliferation of the Sun’ (1967), a 25 minute long multimedia-performance with hundreds of painted slides, several projectors and sound. He wanted to create a poetic trip through space.
With the design of The Pier, the initiators were actually being pioneers by fully embracing mass tourism for the first time. ‘One could find all kinds of entertainment in one place, concentrated in one walk. The pier was a world in itself, a miniature seaside town, a total experience’. 5 But it was a bad sign for things to come. With the introduction of commercial real-estate development, Scheveningen took a turn for the worse. The old hotels were torn down and all the newly developed buildings became isolated ‘total experiences’. The result; a coastal town that is completely turned inwards and spatially disconnected from the boulevard, the beach and the sea. The only elementary connection to nature that remains is the harsh reality of seasonal economics. If an artist would walk around Scheveningen Bad today it would be hard to ignore all the ugliness. Still, get to the actual sea shore or walk to the very end of The Pier and inevitably one gets into a different mindset, because of the overwhelming impact of the elements, the sky, the weather, the openness of the sea and the strange experience of a manmade concrete structure cutting into this timeless environment. They are the same
Today’s Art on Sea 25 September 2015, exactly fifty years after the planned ‘ZERO on Sea’ event, The Pier is still there. The last 3 decades have taken their toll. Not only structurally, but also on a perceptual level. Although the new owner is 75
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‘ ZERO is silence. ZERO is the beginning. ZERO is round. ZERO spins. ZERO is the moon. The sun is ZERO. ZERO is white. The desert ZERO. The sky above ZERO. The night.’ Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, Günther Uecker, 1963
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fundamentals that inspired Henk Peeters and his fellow ZERO artists when they came up with the ideas for ‘ZERO on Sea’.
some artists think of the same ideas and forms as the ZERO artist did in their days. Therefore, it was actually kind of interesting to also look back for a change. All the proposed projects from fifty years ago, in a way, sound very contemporary today. And specific ZERO elements and aesthetics can actually be recognized within a lot of contemporary art. As Daniel Birnbaum says in an interview with Mattijs Visser: ‘One can observe recurring themes. I think it was Mark Twain who said that ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’ 6 In addition, there is a remarkable interest in ZERO from institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
It was more or less a coincidence that TodaysArt (a network platform based in The Hague that presents, develops and promotes digital culture, contemporary art and creativity) stumbled upon The Pier and ZERO. Since its departure from its original festival location on the Spui square in The Hague, TodaysArt has moved all over town following the spatial, architectural and political reality of its time; staging a vertical festival on nineteen floors in the abandoned Ministry of Internal Affairs and being the opening festival for a hotly debated temporary theatre in the harbour of Scheveningen. A logical next step was to look at the abandoned Pier that was, at that time, bought by developer KondorWessels. With the intention to demolish parts of The Pier and plans to erect a giant Ferris wheel, it made sense to have a closer look at this location.
What does the legacy of this movement mean to contemporary art today? Contemporary art is too complex to simply reduce to references of previous movements. As Germaine Kruip says in her interview: ‘It is not an issue for me when people state that they were already doing this back then. The question remains what the reason is for a recurrence. It almost seems like a ritual to me and with every new repetition a very slow shift takes place. This shift is interesting to me.’
Throughout the years, the TodaysArt festivals have always had a specific relation to the context they were staged in. Part of the program has always been publicly accessible and free of charge. Often it concerned artworks in public space that questioned its spatial function, shape or usage. Sometimes existing artworks would fit a certain environment perfectly, in other situations artworks had to be specially commissioned.
Inspired by the current situation of the Pier and all the plans and sketches from the ‘ZERO on Sea’ initiative in 1965, TodaysArt asked several national and international artists to propose commissioned, site-specific or existing projects. The organization specifically requested proposals that would use the (physical) context of The Pier.
2015 is not 1965 and TodaysArt is not ZERO. Still, it is striking that, when confronted with The Pier in 2015, 73
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So the projects for 2015 started off under more or less the same conditions as in 1965, with The Pier as location and the surrounding elements as inspirational sources. Some plans were too ambitious and could not be realized, as The Pier and the natural elements turned out to be quite demanding for showcasing art. This often lead to curatorial consequences. Eventually the selected participating artists proposed interventions in The Pier, on The Pier, on the beach, in the water and in the air, thus establishing relationships with the waves, wind, air, fire, light and water. They respond to the location and (our relationship with) the natural elements. While the conditions of the location seem very similar compared to back then, a lot of things have also changed. As mentioned before, the iconic location of The Pier has, over the past few years, been the battleground of the natural elements and a stage for ambitious and disruptive utopian and commercial ideas. In addition, we find ourselves in a political, economical and technological environment that is very different from the situation in 1965.
touches upon on of the themes and ambitions of the festival when talking about her work: ‘Can we redesign our relationship to the ocean? How do we do it; what are the tools and strategies for doing so? It’s a space race to the 21st century. […]’ In this publication, we present to you the sketches for the TodaysArt Festival and ten interviews with a selection of artists about their artistic practices and plans for the Pier. Some of the plans were executed and (in the tradition of ‘ZERO on Sea’) others were not. The questions we asked the artists refer to ideas and practices around ZERO artists. In addition, Caroline de Westenholz wrote a new article about ‘ZERO on Sea’, which is included alongside images of the original sketches by artists for the ‘ZERO on Sea’ event.
1 Caroline de Westenholz, ‘1965-1966: ‘ZERO on Sea’’. 2 Caroline de Westenholz, ‘1965-1966: ‘ZERO on Sea’’. 3 Provoost, Michelle, ‘Hugh Maaskant, architect van de vooruitgang’, p 228. 4 Caroline de Westenholz, 1965-1966: ‘ZERO on Sea’’ quoting Hans Götze in ‘Scheveningse pier wordt Nulfestijn’, Algemeen Handelsblad, 4th August 1965. 5 Provoost, Michelle,’Hugh Maaskant, architect van de vooruitgang’, p. 228. 6 From ‘ZERO Today. History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but it Does Rhyme’, Mattijs Visser in an interview with Daniel Birnbaum in: ‘ZERO’, ed. by Dirk Pörschmann, Margriet Schavemaker, Mattijs Visser, Thekla Zell, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ZERO foundation, Düsseldorf, 2015, p. 234.
In the end, with the 2015 festival on The Pier, TodaysArt presents the versatility of contemporary (media) art, and art that is reminiscent of particular ZERO elements. The curatorial team selected artists working within different disciplines and practices, whether working autonomously, commercially, collaboratively with universities, companies, other artists or scientists, within art, science, social design, sound or music. Forms, practices and ideas from back then echo in the now. Natalie Jeremijenko 72
Proposals TodaysArt 2015
Plastique Fantastique proposed the installation ‘LIVEBOAT’, that creates an alternative low energy public space on top on the Treasure Island platform of The Pier where in the near future a ferris wheel will be installed. Addressing the ongoing refugee tragedy you can listen to extracts of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ as well as fragments of refugee experiences that are intertwined to a sound carpet.
Plastique Fantastique made a sketch for a banana shaped inflatable tube that will be squeezed between the beams and stairs of the terrace in the building at The Pier. The bubble hosts art performances and offers visitors an unique spatial experience.
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Proposals TodaysArt 2015
Florian & Michael Quistrebert proposed their video ‘Untitled (tartans) that is on show on The Pier. ‘Untitled (tartans)’ renders a cold kaleidoscopic tartan pattern in shadow gradients referring to avant-garde cinema and questioning utopia and more generally progressivism.
Fabian Knecht proposed a sketch for a time based sculpture installation called ‘RÜCKFÜHRUNG’. Knecht intended on making a large sand hill and by installing a large fan that blows with a 100 km per hour all the sand would be blown back into the sea.
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Proposals TodaysArt 2015
Mike Rijnierse proposed a sketch for the commissioned performance ‘Klok’ where a 100 kg church bell will bungee jump from the bungee jump tower on The Pier. The sixty meter fall of the bell will cause a Doppler effect creating a sound experience as if you are cycling towards a church with the speed of 60 km per hour.
Zoro Feigl proposed his performance ‘Kite flock’, a cloud of kites that swarm around one another like spermatoza or fireflies. Entangled to ropes in a branching structure the kites are constantly in a tug of war creating odd movements.
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Onno Dirker, Christian van der Kooy, Karin Mientjes & Peter Zuiderwijk proposed to stage a performative work about transmission. Through signal transfer equipment a message is sent to two nude persons standing on an empty platform who are performing its content.
Onno Dirker and Christian van der Kooy proposed a live hydrophonic concert on The Pier ‘A tempo Hydro’.
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Proposals TodaysArt 2015
Vladimir Grafov made a sketch for the commissioned piece ‘WAVEFRONT ZERO’. Grafov uses laser as an optical method to visualise the flow in fluid waves. By marking a ZERO level as if making an incision in the sea, the work reveals the dynamic forces of the wind and sea streams beneath the Pier.
Berndnaut Smilde proposed a sketch for the commissioned installation ‘CONCEPT Breaking Light#2’ that he developed with Satellietgroep in a residency on the Zandmotor. Smilde aims to open the curtains on the city side of the lighthouse for a short moment and by making use of a prism the artist temporarily changes the function of a lighthouse of just being a beacon.
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Proposals TodaysArt 2015
Children of the Light made a sketch for which they had the history of The Pier in mind, wishing to focus on the appearance and disappearance of The Pier. ‘A sea above the sea, an umbrella, as a blanket pulsating like a jellyfish’. Children of the Light premieres ‘Reflector Suites’ instead.
Onno Poiesz proposed a sketch for ‘Fata Morgana’ a commissioned project for the outer left island on The Pier which will be demolished by the end of 2015. Poiesz is planning to wrap the island completely in mirroring foil.
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Lotte Geeven Walter Lotte Geeven creates portraits of the human relation to intangible abstracts such as the sky or the earth. In search for places where this relation deviates she travels the world. On site -helped by specialists- she studies and reveals the mechanisms of our attempts to understand and control these complex matters.
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The role of the sea in human culture has been important for centuries, as people experience the sea in contradictory ways: as powerful but serene, beautiful but dangerous. Symbolically, the sea has been perceived as a hostile environment populated by fantastic creatures. In the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the sea symbolises the personal and the collective unconscious. In this tradition of thinking about the magical relationship between man, sea and language, an oracle algorithm was created, named Walter.
ing on the mood of the sea. Within the algorithm, words that are connected to each other are linked to moods of the sea by means of semantics and etymology within fine-tuned word clouds, based on psychological research into the relationship between language and moods. During flat, calm seas, the words have a light meaning (e.g. lemonade), whereas during huge waves, the words are heavier and more substantial (e.g. darkness). This classification of the English language follows all the different moods of the sea.
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project?
What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location?
‘What does the sea say?’ With this question, I contacted Thomas Grill. Among many other things, he does scientific research in fields of sound perception, analysis and modelling, interactive electronic instruments, and machine learning, to see whether he could join me in my search for a way to convert the sea into language. In the work ‘Walter’, at the end of The Pier, the visitor hears the sea speak, live, in an endless rhythmic stream of words, responding to the behaviour of the water. The small cube shaped computer, with the translator program inside, is equipped with an infra-red camera. Through the eye of the lens, it continuously scans the surface of the water and reads and recognizes the sea at The Pier in all its moods, day and night. From peaceful and flat as a mirror to furious with huge waves, from light to dark and all possible degrees of variations in between. ‘Walter’ considers the sea a being and chooses his words carefully, depend-
I see the pier as an observatory for the ocean. As a visitor you walk from the quay onto the walkway above the sea; suddenly it is as if you are on the bow of a ship; gazing to the horizon surrounded by the elements, with the wild sea below you.
What attracted you to the project?
The sea attracts me. Before this, I worked on a project for a year, which took place on the water. Central to that work was a meeting on the middle of the ocean, at a point that was calculated by many oceanographers. I put two GPS-devices in the water at opposite sides of the ocean, which would slowly drift towards each other in an oceanic choreography using the gulf streams of the North Atlantic Ocean, meeting in the middle of the ocean, a place where two main currents end in a maelstrom. I followed this slow 7.000 kilometre long journey online for months, until suddenly one 64
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‘Walter’
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of the two objects was stolen by a Moroccan ship. During this period, I became attached to the sea and its unpredictable movements and decided to further explore the mysterious ocean as a subject. For the project on the pier, I am now creating a work that gives a voice to the sea, which has been central to my work over the past year.
hend large, abstract forces around me. This often begins with a question that leads to an adventurous quest for answers. For this, I look for help at institutes and other parties that can guide me during my substantive expeditions. A final work is not related to a presentation space, but is independent with regards to the subject. It may take the form of a newspaper article; a journey; a company or an algorithm in this case. I attach great value to the proper appearance of a work and the correct way of setting up a meeting between the work and the audience. In some cases, the form of a work is not immediately recognisable as art and that is a conscious choice.
Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with other artists? Do you do any commercial projects, just autonomous work, or both? or ‘Walter’ and other works, I almost F always worked together with experts. People who can shed a light on a subject. For instance, Thomas Grill wrote the algorithm for ‘Walter’ and was a great support in setting up the project. The classification of language was guided by Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), with the help of the Stanford University wordnet. Edwin van Gelder designed the accompanying book. Miriam van Eck designed ‘Walter’ and helped with the research. A work develops organically from the interaction in the team in which everybody contributes something from his or her own expertise. Each project consists of a different, customized team and the outcome can never be predicted in advance.
Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important? My signature is in the idea and all of the decisions resulting from it during the realization of a project. How the work is created must be consistent with the subject of the work. For instance, ‘Walter’ is being built by a machine factory. In what way would you describe the current and future function of art? rt is a valuable and sensitive instruA ment to highlight areas within our ‘Society of the Spectacle’. I believe that this will become more and more important in the future, in a world in which the pace of images and information seems to be subject to an exponential growth; within that, a form of positioning is necessary. Art can play a role in this and provide new points of view on this growing world of data.
How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? I n my work, through process-based projects, I search for ways to compre62
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and correctness interest me. They are very human. Through the eye of the camera, the system recognizes nuances and differences in the image of the sea that are not immediately discernible with the naked eye. To a certain extent, technology is therefore necessary in learning to recognize all the different characteristics of the sea. Our eyes and brain recognize the differences in the sea from serene to wild or from light to dark, but they miss out on thousands of other stages. The brain of a ship captain will perceive the condition of the sea in much more detail than my brain. And ‘Walter’ reads the sea even more precise than a captain. In this, working with new media is not an end in itself. Per project, I choose a custom form; this can also be an analogue library or a simple sound recording. The form must fit the idea, the work of art must not be adapted to the new technology. Art is not a gadget.
How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? We slowly lose grip on the world around us, which rapidly abstracts and virtualizes and, through the use of new technologies, can zoom in and out further and further on matter, space and time. In my work, I try to determine a place among all this by asking questions and by building bridges between this world and the human dimension. With regards to your work, what do you think about technology? Is it important to work with new materials? I n ‘Walter’, technology is the building block of the system and also subject of the work. The algorithm is controlled by an uncontrollable sea and establishes connections within the liquid nature of language. For me, as the maker, there is an interesting friction here between machine and nature. The machine and the algorithm stand amidst two extremely complex liquid systems that have many things in common: language and the sea. The state of the art technology of the algorithm and the computer make it possible to link language and the sea, but this will always be subjective and mechanical. Without technology, it would be impossible to bridge the gap between these two systems in such a thorough and precise way, but on the other hand, the technology also stands between the two as a powerless servile computer. These kind of insurmountable contradictions in the desire for control
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? What do these fields mean to you(r work)? Both scientists and artists are researchers, thinkers and creators; sometimes their fields overlap each other. The ratio and cross-fertilisation between the two professions can be extremely useful and contribute to the growth and disruption of both. Personally, I often find science in the spots where I look for answers to questions. We meet each other there. The questions that I ask come from a human, non-scientific perspective: ‘Does the sea have a voice?’, ‘Does coincidence exist?’, ‘What is the 61
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sound of the earth?’ These types of questions don’t really have a place in the world of science. However, projects often develop as an interesting substantive cooperation resulting from mutual curiosity.
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Staalplaat Soundsystem Zeero The platform Staalplaat Soundsystem was founded in 2000. Ephemeral yet very present and physical they often work context-specific outside of the white cube in urban environments, industrial areas or in nature.
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we came up with the second plan: ‘Zeero’.
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project? ‘Zeero’ is a very large organ made of four steel tubes with a length of 24 meters and a diameter of 1.2 meters. It is operated by large burners. The tubes that we use are the tubes that are used for sand suppletion on the beach. The hot air from the burners creates an air current through the tube, which generates a very low tone.
Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? We are attracted to the ZERO theme, because the work of ZERO fits staalplaat soundsystem. The location The Pier on the beach - is also great. How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? For this project, we work closely with Van Oord, the company that is supplementing the beach and uses the steel tubes, as well as Adballon, which provides the burners. Without them, the project would be impossible. We always like to work outside of museum spaces. For example, we work in industrial environments, the urban public space, but also nature. The beach and The Pier fit perfectly with our work methods.
Are natural elements like the sun, wind, the sea, light, nature (natural or synthetic) a big influence on this particular work? he wind plays an important role in T the work. The wind influences the heat and therefore the tone, but also the way in which the sound travels over the beach. What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location? When creating a work for The Pier, you will have the sea in the background, so the work must be simple and powerful. Otherwise you will fail. Originally, we wanted to create a wall of water, a closed wall of water around The Pier. To do this, we wanted a bunch of sand suppletion boats around The Pier, spraying water into the air to form the wall (these boats have very powerful water cannons). The plan was also to vary the color of the water by varying the amount of sand and water coming out of the water guns. We also wanted to see whether it was possible to influence the jets of water using sound. The costs for this plan were too high, so
What is the role of the audience in your work? A presentation in public space gives you an audience that more or less happens to pass by. That openness and open-mindedness is pleasant and is in a stark contrast with an audience that specifically comes to see you in an ‘art space’. Technically, the work functions even if no audience shows up, but it would be an empty work without an audience. Every situation and location has its requirements, so we don’t create work specifically for the public space, but 58
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Zeero
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for the space. Whether it is public, is part of the character of the space. We always visit the location and the location tells us what must be done. A beach in The Hague can therefore be completely different to a beach in Cairo.
he latest materials and media are T resources that you can use, and it is important to know what is possible, but it should not be a goal in itself. Unfortunately, you often see artists creating works just to be ‘the first’. We do not want to be a part of that.
Is the relationship between technology-art-nature important to you(r work)? The relationship between technology, art and nature is important to us, which you can see for instance in our installation ‘Composed Nature’; a forest in which the trees are controlled by oscillating engines. It shows that the relationship between technology, art and nature is part of our work. The starting point for us is usually the structuring and shaping of our surroundings; in the urban environment we did this with a (sound) composition of thirty honking tuc tucs, and in nature with trees rustling loudly through artificial means, which we later exhibited in a church in Deventer for the Kunst en Techniek Prijs of Witteveen en Bos in 2014. ‘ZEROo’ is about the search for an instrument that can compete with the sea.
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? I once heard a scientist say that he ‘worked, because he was curious’. For us, it’s the same. We believe less in the absoluteness and measurability of our experiments, but the distance between the two disciplines is not so big. Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with other artists? Do you do any commercial projects, just autonomous work, or both? When developing ‘Zeero’, we worked with three artists, Radboud Mens, Bastiaan Maris, and Geert Jan Hobijn. Internally, we have a rough division of labor according to everyone’s strengths, but everyone can add what he wants. At the moment, we are working on a sound plan for a tunnel to Rotterdam, which has yet to be built (not definitive). To do this we are working on an idea that involves the reflective qualities of different building materials, new dyeing techniques and the combination between mathematics and compositions. The rules for ‘commercial’ works are also different, which has its advantages and disadvantages. It is a good idea to do both commercial and non-commercial work. You always have freedom, yet it is always limited.
Is your work utopian, dystopian, neutral or different? We do not want to create an aesthetic work; we want to contribute through research and experimentation. It is an attempt, and that is all you should expect. Is it important to work with new materials and technology? 56
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Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important, or would you say that the work you make could be produced by others? I f you’re working with others, you share control over the project with others. If you are afraid of that, you should do it alone. It is also fun and exciting to build and realize projects yourself, and it’s necessary to understand what you are doing. We try to find a balance in that. Is perception in your work important? Ultimately, everyone experiences our work differently. The differences are personal, but are also different in every country or continent (we travel a lot). For us, the acoustic experience is central to our work, and that experience is culturally different, yet universal. Sound is, however, a universal language. For instance, emotions in sound are understood regardless of cultural backgrounds. But sound is also a strong expression of a certain location, of local music, and how people experience sound. This is an exceptional contrast, in which we feel at home, and with which we like to work. It was impressive to see how excited the tuc tuc drivers were about our concert, and how well the emotions were understood in Helsinki. And yet we are sober northerners of the low lands, and we do not pretend to be more than that.
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Helmut Smits
Helmut Smits Waterfall Helmut Smits is a ceaseless producer of ideas that comment on situations and objects in a frank and often humorous way. By observing in a straightforward, critical and witty way, he (often) sheds (new) light on things.
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Could you briefly describe your plan for the project?
any other question or location would have worked for me.
The plan is to create a temporary waterfall formed by excavators. In addition, I would like to make postcards with a sunrise and a sunset, with a smiley face at sunrise and the opposite, a downface - I don’t actually know the exact term - as the sun sets. When the sun comes up, the face is happy and at sunset he is not happy. For me, that’s perhaps the most logical, positive thought? You could also say that you are happy when the sun sets, or when you can go to bed. For me, the sunrise and sunset rival each other in terms of beauty. And then you can display the cards on The Pier, in one of those postcard stands, which you always find at the coast.
Does the performative element play a role in your work? The waterfall will be a choreography in which movement will be important, but I still have to figure out how long it will take, how quickly a bucket of an excavator can be tilted, how much water it can contain... I have to test these things. With regards to formal qualities, how important are elements like color, shape, movement and light in your work? It starts from an idea from which a certain consequence for formal aspects arises. With a new work, a multitude of choices presents itself, and depending on the work you respond to certain elements to a certain extent.
I usually ask for photos of the location, I think about what I see on the photos and what I can do with it. Out of a kind of laziness, I don’t go to the locations themselves. I usually also use Google for images, in this case to find images of Scheveningen or the beach, and then I try to make connections. Ultimately, I look at a location through the eyes of someone else. It would be better to go to the location myself.
How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? Everything is a potential podium and everything can be used. I used to always say that there is at least one work of art or more in each event or thought; the trick is to find them. That search is the challenge and that is why I always want to create new work and not peddle my old work. Being like that is very difficult, but a lot of fun. And inherent to working with things that you see around you is that you are in touch with everyday reality.
Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? I get the most enjoyment out of making new work; every new opportunity that offers potential for new work is interesting for me, not specifically this location. The beach and the sea are places with which I can work, since I always have a lot of ideas, but actually
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‘Waterfall’
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appropriate these springs when water is a primary necessity of life? And then I look into that.
Is the relationship between technology-art-nature important to you(r work)? The relationship between technology, art and nature may be somewhere in the plans for the waterfalls or the postcards, in the sense that it is about a certain kind of constructed nature. But actually it’s more about a kid playing with buckets of sand. But with big boy toys instead. I look at certain phenomena like a child, and sometimes that results in work that has social criticism in it, but sometimes it is also just nice or fun.
In what way would you describe the current and future function of art? And is your work utopian, dystopian, neutral or different? In a way, for me, art is about freedom. It is the only job in which you don’t have to take anybody else into consideration, in which you don’t have to have a certain position. However, I also like that the way I work allows me to look at the world differently, differently from what is considered normal, which enables me to have an opinion, to find certain beauty or discover something strange, about how people handle things. That gives you a certain function in society.
I f people see a certain type of social criticism in the work, then I am completely ok with that. It often happens that I don’t think about such things initially, but that deeper meanings come into it at a later stage. For example, I created ‘the real thing’ Coca-Cola installation, which creates clean drinking water from Coca-Cola. In this work, I try to look at Coca-Cola like a child, or someone who has never seen it before, and then you see a brown, dirty fluid, making it quite logical to purify or filter it to make clean drinking water. And later, the other layers of meaning come into it while you are researching how to develop the work. For instance, how much clean drinking water is necessary to produce Coca-Cola and how those factories function; that the people who live around it no longer have access to clean drinking water. There is currently another issue with Coca-Cola, which has to do with how they produce mineral water. They appropriate natural springs, which is causing a lot of discussion, because can they just
I enjoy thinking about things in the way a philosopher or a scientist thinks, and then show this to the rest of the world and say ‘we can do it this way, or look at it this way’. I don’t think in terms such as ‘ZERO point’, or utopian; things repeat very often, so a starting point doesn’t really exist in my opinion. We are living in a strange time, but there were many such periods. Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with other artists? Do you do any commercial projects, just autonomous work, or both? I do a bit of everything most of the time, and always try to produce new work. I recently did some things for advertising agency KesselsKramer 51
Helmut Smits
Sunrise with a smiley face and a sunset, with a down face (not realized)
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and I’m still in touch with Erik Kessels; he recently invited me for a brainstorm session about identity in Belgium with DroogDesign. I always work in the same way; I try to have an open mind. People sometimes ask, ‘what if Coca-Cola would approach you and invite you, how would you respond?’ I don’t know, that all depends on how critical I can be, how much freedom I would have. Ultimately, it is about the question of how much freedom I can get to do my own thing. I always work alone in my studio. I have control issues, I find it difficult to work with others.
such a way that it’s really good, then I don’t have to do it any more, then it’s ready. Ideas are free, and I am just like the rest. How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? In my work, I do play with the idea that we are now living in an inherently technological society. I have quite some works that are about the technological society. A while ago, I created the ‘dead pixel’ as a work in public space (a square where the grass is removed so that you have a square of earthy soil, which looks like a dead pixel if you use Google Earth. And I created the website for MU in Eindhoven (an art institute), using the listed hours of sunlight for the location; when it was daytime, the website was online, but during darkness, the website would be unusable. Or I put smileys in sunrises and sunsets :) The technological society exists and develops, and I use that. But that doesn’t mean that I am now working completely with technology or working with new materials or tools. Some things are blown out of proportions, but then I am not talking about the internet, but more about things like 3d printers. I see that more as a new kind of hammer, or actually, as a new pencil, with which you can make beautiful drawings, but also produce crap. Just the new technique, in itself, is not interesting to me.
Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important, or would you say that the work you make could be produced by others? Things can be made by others, but only in the way that I want them to be made. I also create booklets with ideas, and people say, isn’t that scary, others can steal your designs? But I believe that you can’t claim ideas. They float around somewhere, but since my work depends on ideas, I often find that something has already been done, or the other way around, that people make something that I have already done. Because of the internet, you stumble upon things much faster than before. If someone on the other side of the world makes something and puts it on a blog, then it’ll be here in no time. So for me, the idea is what’s important and not the creator. On the other hand, I do have a website and my name is on those booklets, so in that sense I do lay a claim to things to a certain extent. However, if someone has an idea and makes it in
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What is the role of the audience in your work? I also always document my work, so it doesn’t matter whether or not there is an audience at the time of presentation. If there is no audience at that specific moment, then there will be one at some point in time. I made many works that were only documented, which were then released on the internet. The internet is a very good stage to put your work out there, to get people to see it.
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Today’s Art on Sea
Enrico Gaido Vacuum Enrico Gaido, originally an engineer, is a performance and installation artist who is looking into the notions of ‘collapse’ and ‘incidents’. This has led Enrico Gaido to explore the use of explosives and gunpowder too; he uses for instance micro explosions within a gelatine base in attempts to freeze ‘incidents’.
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to the space just for a certain period of time. It doesn’t use its architecture nor modifies its perception, and it’s not connected to any of its specific characteristics or functions. It nonetheless has a strong connection with The Pier due to the common condition of ‘temporariness’, which is a condition belonging to the Festival design itself.
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project? y project sketch consists of a large M stone slab that is being suspended, a few centimetres from the ground, in the centre of the space and for the entire duration of the show. Vacuum is the only force holding the stone in suspension. The system lifting the stone consists of a vacuum generator pump in a suction cup that adheres to the material with enough strength to lift it off the ground (blocks weighing up to 8 tons can be handled with this technique, the equivalent of about 3m3 of marble). The system must work non-stop to feed the vacuum in the suction cup and maintain suspension of the slab.
he Pier is not just a place that is T in transition, an architectural and functional transformation period; it’s also a non-static place by definition. It’s a place of transit where you stop just for a short period of time, and it is suspended above a natural element, the sea. The sea continuously crosses it and shakes it, forcing it to react and to resist its power. So, the stone slab is suspended in a similar way, in a continuous tensile and non-static state, in a state of waiting, for a ‘duration’ that depends on its capability to resist.
Exploring the use of the most ‘immaterial’ element that man can imagine (vacuum) as a force capable of lifting something as material and dense as stone, the installation reveals the tensile state that will inevitably try to separate the two elements. Indeed, the equipment is required to perform a continuous work in order to maintain the ratio established between the vacuum and the stone that is balanced. Thus, the balance will appear unstable and fragile, always on the edge of collapsing. It is a performance of the material that tries to keep itself suspended in time and space. This is what makes it a ‘sculpture’.
What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location? ince the beginning, I have been S struck by the architecture of The Pier, which extends in the direction of the sea, as if wanting to challenge it or lose itself inside it. Even if it is firmly anchored to the ground, it represents a door to the sea, not just for its contemplation, but also in a desire to interrogate it. However, I soon realized that the fascinating aspect lay in a very personal and individual dimension, to be experienced in solitude, forgetting about its social function as a place of entertainment and leisure. This function exposes the true face of The Pier, that of a place where it’s not
Can your work or this plan be called site-specific? his project was designed specifically T for TodaysArt and for its location, as a temporary intervention that relates 46
Enrico Gaido
‘Vacuum’
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Enrico Gaido On the left: an example of a stress-strain curve of some materials (such as steel and clay) when subjected to stress.
the individual who isolates himself, but where The Pier becomes an island for the community. Sometimes you just have to move a few metres to feel as if you are in the middle of the ocean, thousands of kilometres away from daily life.
(1) The material reacts to the loading it is subjected to with an elastic deformation. When the loading is taken out the material resumes its original condition.
How does you work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space?
(2) T he loading generates a plastic deformation and the material deforms irreversibly, thus becoming more resistant but less capable of further deformation, namely more brittle (Strain-Hardening phenomenon).
roposing a work for a public space P or a place with a significant history, identity or architecture, is always a challenge. There is a danger of it becoming overexposed or underexposed, and it necessarily has to relate to the environment surrounding it in order to work. This condition is a risk, but also a big boost, because actually the non-neutrality of a space is a source for ideas and reflections. In the end, a space is non-neutral because it has a strong bond with a ‘reality’, either past or present. Since I think my works originate from entering into a relationship with daily reality, even when it is finally abstracted from that. For a work to be presented in a ‘real’ context is something like going back to the beginning, to the point where the work began.
(3) The loading action leads to the final fracture.
For the entire duration of the show, a large stone slab is kept lifted from the ground by the sole force of vacuum.
Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? With regard to the environment and context, I can say that I am fascinated by the reference to ‘ZERO on Sea’, which should have been realized on The Pier exactly 50 years ago. I was very interested in the idea of connecting to that failed event, an ambitious 44
Enrico Gaido
and utopian project by a group of great artists, whose experimentations and poetics greatly influenced the following generations. Moreover, I was really gripped by the accounts of the planned interventions by the artists back then; in a visionary and free way, these ideas did not just have a relationship with the place itself, but also with the public who had to live in it. I felt that TodaysArt was trying to give people a chance to experience that utopian attitude, while also questioning it.
representation of the tendency of tensions and deformations of a material subjected to a given amount of stress or strain (p.34). Even though it refers to matter, the curve defines some states, some conditions and some dynamics of behaviour which reveal a surprising analogy with those of the individual. How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? Living in this inherently technological society means you have new instruments and opportunities at your disposal, both knowledge and language. At the same time, as technology develops, less people will have access to it, at least as ‘passive users’. I therefore think that it’s important, both in daily life and in the professional field, to know what you want to take from technology and what you want to leave behind, while keeping in mind that the ‘leaving behind’ means that something will remain hidden and that the ‘taking’ means knowing something in the deepest way possible.
In what way would you describe the current and future function of art? I think that if there wasn’t an utopian drive behind the work of an artist, a future for art wouldn’t be possible or would have ever been possible. In this sense I believe that art, today or in the future, cannot have another function than that of a driving force behind utopias. I think the same way about politics or about science. Is your work related to the present, and if so, how would you describe the present? hould I choose an adjective to S describe this moment in time I would merely choose the term ‘precarious’. I believe we are actually situated in a precarious time, a provisional time, where little is defined or stable, where both individuals and society are continuously in a tensile state.
With regards to your work, what do you think about technology, about new technology? Is it important to work with new materials and technology? In my works ‘technology’ often has an important role, but my approach is more ‘technical’ than technological. My works are based on the use and the experimentation of techniques, both new or established, but always connected to a ‘materiality’,
his precariousness and tension is T very present in my works and I often like to relate it with a curve which, in the Science of Materials, is a graphical 43
Enrico Gaido
something physical or a chemistry of matter. I wouldn’t define my work as art technology. Beyond definitions, I think that new materials, techniques or technologies can surely offer new opportunities for experimentation, and can be especially enriching when it stimulates the senses and thinking.
rectly related to the human being. As with science, art deals with the laws that regulate the phenomena of reality and in my artistic practice I consider them complementary. Are natural elements like the sun, wind, the sea, light, nature (natural or synthetic) a big influence on your work?
Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important, or would you say that the work you make could be produced by others?
I n my works, nature is found as matter, because of its properties (physical, chemical, mechanical) and its behaviour and effects (pressure, heat, vacuum, weight, impact, combustion, frost, reaction). I’m interested in the relation of matter with the environment surrounding it, or with other matter with which it interacts, which is always a power relationship based on action/resistance and on a balance act that it establishes at some point.
y work is often linked to a technique M that I’ve personally experimented with, modified or developed, but which can easily be used in the same way by someone else. Perhaps, in this case, it would be more interesting to talk about ‘patents’ and about how a work can be protected and copyrighted in relation to the technique that has been used to produce it.
Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with other artists? Do you do any commercial projects, just autonomous work, or both?
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? What do these fields mean to you and your work? A lot of ideas surrounding my work relate to my education, which is basically scientific: I attended an engineering course at the university and only after that I started to be interested in art. This education surely influenced both my method and my aesthetics in my artistic endeavors, the instruments I use and my language. Many of my areas of interest have remained the same since I started, such as architecture or matter, construction and tensile states, but I have investigated them in a more personal way – less objective and from a point of view di-
Since my work is always based on the experimentation of something new for me collaborations with other artists or technicians are essential. Some of these collaborations have been going on for years. But also within these collaborations, I’ve always worked in an independent way, giving priority to experimentation and to the construction of a personal language, without favoring production standards or more commercial contexts.
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Does the performative element play a role in your work? he performative element in my T works is the real instrument for the realization of the work. Often the matter itself does the performance. My role is just that of an activator of a process, which then evolves in an autonomous way and over which I have limited control, similar to the ‘frozen’ explosions in gelatine blocks or with works where an expanding piece of concrete ends up breaking some wooden beams or some blocks of rock. What is the role of the audience in your work for this event? In this project, the public would watch, together with me, a performance of the matter, the performance of the vacuum, which detains a stone slab, suspended in time. It will participate in its tensile state; an attempt, perhaps utopian, to maintain a precarious balanced state for a long time.
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Today’s Art on Sea
Lisa Park EUNOIA ll Park’s work looks at new forms of expression and trans-sensory experiences. She developed a series of performances using biosensors (brainwave heart-rate devices) as a medium for manifesting her inner states.
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Lisa Park
porating neurofeedback, I attempt to present a connection between our mind, body, and consciousness. I believe that human emotions, brainwaves, and sound waves are frequencies of energies that resonate within. So, it is natural for me to be interested in art, technology, and science.
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project? For this year’s TodaysArt Festival, I am presenting two performances: ‘EUNOIA II’ and a collaboration with 4DSOUND. Both performances involve using a commercial brainwave sensor to obtain real-time feedback of my brainwaves and emotional reactions. The ‘EUNOIA II’ performance was done in an attempt to mediate and control my feelings using the visual feedback from the EEG monitor so that I could achieve emotional stability and become composed during the performance. The new work I am developing with 4DSOUND is a 16m x 16m x 5m structure that creates a fully omnidirectional sound environment. Within this site-specific 4DSOUND structure, I will be creating an interactive sound performance using EEG (brainwave sensor) and engaging with the audience.
What is the role of the audience in your work and specifically in your work for this event? When I perform in front of a large audience wearing a brainwave sensor, it makes me feel vulnerable; my feelings and thoughts are being translated into sound and shown into water vibrations in real-time. I feel that I am being exposed emotionally and psychologically. So, I am having a non-verbal dialogue with the audience. They will affect me and this will cause my thoughts and brainwaves to output the sound that affects them as well. It is like a loop. I find performance one of the most genuine ways to express myself.
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? What do these fields mean to you and your work? I’ve been interested in investigating the relationship between my emotion and the subconscious. That is the reason why I started ‘EUNOIA’ and ‘EUNOIA II’: to find a way to visualize my inner states and mind-scape. So in the past few years, I started experimenting with biosensors (heart rate monitor and brainwave devices) as a vehicle for manifesting these invisible states. In relation to art and science, I think of my works as an investigation into a new form of expression and trans-sensory experience. By incor-
For this 4DSOUND performance, the audience will play a crucial role in my piece. I will engage with participants in a new interactive performance that works within 4DSOUND’s spatial sound system. The neurofeedback-driven sound will be played throughout my performance, exploring boundaries of intimacy, and the vulnerability of participants’ interaction with me. I will experiment throughout this performance by physically manipulating the space while people are roaming around - by draping 4DSOUND’s structure with 150-200 meters of my dress. 39
Lisa Park
EUNOIA ll
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Lisa Park
Century that we are living in right now is technology-driven and I think we are living in an interesting period of history.
Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? When I was invited to participate in this year’s TodaysArt festival, I was introduced to the historic location (Scheveningen Pier) and an exhibition planned by the ZERO art movement that never happened 50 years ago. I found it very intriguing, because I just saw an exhibition ‘ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow’ at Guggenheim in New York a few weeks before the TodaysArt festival reached out to me. What fascinated me the most about the ZERO art exhibition is that these artists were pioneers and their works explored diverse materials by exploring color, light, space, and motion. They were introducing a new definition / genre of art in that period of history.
How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? I read an article a few months ago and it said something like this: ‘Humans will become more like machines and machines will become more like humans.’ In the future, this may come true. It is inevitable to stop an inherently technological society, and it is part of our human evolution. So when it comes to my work, I do not want to create work just for the sake of technology or because technology is cool. Is your work related to the present? Nowadays, there are so many wearable technological devices that track one’s physical states. And, I have developed a series of performances using biosensors (brainwave, heartrate monitoring devices) as a vehicle for understanding my inner states. I do relate my work to the current time. But, I am not quite sure whether the majority of people would think the same, because brainwave sensors are not commonly used.
ow in 2015, technology is being N used as a medium/tool for artists, musicians and programmers to create works that push the boundaries of art. I imagine that, 50 years from now, people look back at this moment and remember this TodaysArt Festival that showcased an interesting collection of art happening at this current moment. With regards to your work, what do you think about new technology? Is it important to work with new materials and technology?
Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with other artists?
rtists have been adapting new tools A and materials as part of their practice. It is in our nature to experiment and explore new genres of art. And, artists’ works represent their era. The 21st
I have my own separate studio space as well as a community space from an incubator program that is run by the New Museum in New York. Being surrounded by other talented 37
Lisa Park
artists, engineers, and designers really nurtures my art practice in a creative community space. I enjoy collaborating with other artists.
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Today’s Art on Sea
Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand Implosion Chamber / Photonic Wind Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with philosophy. Gelfand and Domnitch use wave phenomena to investigate questions of perception and infinity.
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Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand
delicate, constantly changing balance determines the visible quantity of sonically imploding bubbles. All of these ephemeral intertwinings awaken the observer’s awareness of the fragile complexity of life’s watery origins as well as The Pier’s semi-submerged framework.
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project? e will present the works ‘Implosion W Chamber’ and ‘Photonic Wind’ and exhibit them in the ‘Gallery’ on The Pier. ‘Implosion Chamber’ is comprised of high frequency sound waves that propagate through a water-filled cylinder, prompting naturally diffused air bubbles to implode. While tracing the motion imparted by sound waves, these implosions are accompanied by shock waves, supersonic liquid jet formations, temperatures as high as are found on the Sun, and conjecturably, quantum vacuum radiation.
What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location? he Pier is an evocation of a threshold, T a horizon between a cluttered urban environment and the empty vastness of untamed nature; an emptiness (‘ZEROness’) that is necessary for the creation and contemplation of a work of art. This is why the ZERO Group chose deserts as quintessential environments for artistic activity during such times of hyper-dense urbanization.
I n addition to this work we will exhibit an installation called ‘Photonic Wind’, in which an Yves Klein blue laser beam shining into a vacuum chamber levitates and propels diamond micropowder. Forming starry jets and languorous vortical clouds, the diamond dust evokes light’s pervasive flow, insuppressibly transforming everything in its wake.
Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? e are obsessed with the ZERO W Group and consider it to have been a continuation of suprematism and the Russian avant-garde. Their pursuit of ‘objectlessness’ (a term coined by Malevich) and cosmism deeply inform our own modalities of ‘space exploration’ – which have recently extended into a collaboration with the European Space Agency. For the past three years, we have been conducting a course at the ArtScience Interfaculty (The Royal Academy of the Arts, The Hague) called ‘Space Science in the Arts’, in which we teach in collaboration with ESA Senior Research Coordinator, Bernard Foing.
Are natural elements like the sun, wind, the sea, light, nature (natural or synthetic) a big influence on your work and if so, in what way? he physical and chemical converT gence of our artwork with its environment is among the most quintessential aspects. In the case of ‘Implosion Chamber’, the slightest change in humidity effects the water’s rate of evaporation, which in turn changes the balance between the water and the multitude of air bubbles it envelopes, as well as the magnitude of effective sound pressure. This 34
Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand
With regards to your work, what do you think about technology?
How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? What do these frameworks mean to you as an artist?
n entirely new philosophy is required A for the advancement of technology, which firstly takes into consideration all living creatures, including the very simplest, such as plankton – as they are responsible for half of the oxygen we breath and for the other fundamental, life-sustaining biogeochemical cycle of carbon, nitrogen, and sulphur. Currently, we are quite far from understanding the technology driving the processes within living cells. This is the direction towards which technology and biotech must evolve. Profit-driven models are obsolete. The main question that should be raised here is: why do we need technology?
kin to the Russian avant-garde and A the ZERO Group, we uphold a revolutionary attitude towards existing institutions, which almost always lag behind the rapid transformations arising in the sciences and the arts. Concerning art in public spaces, it should spontaneously engage as wide an audience as possible, but not via mechanised interactivity and entertainment, but rather through active creativity that strengthens the community - such as collective musical engagement and a variety of other forms of mentally stimulating self-organisation and catalytic perceptual tuning – as in the case of ‘Implosion Chamber’ and ‘Photonic Wind’. This is especially challenging because the density of external stimuli in urban environments has reached a degree of maximum saturation, leaving very little mental space for such pursuits.
Is the relationship between technology-art-nature of importance to you(r work)? And how does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? espite all the sensory-extensive D capacities introduced by modern technologies, human awareness has been drastically impaired by technocratic, autopilot behavioral patterns – utterly disorienting it from its origins. The course of quotidian technology should be shifted towards a broadening rather than a crippling of our capacity to sense our bio-cosmic surroundings. In our artistic practice, we do not work with technology, but rather with scientific research which is not instigated by the potentiality of future applications.
In what way would you describe the current and future function of art? And is your work utopian, dystopian, neutral or different? Our concept of art is that of an instrument for evolutionary trajectories rather than for the sake of entertainment or the art market, as this leads only to overproduction instead of aesthetic and cognitive refinement. Art must strive towards increasing synergy and diversity in the biosphere as opposed to the homogeneity of an isolated ‘technological paradise’.
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Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand
Photonic Wind
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Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand
Is your work related to the present, and if so, how would you describe the present?
sis of scientific creativity – a tendency that we strongly embrace in our own research.
After the failure of totalitarian propaganda, society has been replaced by mass/social media mind control, which is equally politically navigated as evinced by the poignant documentary ‘The Century of Self’. This strategy is especially effective because it is homogenous across the globe, and thereby nearly inescapable. In order to maintain our independence of thought, we choose various paths of resistance. We emphatically contrast the depth of unmediated real-time experience central to our artistic endeavours from the flat / mediated perspective of the present dictated by suffocating simulations and the number of mind-numbing hits and likes. Our perception of the present should evade compression, as it is our only means to tap into the most formidable of all mysteries, tackled by cosmology and cosmogony: the voluminous flow of time, synthesising the past, present and future.
Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with others? Since 2008, we have been running an art-science laboratory in Amsterdam called Synergetica. Various artists and scientists from all over the world collaborate through our lab, which focuses primarily on photonics, fluid dynamics, acoustics, quantum chemistry and psychophysics. Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important, or would you say that the work you make could be produced by others? Even though our art strives as much as possible towards the universal and consequently towards the blurring of boundaries between mental and physical space, we have often been told by our audiences how inexorably personal the aesthetics is with which we imbue our endeavours. Perhaps the extremely intimate and contemplative conditions required to experience our installations and performances infuse them with an unmistakable sense of our own inner world.
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? What do these fields mean to you and your work? ddressing the very fringes of the A known and perceivable, we consider theoretical physics to have taken the place of philosophy in present times. Also, we think that the appearance of such new branches of science such as biogeochemistry, quantum chemistry, synthetic biology, and art-science among others, are indicative of an emerging tendency towards a synthe-
What is the role of the audience in your work and specifically in your work for this event? Due to the extremely subtle and ephemeral nature of the work, every visitor experiences it in their own way – and the experience can never be 31
Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand
repeated because of the complexity of the physical processes involved. Therefore, the audience is as much the creator of the experience as we are. Does the performative element play a role in your work? Both installations can be perceived as performative installations. These rather unpredictable ‘performances’ emerge as the dynamic interactions of various physical phenomena. With regards to formal qualities, how important are elements like color, shape, movement and light in your work? The main impetus of our work is purely sensorial: unmediated and unprecedented sensations of exotic spatio-temporal phenomena. Hence our task as artists lies in attuning the senses to uncharted perceptual territory. Are optical experiences of importance to you? Since the very start of our collaborative adventures, nearly 20 years ago, we have been relentlessly pursuing the elusive nature of light, from sonoluminescence and laser-trapping soap bubble membranes to optically levitated diamond dust.
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Today’s Art on Sea
Germaine Kruip Black Circle at Sea Light, (architectural) spaces and the interaction between the art work and the audience is crucial to the work of Germaine Kruip. Almost all of her work deals with perception wherein she approaches the eye as an optical instrument, as a tool, especially in her recent works.
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Germaine Kruip
I find it interesting to present my work within a historical context, such as the context of ZERO, even though it wasn’t made deliberately for this context. I support the idea of observing artistic practices from the past and to compare them to contemporary expressions. It is not an issue for me when people state that ‘they were doing this already back then’; it raises the question of what the reason is for a recurrence. It almost seems like a ritual to me and with every new repetition a very slow shift takes place. This shift is interesting to me.
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project? The piece for The Pier called ‘Black Circle at Sea’ has its origin in an autonomous work titled ‘Phantom’, which represents a reversed spotlight. ‘Phantom’ is about the absence of the image, the phantom of the actor that left the stage. The spotlight in a theatre, which follows the actor on stage, illuminates the presence of the person. However, in ‘Phantom’, the light projects a shadow. Instead of a spotlight illuminating you on stage, the work makes you walk through a shadow. At the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre (EMPAC) in New York, I created a more spacious version of this work by using different spotlights, creating a black hole that confronted you with your own expectation of what you had wanted to see. Gazing into a void, the black round shadow acted as a ‘mirror of the soul’. When I imagined this work at The Pier, above the sea, it became a black sun, something illustrative. The shape is invariable, but the context changes the perceived appearance and provides a certain meaning. I hope to create an alienating effect. I do not intend to actually show a black sun; it’s about the abstract language. I wonder in what way the audience senses this abstraction and I am interested in this ambiguity of whether it is being perceived as a shape or a hole.
What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location? And what are your thoughts about the aesthetic and social political aspects of the location? I have never made a piece at sea before, but have imagined it many times. The vast view, the horizon, this infinite view is fascinating to me. I am currently working on a theatre project, a work with light, in which this gaze into infinity appears out of the darkness and touches upon the imaginative. You have that same view when you look at the horizon across the sea, even more so at night. You will be able to perceive ‘Black Circle at Sea’ from The Pier or from the beach, but The Pier will be the perfect spot, while also acting as a kind of anchor point for the imagination. How important is perception in your work? All of my work deals with perception. It’s the core of my work. This crucial element can be related literally to the
Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project?
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performance of the eye. I approach the eye as optical, a tool, and especially in my more recent work this aspect is intensifying. For ‘Black Circle at Sea’, I’m very curious what the outcome will be, with all the different variations of light in which something will become visible. This moment of doubt, between appearance and disappearance, is the most beautiful thing. At this point the activity of the eye and brain is the most apparent. There is a moment in which you start to create an image yourself, but it does not exist in reality. And there is a moment when it actually manifests itself and then disappears, leaving behind a mental afterglow. This is also what ‘A Possibility of an Abstraction’, the work that I developed at EMPAC, is about. ‘Black Circle at Sea’ won’t be running throughout the night either, creating another momentum as it disappears.
rection of the wind. However, the work was never realized. During TodaysArt, it will be close to a full moon and perhaps ‘Black Circle at Sea’ will interfere with the moonlight, or another welcome or unwelcome disturbance might occur, perhaps even causing something to fail. How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? What do these frameworks mean to you as an artist? I always attempt to approach my work in the same way regardless of the context, and to be open to how the context changes the work. I actively search for this shift, and sometimes consciously present the same work in another context. I don’t want to be thinking: ‘This work is only supposed to be presented in a museum or a theatre’. This repetition in receptiveness of the piece towards its context and meaning and the way the work mirrors its surroundings, interests me. By approaching the work in this particular way it gains a certain openness and vulnerability, which I allow it to have. In doing so I want to get rid of the hermetic character, the closed formula of ‘this is the way it should to be done’. There are certainly ways that can be called more successful, but I don’t want to shy away from experimentation since very often these experiments create a lot of good output. By executing the work in a consistent and accurate way, I not only stay true to myself, but also allow the work to be vulnerable at the same time.
In what way are natural elements like the sun, wind, the sea, light, nature (natural or synthetic) influencing your work? I often work with artificial daylight and what I especially like about this is the moment that real sunlight disrupts it, because it creates another momentum. I search for these momentums with the help of the natural elements, which are for the most part uncontrollable, continuously causing the work to position itself in the here and now. There is nothing more beautiful than a work that is disrupted by something outside of it, for example, the wind. I once made a design for the Domtoren in Utrecht, in which the light intensity was determined by the force and di-
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Black Circle at Sea
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that transformation is what art comes down to for me, not being able to describe it. And then I am referring to my own work and my personal view on art, by no means generally speaking.
I n what way would you describe the current and future function of art? And is your work utopian, dystopian, neutral or different? Essential to the work of light that I’m currently working on in a theatre is the collective view, through which we can collectively dream or stare into the void. To search for a non-productive view on purpose, because nowadays everything needs to have a result, needs to be accounted for. We are under this constant pressure, we have to continually multitask, with way too many stimuli around us. We always have to be productive, and that’s why I find that abstract language so important, that emptiness, as a moment in which you can drift off. I don’t want to be concerned with the future. I’d rather take the audience into the present. Hopefully, that shift will take place in the now, an ephemeral space that cannot be measured, but actually demands a belief in it. There was this review that I read about a book by Jonathan Crary in the New York Times that said: ‘This collective moment lost in a gaze, represents one of the last remaining zones of dissidence, of anti-productivity and even of solidarity’. Among other things, his book is about the dream being the only place where true freedom still exists. Even your computer is expected to be productive when it is in sleep mode. It’s about this spot in which you can still be amazed, where your mind drifts off, and drifts off into something else. Things can change into something else, without determining what it should be. The space that is required to bring about
What do the fields of art and science mean to you and your work? What do these fields mean to you and your work? The eclectic references you may find in my work originates from where I get my information and inspiration, and very often this comes from science. I often search for information in science to find out more about the knowledge behind things. By isolating bits of this scientific knowledge I dissociate it from the scientific context and replace it with a new one. At the moment I am developing a piece inspired by the scientist Harold Edgerton who was active in the 50’s and who had a lab at MIT where he studied time and image1. And I was part of this exhibition at MIT titled ‘Man in the Holocene’ that also dealt with the relationship between art and science. I am not choosing science over other crossovers, but I do appreciate science a lot. I often wonder how things work, how they operate exactly. This often leads to scientific Wikipedia internet pages for instance. For The Old Church in Amsterdam, I am currently working on ‘Simultaneous Contrast’, which is about time and the discrepancy between what the brain and the eye perceive.
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to understand, I believe you get a deeper physical involvement with the object. It means keeping it tangible, but at the same time embracing the intangible. Having said that, you can also make things happen with technology that you wouldn’t even have thought of before. I use all the different approaches side by side, since I am working on a project with mirrors that are being pulled out of the mud in the same way as they did in the 14th century, while also working with new technologies at the same time.
I s the relationship between technology-art-nature important to you(r work)? The piece ‘Esthetics as a Way of Survival’ that was part of the ‘Man in the Holocene’ show at MIT, deals with the connection between art and nature and it is not the art here that is reflecting on nature, but nature mirroring art. The piece presents the Bower bird, a bird which builds beautiful and richly colored nests to lure females. Art critic Dominic van den Boogerd called it a nature documentary on art. That intrigues me. The surroundings or context defines the art, absorbs it. Such as with ‘Black Circle at Sea’, in which natural phenomena imbue the art work with meaning.
Regarding your studio practice; do you work alone or together with other artists? Do you do any commercial projects, just autonomous work, or both?
How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? I like to combine hi-tech approaches with lo-tech ones. Certain elements can be computed and visualized in a highly technical manner that could never have been envisioned without the use of hi-tech technology, but then sometimes I attempt to execute such things with lo-tech anyway.
I always work on lots of things at the same time, making scale models, some works are created indoors, others are produced outside of the studio, anything is possible, I have no rules in that regard. However, it’s always a long process to get things going. In my studio, I always look at a piece that is finished for quite a while, to see whether it’s ‘alive’. But I always start working completely alone on something that I thought up. Later on in the process, others will have their influence on it in order to accomplish the concept in optima forma. And whenever someone says that something is impossible, I become even more fascinated about how to make it happen.
There is this enormously rich amount of knowledge available about technology that I am trying to appropriate. But on the other hand, I want my work to reveal typical human elements, such as a human scale, human touch or human failure even. This is a matter of taste of course, but in my opinion the human quality enables you to maintain a certain physical feeling with the work. Whenever the procedure is complicated, but visually easy
hen I was asked for the ‘Concept W Store’ by Jil Sander in New York, in 2008. Lots of people said: ‘Be careful, your work will be seen as design 24
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after that’. But I believe in art and that whenever it is good, art survives within the world of design, or design becomes art. The framing does not bother me, I just want it to be good and create something of value, regardless of whether it is called art or design. I try not to be narrow minded and if there is an interesting request, I am inclined to do it. I am not worried for misinterpretations at all and besides that, it really brings me new ideas and possibilities, and it broadens my horizon. In order to be able to draw conclusions you have to take risks and allow yourself to make mistakes. Trying your hand at other disciplines is nice, but I look at myself as an artist, not a designer. I allow myself a degree of freedom, but at the same time I don’t mind having to work within a certain set of rules.
costume designer and the actors, while at the same time scenes will constantly be changed. It is essentially the same process as being commissioned for an installation. Being a scenographer wasn’t always easy; there was a reason why I became an autonomous artist. But a given situation, an existing context to work from, that is a constructive starting point for me; something I love doing, and that I am capable of doing. When certain questions seem impossible, or if there are certain restrictions, it challenges me.
ith regards to formal qualities, W how important are elements like color, shape, movement and light in your work?
I developed this practice with a visual language that is largely based on formal qualities. This evolved out of the wish to create a stage in which the viewer can manifest him/herself and won’t be distracted by what the artist might want to say. To create and foster a certain openness, an invitation towards the viewer, the work calls for a certain detachment. Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important, or would you say that the work you make could be produced by others?
Having to work with restrictions is sometimes even the reason for a certain artistic design. For instance, the context, the boundaries, and wondering what I could change within a set of limitations led to a concept for the design of a coin for the Queen; I gave both the front and backside of the coin the same appearance. Both sides had the Queen’s portrait depicted at a decisive and historic moment in which she pledged to become queen. It is precisely the questions posed by others and a specific context that challenges me to come up with good work. A certain openness should not be underestimated. I am a trained scenographer whose challenge lies in protecting a scenographic concept and design, while having to incorporate the various comments made by people like the theatre director, the
A personal signature, or me being physically present, is something I leave out on purpose. I am trying to be as absent as possible, so that others can take my position. Some elements are produced by me personally, but I never call attention to this fact. It’s the same with my performances, in which 23
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I am always absent; others perform them.
hat is the role of the audience in W your work and specifically in your work for this event?
With regard to the audience in the theatre play that I directed, I decided from A to Z what the audience was going to see and when they would see it. However, most of my work actually has a very open character, in which the audience can decide when they want to get in or out. With some of my work, it might not be entirely clear whether it’s a work of art, and I appreciate that confusion. With ‘Black Circle at Sea’, there will be people who will see the work on The Pier and on the beach but might not recognize it as a piece of art and experience it differently. I find this situation equally valuable. I detest the word ‘interactive’ the most of all. Enforcing a certain behaviour while people look at or experience a work is way too rigid in my opinion. Just let it be and speak for itself. 1 From 1934 onwards, Harold Edgerton was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and he is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope into a common device. He was also instrumental in the development of sonar and deep-sea photography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Eugene_Edgerton The Zero artist Otto Piene was also director of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies between 1974 - 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Piene
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Today’s Art on Sea
Ali Demirel + Biosphere The Pier In his work, experimental video artist Ali Demirel focuses on minimal images and structural compositions with a conceptual base. Following his collaboration with Richie Hawtin on music videos, he started to design and perform live shows.
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From an architect’s point of view (as an artist with an educational background in architecture). I am especially interested to see how structures work in reference to their program. It is always a learning experience when there’s an experimental approach to this aspect. Post-modern architecture has played with this concept a lot. A famous example is Rem Koolhaas:
Could you briefly describe your plan for the project? When I saw the condition of The Pier structure before renovations, I was fascinated by how nature took over the structure after humans failed to do so. I tried to capture the beauty of that state and make a film about it with an exclusive soundtrack by Biosphere.
key aspect of architecture that KoolA haas interrogates is the ‘Program’: with the rise of modernism in the 20th century, the ‘Program’ became the key theme of architectural design. The notion of the Program involves ‘an act to edit function and human activities’ as the pretext of architectural design: epitomised in the maxim Form follows function, first popularised by architect Louis Sullivan at the beginning of the 20th century. The notion was first questioned in Delirious New York, in his analysis of high-rise architecture in Manhattan. An early design method derived from such thinking was ‘cross-programming’, introducing unexpected functions in room programmes, such as running tracks in skyscrapers. More recently, Koolhaas (unsuccessfully) proposed the inclusion of hospital units for the homeless into the Seattle Public Library project (2003).
What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location? I find pier structures interesting; they metaphorically represent the human desire to break the border, to reach out, extend the living territory to the sea. The futuristic style of the architecture is also interesting in this particular example. What makes it very special for me is the history of it, failures of attempts to make it ‘live’ socially and economically. Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? The location (The Pier) and the conceptualization of the program around the ZERO movement is very interesting and relates to my current artistic direction. One of my current subjects of interest is architectural structures that fail or transform their function. The main theme I question through this subject is the fight between nature and civilization.
rom an artistic point of view, I am exF tremely interested in examples where the program totally fails for humans, but nature successfully occupies the structure! This pier was a perfect example of it.
How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? What do these frameworks mean to you?
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The Pier
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4K technology, but limit myself by not using any digital effects. Video technologies give us new ways to capture and compose our surrounding, similar to all digital art mediums. I would like to refer to Vertov’s kino-eye. But I don’t like using technology for the sake of using it. Nowadays everything is very fast. My work is the opposite; very slow.
I n what way would you describe the current and future function of art? And is your work utopian, dystopian, neutral or different? My point of view in the video is an utopian perspective that appears to be dystopian. I believe that the development of human civilization is dangerously out of balance with nature, a cancer. And my artistic fantasy in this movie is a ‘peaceful’, ‘beautiful’ and well-balanced future landscape, after natural selection eliminates the human problem!
Is perception in your work important? All of my work is about transforming the audience perception and in almost all of it, I try to use my artistic tools to transform the way we perceive our surroundings, the life around us. Sometimes a slight shift in your point of view might result in a very different perception. For example, in this piece for The Pier, I am trying to create scenery from a distant future without human civilization. But I shot it just a few months ago, without any staging and without any digital effects or manipulation. I hope that the way I look at it and capture it, and the way I edit it with sounds from Biosphere, creates a totally different perception of The Pier.
With regards to formal qualities, how important are elements like color, shape, movement and light in your work? he use of color and movement in T my piece for TodaysArt is also very important here. I use a very flat, desaturated color spectrum in this film to create the special visual aesthetic. But it is not black and white. The point is to have less color. The same applies to movement: there’s always a very slow movement, but never still. With regards to your work, what do you think about new technology? Is it important to work with new materials and technology?
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? What do these fields mean to you and your work?
Technology defines my artwork; it is always connected to the concept. It is our tool, with which we perceive and express ourselves. But it is also important not to get lost in it, as we have too many tools and possibilities nowadays. Sometimes, as in this case, limiting it could also be a method. For example, I use advantages of the new
I studied nuclear engineering before studying design and architecture, before deciding to become an artist. Studying these different fields has had a very big impact on my work, both in technique and style. Studying engineering has influenced my systematic thinking, nuclear science is a 18
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source of inspiration for my imaginative creativity. Regarding your artistic practice and your studio; do you work alone or together with other artists? Do you do any commercial projects, just autonomous work, or both? I like to collaborate, but I work alone. Perhaps an exchange is the right word. I produce work in various mediums and contexts. Some of my work could be considered commercial, as it is related to the entertainment business. However, I do not shape my work according to the expectations of the crowd or institutions. I like to push their expectations and limits. You could say that that is the artistic perspective for my work as a live visual performer at large electronic music festivals. Most of my collaborations, like the current one with Biosphere, are with musicians and sound artists. During the past decade, my main collaborator has been Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) in this field. I also collaborate with physicists, mathematicians and programmers to create concepts and technologies for interactive visual content and software.
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Today’s Art on Sea
HeHe Radiant Beach HeHe is the artist duo of Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen. By working with light, sound and image they look at the relationship between the individual and its architectural and urban environment. As they state on their website: ‘We are creative. We shape technology. We design art. We abuse methods and techniques. We open up new vistas. In short, we forge the past and fake the future...’
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Could you briefly describe your plan for the project?
Is your work related to the present? The work creates an immersive, physical and visual experience that enables people to imagine a fictional narrative and engage with both the future possibilities or limits of technological society. The green sand might bring to mind ideas of nature being polluted or contaminated by urban life: chemical substances, radio activity or undefined technologies from the future such as ‘Glowing Dunes’ designed by mineral modification. The color green has been used consistently in experiments to develop advanced technologies, and is also a shorthand for both ecology and toxicity.
I n Scheveningen, we want to make a small and strange laboratory performance titled ‘Radiant Beach’. A stretch of sand will be sprayed with paint that glows in the dark under UV light. Visible only at night, it gives a new color to a small part of the coastal landscape. Why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? The Pier project is appealing because of the lightness of touch: the willingness to experiment with undefined outcomes and the history of ZERO as a point of departure.
e hope that our works make people W laugh and shiver. We expose beautified performances of dysfunctional landscapes and infrastructures befitting to the everyday technologies that surround us.
What do you find interesting about The Pier as a location? iers are charming pieces of archiP tecture. It is difficult to say why. They come from a different time; they no longer fit reality yet they still give a strong identity to a place. At The Pier, one senses a social or political reality, an urban transformation, a trace of an industrial landscape, a dynamic of change in the air.
Is the relationship between technology-art-nature important to you(r work)? Today, there is a growing tension between the concept of nature and the reality of living in synthetic or man-made environments. The contradictory situation of living an apparently ‘ecologically-friendly’ life in an increasingly unsustainable world acts as a stimulus for making new work.
How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? I n an ideal scenario, art blends naturally into the existing environment and can be alien at the same time. Our projects are often responses to specific sites and relate to specific audiences or situations.
With regards to your work, is it important to work with new materials and technology? I n our high speed society where technological spectacles are celebrated, 15
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Radiant Beach
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it is worth questioning definitions of ‘old’ and ‘new’. Sometimes, the latest technology turns out to be really quite old, with a hidden history of discovery, invention and testing that traverses science and culture. We research the cultural history of technologies to find clues, paths not taken or forms in old technologies that might be used to provide a new meaning to today’s technologies. We call this method ‘reverse cultural engineering’.
saturated colors and strange glowing pigments are used to transform a natural environment into an artificial one. Pure colors have a childish semblance that attract attention as well suggesting a polluted, stained or radioactive man-made world. Does the performative element play a role in your work? In practice, our work has an ephemeral, performative character. There are no human performers, but rather the industrial landscape and its machines.
How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? Most people see technology as politically neutral, developing progressively over time in small steps to become something relevant to people. Even in alternative cultures - focused on experimental forms of interaction, hacking, DIY, maker and shareware ethics - technology is associated with positive ideas, the possibility of prosperity and progress. But technology also has a dark side: it causes pollution, environmental disasters, urban sprawl, and social injustice. Our work is to integrate all these opposing viewpoints into one.
What does your studio practice look like? HeHe is a duo: Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen. We have worked together for over 15 years. There is no formula for each project; it is more something like a growing experience between the two of us. Mostly we work from a small chaotic studio in Paris where we make models and prototypes. Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? e have often worked in informal W collaboration with scientists, other artists, friends, public organizations and researchers. The project in Scheveningen has roots in a previous collaboration with scientific research in fluid mechanics.
With regards to formal qualities, how important are elements like color, shape, movement and light in your work? We often use synthetic representations of nature by adding a layer of color to the existing environment in order to create artificial environments. This can be done through a variety of media: video, light beams, pyrotechnics, sand or dyes. Bright 13
Today’s Art on Sea
Natalie Jeremijenko Pier-2-Pier Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist who combines engineering, environmentalism and more to create real-life experiments that enable social change. She is director of the Design Environmental Health Clinic at New York University that prescribes creative health solutions for people with environmental problems.
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are worth exploring. And it would be interesting to see – and that’s why my piece ‘pier-2-pier’ is a comparison in order to make historic references to other piers.
So the first question is why did you agree to participate in the TodaysArt project on The Pier? What attracted you to the project? Civilization has always thrived on these estuary and shoreline conditions. And why and how is extraordinarily important human history, and worth really thinking through locally. How long has that been inhabited, and how did fishermen manage the fisheries and the shoreline in other times – where in fact, it’s a brief moment in human history where we have degraded the very environment we inhabit. Most of the civilizations have done the intelligent thing; which is to improve the environment for human habitation and the health of other animals, which of course, our health depends on; rather than degrading it. To the extent that there’s probably a long history of that in this particular shoreline; and of fishermen, though I’m not sure how well it’s captured in the holiday, leisure context that it’s become. How do we reimagine leisure at the beach front so that it’s actually productive rather than destructive? How do we reimagine the food that is available at the shoreline, so that it’s productive, rather than destructive? How do we harness the extraordinary energy that’s there? Minute by minute battering onto the shoreline, not just in a defensive mode, but in a way that really captures that energy.
Could you describe your plan for the project in more detail? How do we build in a context where you have an annual 100-year storm? The structural strategies have to be revised. And so the project I’ve proposed explores this fundamental shift of using buoyancy and tension, rather than rigidity and mass as the primary engineering strategy. Obviously, using buoyancy and tension radically changes the cost and the methodology. In fact, it makes it much easier. So I’m talking about ropes and floatation, instead of huge pylons of concrete and wooden structures that are reinforced against the extraordinary wave energy. In the ‘pier-2-pier’ project, I’m exploring how we make those structures pliant; able to absorb that energy, and in fact capture that energy as opposed to resist the energy or defend against the energy. So it’s a fundamental shift in the engineering language and approach to shorelines. And I think a really important one for the 21st century, and it’s not in the engineering vocabulary. I talked to ocean and coastal engineers, and they are just baffled by these approaches. It comes out of my engineering background, which is in Space Systems Design; where payload really mattered and everything vibrates and you don’t launch a satellite with concrete
he ‘70s is when the experimentation T was going on with wave energy generation and tidal energy generation. And so those are the things that I think are important, that I’m exploring; and 11
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pillars on it; you just can’t. So the structural vocabulary I’m drawing on is, I would argue, by no means naïve, but dealing with very different constraints. And so the very simple pylon that I’ve designed is simply a submerged buoy with three helical-anchored ropes. So it’s a tripod. And everyone knows from a camera tripod that that’s the most stable structure you can get that won’t wiggle. The perfect constraint of three legs, in an earthly context – a terrestrial context – is how we make a perfect, constraint and stable context. And that’s the interesting thing about working under water. And in an aquatic ecosystem everything is basically inverted. So it’s a fluid regime, much more like air. So for instance, if you hang a weight from the ceiling from three points, you can see how this would function. You can bang it, it will move but it will stay constrained. So that’s the way the tripod pier and pylons work. And you can imagine what three ropes and a buoy costs, compared to a concrete pylon. The other thing about the pier is that it uses a transparent material; because we’re not trying to create rigidity. We’re trying to respond to the biogeochemical processes that are there. The minute you make a pylon or sort of a boardwalk or pier that cuts out the sun, then you stop all the algae and the phytoplankton, and the plants and the photosynthesis that goes on underneath that. And that’s the basis of the biogeochemical processes; so you’re cutting them out. And that makes no sense in contemporary context. So by using a floating transparent
space foil, ECTFE, wrapped in ropes and reinforced by ropes, and using air to create the structure, you get the rigidity that you need. As everybody knows you use air for rigidity, and that doesn’t give you mass, that gives you buoyancy. And again pliancy; you can absorb much more energy. So in addition to those two fundamental kinds of engineering approaches, we can build a very inexpensive structure that projects out like a pier. Which is a way to take people and their activities and interests into the water, to address the vessels or the other organisms and to kind of suspend this, if you will, on this liminal zone… To extend that liminal zone. The fundamental idea that I’ve articulated, and which I think makes sense of some of the things that were originally developed by the gang – the original gang – is how do we design mutualistic systems? How do we design in such a way that it improves our shared environmental health? So the pier becomes a structure for supporting mussels and mussel ropes and mussel cultivation, and a mussel choir, if we can. Sort of a mussel opera house, if you will, to foster the growth and colonization of a healthy mussel population. The inexpensive industrial methodology for fostering mussel cultivation is on ropes with buoyancies and the kind of engineering approaches that I’ve just articulated. So it matches well. And in addition, what we’re doing with these mussel ropes is using a system that’s being developed by Craig Steven from New Zealand; which is again an inversion. Craig Steven is a marine 10
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physicist from NIWA (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research). Every bridge that you go to is colonized by mussels or, what others would call ‘fouled’. And fouling is of course the negative terminology that the marine engineers use for biological activity; which of course is not a negative. It’s not a fouling, it’s actually positive. And so Craig’s insight was that all of these wave generation and tidal generation and offshore wind generation are all kind of battling fouling because it screws with conventional engineering numbers. Once you change the weight, once you’ve got a huge mass, you’re changing the water resistance of whatever – so they hate it. They hate fouling. Of course, I think if we’re going to radically change our bridges and piers and structures so that they don’t minimize the damage they do, we should in fact, take the reverse approach; which is, how do we maximize the positive effect we can have. Then we really have to look at how we can incorporate so-called fouling, or biological growth into the structure. And so Craig’s project has been to take an oscillating rope, which is a great way to capture energy. But as it gets fouled or as the mussels grow on it, it gets heavier, it gets more momentum and changes the physics. As it becomes fouled it becomes more productive, it harnesses more energy. So it’s the combination of these kinds of ideas that I think is important to introduce into the popular imagination, so that people can start demanding that engineers pay attention to this. Because frankly, all the large
2 Evaporation Distilling System 3M ussel Farm + Wave Energy Collector 4 Ground Anchoring
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municipal projects are being built for the public by these large engineering firms. This is because of the professional structure of the engineering design and services; they have to and are required to use off-the-shelf systems that they can characterize and they can sign off, and insure, and can calculate. So they’re completely anti-innovation, despite their marketing. They have no professional incentive at all to innovate in the Anthropocene. And you can’t blame them because they’re held responsible. They don’t have the tools for calculating dynamic vibrating systems. That’s why they don’t do them, because they can’t calculate them, therefore they can’t insure them. They can’t do the risk analysis, so this really is a cultural project to start creating a demand to shift what these specifications are.
public can learn about complex technical issues, and they must. And so I think this approach is really important to really change, public discourse. How does your work relate to existing structures and institutes? And to public space? What do these frameworks mean to you as an artist, and for your work? That’s why I’ve set up my practice inside this context of the environmental health clinic (as director of it at New York University) so that I can really make it clear that I think anything goes, as long as it improves our shared environmental health, increases our work quality, increases our air quality, increases biodiversity, improves our food and food systems. This is the design challenge and the imaginative challenge we face. So I framed my practice, all in this very simple way that treats environmental issues as health issues, and health issues as environmental issues, because frankly that’s what they are. The things that determine your lifespan and your lifestyles are these environmental factors. Your air quality or food systems, your health, they are very much determined by your local environment. So coming from that approach science and technology are very much part of my work. I see myself as much as scientist and engineer as an artist. But, institutionally, that’s tricky. Engineering firms, landscape architecture firms that I’ve been working with lately, it seems to be very difficult for them to see my approach as valid, because it’s outside their professional
e need bridges, piers, infrastructure W that promotes environmental health, that increases biodiversity, that increases and improve water quality. And all of the discourse culturally, about being environmentally friendly – it’s all about minimizing our damage, and making it so it’s not destroyed in the event of a storm. Shoring it up in terms of defence. And these are fundamentally retro, conservative, fearful concepts, that have nothing to do with the kind of imaginative design capacity that we have. We can do much more than reinforce a pier. his is a great cultural moment for T extraordinary attention. Can we redesign our relationship to the ocean? How do we do it; what are the tools and strategies for doing so. It’s a space race to the 21st century. The 7
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references. So I’ve just gotten through some recent extraordinarily challenging situations. Perhaps this idea does challenge the status quo, but it makes sense to a lot of people; that we should be designing our food and food systems; our shared infrastructure in ways that go beyond this stupid rhetoric that the professional societies have brought in. It pledges to be environmentally friendly; to consider the environment. That’s just this incremental kind of, we can do what we do, and we can kind of morally flagellate ourselves; instead of saying, come on this is a great and important need – an extraordinary challenge, and it redefines how we design things. It’s not about doing less damage; it’s about doing something good and making sure it performs, and here are the ways in which it has to be good.
question of, do these piers work. Of course people don’t trust them. And they shouldn’t trust engineers just because they’re engineers. They should trust the experiment, they should be able to see whether it works or not, and how you make it work or how you improve it. The things that affect public health are now our shared future and it needs this very different methodology than what is typically used in this context of marine engineering and architectural design. The few thousand dollars we might have to do this experiment, versus the 10 million dollars that were used for this experimental design phase where ten different designers and architects in New York were getting one dollar each just for their first design phase; to execute Photoshop plans. The extraordinary misallocation of public funds in this context is shocking to me. And I hope to make that evident; and I think that’s where artists working in this way are valuable, they just wonder. I don’t care if somebody has an engineering degree or an architectural degree or not. Watching the tripod, will it work or not, and how big should it be; that’s wonder driven. That’s interesting, that’s about our shared environment.
And it’s not only about making the designs, but also really trying to make it work or to really sort of relate to the daily reality or practice? I have a very strong commitment to building stuff, to experimenting. And that’s exposing it to failure; exposing it to revision, exposing it to learning tremendously. I learn so much more when I build something than when I write about it and propose it and budget it, and draw it and calculate. It’s all the things that you don’t predict that you learn from. So these are public experiments - and it’s necessary that these are done in public - and I’ll take bets on how long it’ll last and how it’ll perform. Because it’s a public question. It’s not just a technocratic
ow do the mussels in the mussel H choir - that I hope to be able to install on the Pier too - like it? How much are they singing (aka what is the water quality)? These are questions that draw on all our shared intuition about our shared environment, and can be winded, not as calculations of growth responses for commercial mussel farming, but as this tremendous 6
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cultural opportunity of – is this working, could we redesign our relationship to the shoreline, can we make a positive impact to improve health?
his is a really important context, a T historic moment for a wide cultural and urgent invitation to redesign our relationship to natural systems. And the only people who could do that effectively are artists. Because we know that scientists insist on calculus. Calculus is great. I love it, I was a math geek and I love math, but math is a descriptive language that does not engage wondrous fascination with how we redesign. It doesn’t frame the important cultural problem of how we can redesign our relationship to natural systems. And it also doesn’t invite everybody into doing that. And these material practices do – using art as a public form, is an invitation.
hat’s a big cultural question. That’s T not a technocratic calculation. And so I see my project and my work more generally as an invitation to take this kind of design outside of the realm of technocratic institutions and into the public imaginary, where we can draw on the extraordinary capacity and wonderful scepticism and diverse challenges that people have in a cultural context; a school teacher, a child or a local fisherman, or anyone can comment on this and see how this works. I’m interested in what the local fisherman will say. The kind of shared ideas and the shared language, promotes a much more active and interesting discussion than the constrained professional public design protocols.
With regards to your work, what do you think about technology, about new technology? Is it important to work with new materials and technology? he cultural question is, what opporT tunity does this particular technology or material provide for the kind of social and environmental change that is appropriate right now? And for instance, this space foil ECTFE for the pier has been used for football stands, Frankfurt Football and Eaton projects. At the scale that I’m using it at – it’s a game changer. The football stadium is basically – it’s just a roof that they can light up nicely. In the case of applying it in a pier where you’re suddenly allowing all the solar throughput to create the healthy aquatic ecosystem underneath, while still allowing people to walk over it. Because most boardwalks have that terrible paradox in them that they’re allowing public appreciation and public access to
In what way would you describe the current and future function of art? – I mean, you mentioned already the importance of a cultural investigation. Do you see the wondering as a sort of utopian thing? No, no, I don’t. I think I see it very much as a route around the super specialization. The cliché about art is that an art museum is a public museum. Art is for public display. People go into a museum and they are prepared to make their own judgment. Scientists publish for their community of expertise. Artists are always already producing for the public. And they have the strategies of representation and engagement. 5
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these delicate ecosystems, but they’re also destroying them. They’re creating these big dead spots in order to facilitate people’s presence there.
How does living in an inherently technological society influence your work? I think that the cultural challenge is that we are never ready to figure out what the cultural opportunity of technology is. It’s not whether or not – every society has technology and is defined by it. But the questions we’re asking though, is how do we apply it? We get the technology we deserve. We use technologies in ways that we see fit. And we’re not victims of that technology. It is an imaginative challenge to us, to how we use these to produce the kind of social and environmental change that we desire. That’s, I think, the imperative of any age, but certainly ours.
he other aspect I didn’t talk about T with ‘pier-2-pier’ is actually from Michael [Kokora from OMA] thesis, who is one of the collaborators. One of the important, huge technologies and demands of the 21st century is desalination. And what the transparent material allows us to do, which hasn’t been done before, is create these artificial clouds. So the artificial clouds introduce brackish water, grey water, salt water, sea water, whatever you like, into it. Of course the sun hits and penetrates, and it evaporates, condensing on the top of the transparent pillow. And then because of the curvature of the transparent pillow, it runs down the side – the distilled water, the fresh water, runs down the side and collects on the edges. So we have a water purification system inside this structure. And we do gradual, slow complete desalination.
Is your work related to the present, and if so, could you describe the present? ell I don’t know if I do. I don’t like W being general. I look at the details of what materials are available to us now. What opportunities are available to us now that we did not have before. And tidal energy generation, distributed local power production, these new space foils, a whole lot of durable polymers – all of the materials that I’m using are quintessentially contemporaneous and define our times. It’s interesting, I think, when it comes to the ocean and plastics, the whole sense is that plastics are always and already a pollutant. And certainly, some people have suggested – I think it was Marina [Zarkou] who suggested that we call the Anthropocene the Plasticine. It’s when plastic has become part of the biogeochemical
So the idea that we can do a passive inexpensive desalination strategy as well is part of the mutualistic systems design where we’re promoting biodiversity, improving water quality, generating energy, allowing access to people, introducing new structural experiments, and desalination water. That’s the kind of performance that our current technologies need to address, because they’re the challenges of the 21st century. Well, as they were defined – what is it, 40 years ago now. These are not new, but we now have new ways to design and explore, and it’s urgent that we do. 4
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processes of the world, distributed far and wide throughout the oceans and in miniscule – zooplankton and phytoplankton and bacteria, plastic is widely distributed.
realms. I’ve always collaborated in various ways. Regarding your studio practice you work within the context of the NYU, would you call that autonomous or commercial, how would you call that?
But it’s not only a pollutant. It is a material that we can use as a pollutant, or we can use it to our advantage. So the durability and the buoyancy and the capacity of plastics can be used environmentally-productively, and that’s I think a really important demonstration. Because of the popular imagination, ‘all plastics are pollutants’, someone might say, let’s build a nice wooden boat. There’s a kind of nostalgia about the pre-plastic times that somehow it was more pure, innocent or better. It’s a nostalgia that I appreciate, but it’s not the opportunity that we have. It is a different opportunity and applying the past now, by for instance building a wooden boat now, you’d have to justify extraordinary labor conditions. Different materials create different opportunities. Technologies and materials create cultural opportunities.
I ’m an academic. I work in the public realm. I am trying to find ways to support and fund and continue the work that I do. It’s always difficult, but I’m not alone in that. There isn’t really academic funding for this sort of work at NYU. If I was an engineering consultant or even an NGO, and we were talking, there would probably be a $200,000 price tag on it. I believe that if we do a good public demonstration, we learn from it, things will come out of it. What is the role of the audience in your work and what could you say about the role of the performative element in your work? I ’m doing a collaboration with some artists and directors right now, which is actually a performance of the Environmental Health Clinic. I’ve struggled with this idea for the performance. I mean, there is this idea that it’s a rehearsal for a kind of social change, but I’m actually much more interested in directly figuring out how to do that, instead of performing it. That’s why I use the word experiment much more. So I’ve been working on this environmental health clinic performance. But the whole question of the performance is, is this a performance? So it really questions, is this real; how real can it be; how real is it? And in
Where do you position yourself in relation towards art and science? What do these fields mean to you and your work? Do you consider yourself an artist using science? o, I read mainly scientific literature. N And I’m in discussion with lots of scientific colleagues, and I collaborate and talk to artists and scientists. I think of myself as both. Some ideas are more relevant to other communities. I have to say, I think my work is more appreciated in the scientific realms than they are in the artistic 3
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that way, I’m always looking for viable and interesting ways to engage the public, and that’s one of the ways to do that. And this idea of betting is one new way that I’ve been developing, where we can take bets on how long people think the tripod pylon will last and how much it might move, and whether or not the tea cup on the top will fall over.
systems. In productive, wondrous engaging ways. Because there is such gloom and negativity and fatalism dominating the Anthropocene. So I have actually formulated this idea that seizes the golden spike of the Anthropocene. When the international geological society decides on an era, the Holocene, or the Pleistocene or the Anthropocene, they will use a golden spike to mark different places around the world where the initiation of the Holocene happened. So there’s been a long debate going on, approaching five years, about the Anthropocene, about whether or not it really constitutes an epoch or an era; if it’s geological in scale.
Do you consider a personal signature, a personal ‘touch’, important, or would you say that the work you make could be produced by others? I have this debate with other artists that my work is so rational. And to some extent it is, but that’s part of my signature, that these are well rationalized works. But they’re also wonder-driven and visually engaging, and they use strategies. I don’t think art necessarily has to be irrational. It’s very important, I think, to have art as an intellectual activity. It’s not a craft activity, it involves a great deal of craft that I really admire, but artists are intellectuals. That’s the way that I was brought into the arts. Image making comes out of ideas.
I ’m seizing the golden spike to mark places where we take responsibility; where we’ve used this concept of the Anthropocene and say, okay here is a point where we have taken that knowledge and now we are designing something that improves our shared environmental health, that increases biodiversity, that improves water quality or air quality. That’s the opportunity of the Anthropocene; that’s how we define the Anthropocene. It’s a self-knowledge, and with that, it’s the response or the response-ability. The ability to respond.
And so the idea and not the formal qualities are the starting point for you then?
And this is also the way that nature or natural elements like the sun, wind, the sea, light, nature (natural or synthetic) influence your work? My particular approach to designing with nature is to recognize that natural systems are mutualistic systems. That most of the world’s biomass is produced – they’re mutualists.
es, but the formal qualities are critiY cal. I think ‘pier-2-pier’ will be visually distinctive, but it’s not designed first and foremost to be visually distinctive. And that’s what I think of the images that we need to produce for the 21st century. We need to produce images that demonstrate and explore how we redesign our relationship to natural 2
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Mutualism is that subset of symbiotic organisms where all parties benefit. And it turns out that 95 percent at least of the world’s biomass consists of mutualists. All the corals, all the forests, all the flowers and pollinators, we’re all in a tangle of mutualism. In fact, it’s not about competition for resources, it’s not primarily about predator-prey relationships. Most of the natural systems are structured and designed as mutualists. It’s about creating these productive relationships. If I were to say how nature impacts my work, then I’d say that it’s that wisdom in nature that I’m trying to develop and instrumentalize and go forward with, because it’s mutualistic systems design. We learn that straight from nature, and we can apply it.
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Saburo Murakami
Tsuyoshi Maekawa
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Henk Peeters, design for realisation of Yves Klein’s works
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Gianni Colombo
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Ferdinand SpindelÂ
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Tsuruko Yamazaki
Shoza Shimamoto
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Heinz Mack
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Heinz Mack
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Ferdinand SpindelÂ
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Henk Peeters
Christian Megert
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Nanda Vigo
Michio Yoshihara
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Hans Haacke
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Lucio Fontana
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Otto Piene
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Proposals for ‘ZERO on Sea’
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Photo montage by Henk Peeters using work by Gianni Colombo, Hans Haacke and Heinz Mack, 1965
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My objects constitute a spatial reality, a zone of light. I use the means of technology to overcome the personal gesture, to objectify, to create the conditions for freedom. G端nther Uecker, 1961
Utopias have a largely literary worth. Utopias with a real basis are not Utopias. My Utopia has a solid foundation: light, smoke, and 12 searchlights! Otto Piene, 1958
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You can spell out relevant themes the ZERO artists shared, but when you try to understand it, you find things that are recurring. The interests are still there, or they have taken on renewed relevance. Daniel Birnbaum, 2015 From: ‘ZERO Today. History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but it Does Rhyme’, Mattijs Visser in an Interview with Daniel Birnbaum in: ZERO, ed. By Dirk Pörschmann, Margriet Schavemaker, Mattijs Visser, Thekla Zell, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, ZERO foundation, Düsseldorf, 2015. p.236
I did not like Nothingness, and this is how I came to know the void, the deep void, those depths of blue! Yves Klein, 1961
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Photo montage by Henk Peeters using work by Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, George Rickey and G端nther Uecker, 1965
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ZERO on Sea Notes 1 For a detailed description of this project see Caroline de Westenholz, ‘ZERO on Sea’, in Colin Huizing a.o., Nul = 0. The Dutch ZERO Movement in an International Context, 1961-1966, Rotterdam 2011, in association with Schiedam Stedelijk Museum, p. 86-117 2 ‘Fragments of a conversation with Henk Peeters,’ in: Henk Peeters, Franck Gribling et al., ZERO onuitgevoerd, catalogue exhibition Art Historical Institute Amsterdam, 24 April – 13 May 1970 (not paged) 3 The ‘ZERO on Sea’ archive is kept in Albert Vogel Archive (henceforth: AVA), The Hague Municipal Archives, inventory nr 709, file nrs. 1614-1623 4 ‘Just look at The Pier, that crazy concrete funnel, it is ZERO art in itself, a sort of ready made,’ Hans Götze in ‘Scheveningse pier wordt Nulfestijn’, Algemeen Handelsblad, 4th August 1965 5 For the history of Scheveningen pier see a.o.: A. Adama Zijlstra, ‘Overname en afbraak’, in Het Kurhaus, van badhuis tot levend monument. Een kroniek van 160 jaren, Den Haag 1970; Michiel van der Mast, Henk Overduin and Gerrit-Jan de Rook, De Scheveningse Pier, catalogue exhibition Haags Gemeentemuseum 29 July – 10 September 1978; Mariët Herlé, De Pier van Scheveningen, Den Haag s.d. 6 Letter Leo Verboon to Yayoi Kusama, AVA, file no. 1636, also in CICA/YK/3900.31 7 According to various newspaper clippings, AVA, file no. 1614 8 See: Lynn Zelevansky, Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, Alexandra Munroe, Love forever: Yayoi Kusama, 19581968, catalogue exhibition Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Japan Foundation, Tokyo and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1998-1999, p. 179 9 AVA, file no. 1617 and 1636 10 Letter IGO to Yayoi Kusama, 11 February 1966, CICA/ YK.3900.32 11 Letter IGO to Yayoi Kusama, 16th February 1066, signed by Verboon and Vogel CICA/YK/3900.34 12 Letter Yayoi Kusama to IGO, 25 February 1966, CICA/ YK 3900-09 13 Letter Yayoi Kusama to IGO, 10 March 1966, CICA/ YK/3900-4 14 Letter Yayoi Kusama to IGO, AVA file no. 1636. Also copy in CICA/YK/3900-5. On the copy in Albert Vogel’s archive it says: ‘MACH-12 SATUDAY’ in Kusama’s handwriting 15 Forum voor architectuur en daarmee verbonden kunsten, 20th June 1967 16 Letter to IGO, 23 March 1966, AVA, file no. 1636 17 From: Otto Piene, ‘The development of the Group ‘ZERO’’’, The Times Literary Supplement, September 3, 1964, ibid. XXIII. The first big ZERO project in this respect was Mack’s Sahara project (conceived in 1959) 18 Otto Piene, ‘Wege zum Paradies’ (‘Paths to paradise’, transl. by Howard Beckman) in: ZERO 3,2,1, Cologne 1973, p. 146-149 (reprint of the original ZERO magazines 1, 2 and 3) 19 The plans are explained in a letter by Otto Piene to International Gallery Orez, 15th March 1966, reprinted in Forum voor architectuur en daarmee verbonden kunsten, 20th June 1967, p. 17 (the original letter is lost) 20 All designs and correspondence for ‘ZERO on Sea’ are in Albert Vogel Archive (AVA), The Hague Municipal Archive, inventory nr 709. All designs from the German ZERO group: file no. 1616 21 Letter Heinz Mack to International Gallery Orez, 10th March 1966, AVA, file no. 1616 22 E-mail Heinz Mack to Caroline de Westenholz, 10th October, 2010. In this e-mail, Mack mentioned that he had also offered to reconstruct the light carrousel of the Nul 1965 exhibition on The Pier; the original had been damaged and destroyed. No such proposal has survived in
Vogel’s archives 23 All Italian designs in AVA, file nr 1620, unless otherwise mentioned 24 AVA, file nr 1618 25 Designs of the Gutai group: AVA, file nr 1617 26 This design was not found in Albert Vogel’s archive. It is stored in the archive of Alberto Biasi, in Padua 27 Letter Günther Uecker to Heinz Mack, reproduced in Uecker Zeitung 1 (1969). Translation Caroline de Westenholz 28 ‘A 1965 project for a show at Scheveningen, Holland, involving sea gulls, was executed in 1966 at Coney Island: Living Sculpture showed the birds diving for crumbs of bread.’ Carla Gottlieb, Beyond Modern Art, New York 1976, p. 315 29 Letter Armando to Leo Verboon, n.d. (1966). All designs by the Nul group: AVA, file no. 1615 30 Letter Ferdinand Spindel to International Gallery Orez, 2d February 1966, AVA, file nr 1616 31 Henk Peeters, ‘Onuitgevoerde plannen ZERO I’ and idem, ‘Fragmenten uit een gesprek met Henk Peeters,’ in ZERO onuitgevoerd, p. 6–8 32 Letter Jan Henderikse to Hans Götze, 4th September 4 1965, AVA, file nr 1615 33 Letter Hans Haacke to International Gallery Orez, 18th August 1965 and six sketches, AVA, file no. 1616 34 Filed with the French artists, AVA, file nr 1618 35 Op. cit. note 30 36 Letter IGO, 3d April 1966, signed by Leo Verboon, CICA/ YK/3900.36 37 See Cor Wijnbergen, ‘Reinder Zwolsman,’ Studio no 26, year 44, no. 2167 (June 27–July 3, 1971), 16–19 38 Jan Juffermans, ‘20 jaar Orez—een zorgeloos galerie-verhaal,’ Tableau no. 2 (November/December 1980), 479–480 39 Haagsche Courant, 16 april 1966 40 Op. cit. note 2 41 ‘Letter Leo Verboon to Yayoi Kusama, 6th April 1966, CICA/YK/3900.37 42 According to the written sources: ‘8.55 Uit Bellevue’, Televisier, 19 April 1966; ‘Werken van Nulgroep op scherm’, Brabants Nieuwsblad, 18 April 1966; ‘ZERO-Nul géén kunst’, De Tijd, 19 April 1966 and untitled in NRC, 19 April 1966 43 VARA, ‘Uit Bellevue’, 18th April 1966. The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Hilversum, carrier number 6616111 44 https://www.facebook.com/events/841435029210140/
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been renovated in order to house new entrepreneurs who have plans to erect shopping and food facilities there. On July 17th, 2015, The Pier reopened to the public. On 24-27 September 2015, TodaysArt organised a grandiose extravaganza that celebrated the idea behind the original project. As the organisers write on their Facebook page: ‘Over the past few years, this building on the sea has been the battleground of the natural elements, the economy and failed ideas. Fifty years ago the ZERO art movement planned the event 'ZERO on Sea' on The Pier, but it never took place. Inspired by the iconic Pier and 'ZERO on Sea', TodaysArt creates a contemporary event filled with performances, club programmes, installations and a symposium above the waves, as well as interventions on the beach, in the sea and in the air.’ 44 The initiator was in this case, TodaysArt with various supporting partners. And this project did take place. A better tribute to Zero on Sea could hardly be imagined.
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Bellevue (the name of a theatre in Central Amsterdam). Directed by Yayoi Kusama and Henk Peeters, journalist Joop van Tijn interviewed a couple of ZERO artists in German and in English.42 Only a short fragment of this programme has been kept, in the Dutch television archive. It features a bird’s eye view of Scheveningen pier, with the sounds of the breaking of waves on the shore and the shrieking of sea gulls in the background. A number of press clippings passes by on the screen, and we see the faces of some of the participating artists. It ends with an answer to the question, and what happened to 'ZERO on Sea'? ‘Geen ZERO, geen zier.’43 A nice pun, in Dutch, which means ‘not a thing.’ It was a sad ending to a visionary project.
Aftermath: ‘ZERO on Sea’ now In retrospect, the concept of 'ZERO on Sea' seems curiously contemporary. Long before photoshopping was invented, Henk Peeters constructed a series of photomontages of The Pier as a Gesamtkunstwerk. The way the ZERO artists wanted to attract producers of industrial products such as beer bottles, car tyres and a soap company as sponsors also anticipated modern times. In their designs, the relationship between man, nature and technology (the central subject of ZERO 3 magazine) was explored in a futuristic kind of way. Nowadays, society has become inherently technological. On 27th June 1967 the daily Haagsche Courant published a slightly naive letter, probably written by Henk Peeters, to Reindert Zwolsman. It recalled how two years previously, Zwolsman inspired ‘us artists from eight countries to a dream. For three long weeks, your pier would be a ZERO monument, a world miracle of light and air, water and fire.’ Rumour had it that Zwolsman was too stingy, the letter continued, but the artists knew better: ‘We found in you a true maecenas. You have protected art and did well by leaving the dream to remain a dream. You have acted in true ZERO spirit. Whoever touches Zwolsman, touches us.’ It was signed by all the participating artists. Little did Henk Peeters know that fifty years after the original event was planned, 'ZERO on Sea' would be commemorated on Scheveningen pier. In 2014, Scheveningen pier was sold to developers KonderWessels Vastgoed (VolkerWessels). Ever since, the structure has - 21
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our Gallery. The Dutch television will make a recording.’36 The ‘business organisation’ was Zwolsman’s EMS company, which could no longer provide the necessary sponsorship anyway. in 1966, EMS paid its shareholders their dividends for the last time.40 Elsewhere, Verboon says: 'When we had collected all those plans, we started to calculate: the whole affair was going to cost several hundred thousand guilders. And Zwolsman was much more bankrupt than he realized, at that moment in time, so all that we got out of him was a tiny little amount of money.' 38 Verboon was only too right. Kusama’s correspondence with Orez indicates just how much the entire project was going to cost. If all participating artists were going to be treated like Kusama and have their individual wishes catered to as she expected, the whole project was going to require a fortune. Correspondence in Vogel’s archive shows that Aubertin, Otto Piene, George Rickey and Nanda Vigo also wished Orez to order and provide all the materials they needed – and those are only the letters that survived. The artists would then simply assemble their pieces on the spot two weeks before the event. Considering the number of artists involved, the gallery would have had to rent an entire warehouse in order to store all the materials. This cost factor was of course the major reason for the cancellation of the whole event. So instead of the actual project, the plans and designs for 'ZERO on Sea' would go on show in Orez. This exhibition would last from 15th April till 4th May 1966 and it was organised by Henk Peeters.39 It featured two letters, one sketch and three photo’s by Yayoi Kusama.40 Kusama received an air ticket to fly over in the first week of April. Peeters would pick her up from Schiphol airport. Verboon announced: ‘In Holland you will be taking part in a big Television Show about ZERO. After that you will go to Essen for your One-Man-Show. We are paying for this, because we are trusting that you will make some works of art for us, as compensation. Your ‘Stay’ in Holland will also be payed for by us. I am looking forward to seeing you again, we are making a lot of publicity for you, you are becoming famous over here.’41 This ‘big Television Show’ was meant to advertise the 'ZERO on Sea' project, but now it just served to announce its cancellation. It was broadcast on April 18th, 1966 and it concerned the programme Uit - 22
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exhibition, which Henk Peeters used for one of his photomontages. Nanda Vigo wanted to install a so-called Cronotopo, a walk-in concrete cylinder with glass panels and mirrors installed inside. The visitor was meant to walk up and down between them. Gutai member Tsuruko Yamasaki of the Gutai group delivered a colored sketch of curtains made from a cheap blend of rayon and linen cloth, in ten to fifteen different colors, one meter wide and twelve meters long, presumably intended to be hung from a high point on The Pier and left for the wind to play with. His colleague Norio Iami sent a sketch for a kind of pavilion with four layers of draped curtains against a green background, which could be raised and dropped in turn. Lamps placed behind the curtains would reveal different color combinations. Ferdinand Spindel had a plan for a dark, grotto-like labyrinth, around fifty meters long, and filled with forms made of foam plastic.35 The photos he sent of this idea remind one involuntarily of the sets from the German expressionist movie Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari.
The end of ‘ZERO on Sea’ Unfortunately, the 'ZERO on Sea' project was never executed. From the start, it was questionable whether the high flying constructions of the international ZERO-artists would be able to withstand the harsh Dutch climate; in early April 1966, storms ravaged the North Sea coast. No insurance against possible claims in case of damage could be obtained. And last but not least, the project would become far more expensive than originally planned. Yayoi Kusama received the bad news in a telegram of 25th March, which has not survived. This was followed by a letter from Leo Verboon explaining that some projects were extremely expensive to set up, and would require a disproportional part of the budget. Orez considered this would not be fair to other artists: ‘A manifestation such as ‘ZERO-on-Sea’ is incomplete without them, and the artistic potency of the whole show would be ruined. Alas, Gallery Orez could not come to terms with the business organisation on this point. After that it was decided, for the time being, not to go through with any of the plans. We are fully aware that this course of events is very disappointing for you, but we hope that under the circumstances you will understand our position. Starting on April the 15th, plans and designs from ZERO-on-Sea will be exhibited in - 23
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The beach The beach was clearly the least inspiring aspect of 'ZERO on Sea'. There is only a limited number of designs devoted to this area. Hans Haacke suggested a labyrinth of beach chairs there. Günther Uecker thought of projecting a film onto buildings on the coast, or onto the sea itself.
The Pier: earth and wind Henk Peeters had been actively experimenting with sound and movement, which is why 'ZERO on Sea' held such a special appeal for him. He had so many ideas that his proposals alone could fill an entire article, and he submitted twelve drawings, including: a plan for a hundred polished metal tubes of different sizes and diameter, hanging from a ceiling, to be moved by the wind or by hand, in order to produce a special sound; pyramid-shaped vessels with mirrors at the bottom, filled with water, hanging from the ceiling and lit by spotlights.31 The latter was a variation on the ‘water ceiling’ that he had produced for the Nul 1965 exhibition. Jan Henderikse wanted to create a room by piling up crates of beer bottles to serve as walls and using glass plates as floors and ceilings. ‘It seems so simple, but the execution must be fantastic because of the grandiose lighting that shoots through the crates like a Broadway ad.’32 Hans Haacke had a whole list of ideas for The Pier. He wanted to attach white nylon streamers, around fifteen to twenty meters in length, to the two groups of seven flagpoles situated on the long bridge of The Pier. He also wished to create a ‘wall of balloons,’ to be moved by the wind—balloons on ropes of different lengths fixed closely together, and floating on top of each other.33 Christian Megert intended to erect a mirror across the entire width of The Pier. Three lorry loads of shattered mirror pieces had to be discharged in front of it. A loudspeaker would amplify the sound of breaking glass.34 Gianni Colombo suggested making a cylinder consisting of six layers of segments, each with a diameter of one meter. All layers were equal but each was slightly rotated from the previous one, as if in a screw movement. This design looked very much like the one for the Nul 1965 - 24
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fountains, deposited every two meters or so. These would spout the water up into the air at varying heights, from two to twenty meters, the highest being closest to the shore. Finally, they designed a ‘kinetic horizon’, made from a line of about ten rotating, fan-shaped, lightmetal circles, driven by a propeller. This structure was to be mounted on the furthest island of The Pier. It would turn around on its axis according to the direction of the wind.26 Günther Uecker wanted to hang huge pontoons between the legs of The Pier. A loudspeaker on the structure itself was supposed to amplify the sound of the lapping of the waves underneath the pontoons. Next, he wished to create an island of silver buoys and one made of silver cloth (extended over a number of buoys). In a letter to Heinz Mack he elaborated on his visionary views: ‘Perhaps we can dye the sea and the beach, or pour many tons of false diamonds or glass pearls into the sea; diamonds would be even better, so we will attract lots of visitors… Underneath these islands [i.e. of The Pier, CW] there must be lots of light (..) and one should be able to go out on the sea over a skin of silver. That would be something for you. It would be good to have a NATO rocket there and change it, humanise it…’27 Hans Haacke suggested ‘messages in bottles’ to be sent out at sea and a battalion of aluminum cannon balls, to be anchored between the islands of The Pier; they would loosely bang against each other in the wash of the waves. Other ideas included a swimming balloon sculpture on the surface of the water, an orange-colored pole standing on top of a buoy and jets of seawater squirting up into the sky, crashing against each other, or against the bottom of The Pier islands. Next, Haacke wanted to throw washing powder into the sea, in order to make it foam properly. A small boat with the favorite food of seagulls was to be dispatched in order to create a ‘seagull sculpture’ in the sky. This idea was executed in Coney Island later that year, which secured the 'ZERO on Sea' project an early mention in international art history.28 Armando sent in a sketch of his sound cabin.29 He intended to ‘annex’ the noises of the sea in order to amplify them and broadcast them all over The Pier. He also wished to ‘paint the sea black,’ a reminder of his Black Water project from 1964. Ferdinand Spindl opted for foam plastic ‘sea roses’ floating on the sea.30
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Photo montage by Henk Peeters using work by Akira Kanayama, Heinz Mack, Yves Klein en Gabriele Devecchi, 1965. The smoke columns on The Pier indicate the design by Yves Klein.
Photo montage by Henk Peeters using work by Saburo Murakami, Pol Bury, Otto Pienne, Henk Peeters, Gianni Colombo, Hans Haacke and Akira Kanayama, 1965
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and balance trembles and vibrates and fiercely reflects the light.’22 It was a variation on his plans for his 1959 Sahara project. Lucio Fontana sent in a photograph of a ceiling relief with holes in it, entitled Decorazione per un cinema (Decoration for a cinema), dating from 1951. The idea was to light it from behind in order to suggest the starry night sky in broad daylight. Unfortunately, no accompanying letters have survived.23
Fire Yves Klein was no longer alive, in 1965. Henk Peeters wanted to pay him a tribute by executing his plans for a climate chamber for the first time. Apparently this was considered too ambitious and the 'ZERO on Sea' archive includes other ideas from one of Klein’s exhibition catalogues, edited by Henk Peeters.24 They all had to do with the element fire. The intention was to recreate Klein’s Mur de feu (Wall of fire) by putting fire to rows of gas burners, as the artist had done for the exhibition at Haus Lange in Krefeld in 1961. A ball of steam, made out of water jets, would evaporate over a gas flame. Finally, Peeters wanted to put gas flames out into the sea. A visualisation of the latter idea can be seen in one of his photomontages.
Carpets on the sea Michio Yoshihara, the leader of the Japanese Gutai group, sent in two watercolors with vivid designs for 'ZERO on Sea'. He wanted to extend a rope with tufts of red ribbon between two islands of The Pier. Also, he intended to put out a red ‘carpet’, fifty meters long and two meters wide, that would stretch over the surface of the water from one end of the watchtower island to a bunch of white ribbons at the other end, where it was to be anchored to the bottom of the sea.25 Gutai member Norio Iami submitted drawings for five triangular rafts, which had to be anchored out to sea and covered in red, blue, green, yellow, and white vinyl. The Italian Gruppo Enne produced what was perhaps the most exciting design for the sea. It consisted of three parts. A surviving photomontage shows a Red Wave of eight by five hundred meters running straight from the beach into the sea, a little bit to the south of The Pier. This wave was made out of little red balls, held together by floating transparent polyethylene tape. To the north of The Pier and running parallel to it, the group envisaged a line of seawater - 27
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‘Can you get an electrician for me when I come to Holland? Since I will be in Holland only ten days before the opening, please have the material and the electrician ready for me when I come. I need a tape recorder. I will bring tapes of Beatle’s music. At my show I gave visitors a button reading ‘LOVE FOREVER Kusama’. Please make 1000 buttons like the sample I am sending, but of course the words in Dutch. I hear that the exhibition will be permanent so please buy the mirrors. I will send you the measurements tomorrow. I shall also send a photo. Thus, you will understand how to make it with the help of a carpenter. Please send me an airplane ticket as soon as possible.’ 16 The accompanying sketch shows that there are some differences with the Castellani Peep show. In The Pier project, the text on the buttons should now be in Dutch. The ceiling lights should form the words ‘Love’ and ‘Sex’. There must be two peep holes, not one only. And lastly, the public should be allowed to go inside.
‘Probing into the night sky…’ We will now look at the designs of some of the other artists. The core members of ZERO, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, had long declared the elements to be tools of their art: air, fire, water, earth. They wanted to reharmonize the relationship between man and nature.17 'ZERO on Sea' offered enormous impulses for this. Otto Piene used 'ZERO on Sea' as a platform to realise his dream of an ‘astronautic theatre’ in the night sky.18 He developed plans for three giant balloons, in red, black and silver, to be filled with helium. The red one would give the impression of a red cloud in the sky, and the black one that of a ‘splendid large blackberry.’ The silver balloon, the smallest one, had to look like an artificial planet. The balloons were to be located over the different islands of The Pier. During the day they should appear to be ‘standing’ on smoke columns, which would be achieved by burning oil in cans floating on the water, and at night they were to be lit from various angles by searchlights.19 He created watercolor and ink sketches for both views.20 Heinz Mack was inspired by the many antenna masts he had seen in Holland and Belgium. He suggested to acquire one such mast, paint it blue like the sky itself and anchor it to the bottom of the sea.21 ‘This is the idea of a vibrating tower of light, which in its vertical tension - 28
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and will be overwhelmed with light. This image will be a fantastic sensation in this exhibition.’ 12 This letter was followed up by a technical one requesting all the relevant material for the 'ZERO on Sea' project and the expenses involved.13 The next one mentions a special delivery letter, posted one day earlier, that seems to have got lost.14 Now Kusama went into more detail into her needs for The Pier project. Like in the Castellani exhibition, she wanted Beatle music to be played and she needed a recorder for that. Also, she wanted to have buttons made with the text LOVE FOREVER: ‘I think it will be less expensive to have the buttons made here, but I will need some money from you, about twenty dollars, to have 1000 made. I will bring them with me when I come.’ On March 23d Kusama reported to Orez about the Castellani exhibition in a handwritten letter. The second page of this letter, which contains a sketch of the planned Peep Show, has been reproduced in Forum Magazine15 and elsewhere since, but the text of the first page has never been published until now: ‘404 East 14th St. New York City, NY U.S.A. March 23, 1966 Dear Albert and Leo, My show [in the Castellani Gallery, CW] is on and many people were shocked. Museum directors came and said it was the best show this year. My hexagonal mirror room, illuminated by electric bulbs was spectacular and fantastic, according to visitors. The Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston is borrowing my exhibit.’ This posed a problem in regard to The Pier project: ‘I promised I would bring the material to Holland after my show was over. Now I need the bulbs and sockets for Boston but I will bring the control motor to Holland because it was specially made here for my show and would be difficult to duplicate in Holland. Can you buy bulbs and wires for me in Holland? It will not be expensive. The bulbs are yellow, blue, green and red. I have a drawing made by an electrician showing how the wiring is arranged. I will send you samples of the bulbs and sockets by air mail tomorrow.’ Four photo’s of this ‘control motor’ were included in Kusama’s correspondence with Orez. - 29
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Design for Peep Show for ‘ZERO on Sea’ project. Letter to Orez, 23 March 1966, second page, published in Forum Magazine in 1966. Original in Albert Vogel archive, file no. 1636
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Design for Kusama’s Peep Show for ‘ZERO on Sea’ (fragment). Albert Vogel Archive, Dutch Municipal Archive, file no 1636
Photo control motor for Kusama’s Peep Show. AVA, inv. nr. 1617
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For 'ZERO on Sea', Kusama initially wanted to decorate a 30-m-long corridor with her phallic objects.7 Eventually she suggested to make a Peep Show. Kusama first Peep Show opened on March 16th, 1966 in the New York Castellani Gallery and it consisted of a mirror-lined hexagonal room. The ceiling was embedded with small red, white, blue and green bulbs, flashing on and off in sequence. Viewers looked into the room through a peep hole. During the opening, music by the Beatles was played, and Kusama distributed ‘Love Forever’ buttons to visitors; its actual title was Love Forever Show. It combined ideas of mechanization, repetition, obsession, compulsion, dizziness and unrealizable, interminable love, Kusama wrote in a promotional brochure: ‘I also called it my ‘Peep Show’ because spectators could see what was inside the room but never touch it.’ 8 Kusama intended to do something similar for 'ZERO on Sea'. The file in Vogel’s archive contains the drawing of a floor plan plus a section of the peep show, two pages of calculations, four photographs of the control engine, one photo and two contact sheets of the Peep Show itself and several letters, one of which contains a sketch.9 This shows a hexagonal cylinder with a radius of 56 inches, with two peep holes and mirrors for walls and floor. In February 1966 Kusama received a letter from Orez, courtesy Naviglio Gallery in Milan, wishing her every success with her exhibition there and urging her to come and visit The Pier ‘as soon as possible’. She was very welcome and would be the guest of the gallery.10 This is followed by another one less than a week later, telling her the show would now open on April 15th. Building-up preparations for The Pier projects were scheduled to last no more than a fortnight, and Kusama was requested to tell the gallery how much time she thought she needed for hers. For each working day the artist would receive fifty guilders, we now learn; travel costs would be paid in advance, The Pier would be her host, hotel accommodations and meals would all be provided for.11 From New York, Kusama reported about her progress on the preparation for the Castellani Gallery Peep Show. She goes on to describe the Peep Show that she planned for The Pier: ‘After I did this floor show now I am making ceiling show with electric lights and music as I explained in the sketch I sent to you. The mirrors on the wall wil be spaced slightly apart to allow heat to escape from the hexagon and to allow people to peep into the room. I am going to call this the ‘Peep Show’ because people will look from the outside into the space where the lights will be reflected in the mirrors. After the people have peeped into the space they can come into the room - 32
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attracted the artists: the surrounding sea, the sky and the beach. During the summer of 1965, from all over the world, designs came pouring into the letter box of Javastraat 17, The Hague, the address of Orez International Gallery. For publicity’s sake, Henk Peeters mounted a series of photomontages; he simply cut out pictures from the Nul 1965 Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum catalogue and glued those onto photo’s of The Pier. The results, however enticing, therefore do not necessarily represent the actual designs the artists eventually submitted. In the late summer of 1965 it became clear that the original starting date of 'ZERO on Sea' on 25 September was no longer feasible. The project was postponed until 15th April 1966.
Yayoi Kusama’s plans The preparations for 'ZERO on Sea' can be followed closely by means of some documents from Albert Vogel’s archive, concerning the plans of Yayoi Kusama. The first time Kusama heard of The Pier project must have been in a letter from Leo Verboon, dated July 2d, 1965. International Gallery Orez was Kusama’s agent for Europe at the time. ‘Yayoi Kusama 404 East 14th. street NEW YORK CITY N.Y. 1009 U.S.A. July 2, 1965 Dear Yayoi, (…) Towards the end of September, on The Pier of Scheveningen there is going to be a huge ZERO/Nul manifestation. This will be something fantastic. We are therefore also doing our best to get you included in the show. (…) Friendly greetings from us all International gallery Orez (L.J. Verboon)’6
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Armando, Jan Henderikse, Henk Peeters and Jan Schoonhoven (‘nul’ being Dutch for ‘ZERO’). It seemed only natural that Peeters should develop his ideas with his gallery. In the spring of 1965, the plan for ‘ZERO on Sea’ was born. ‘ZERO on Sea’ was to be the ultimate celebration of the new and revolutionary approach of art of the international generation of avant garde artists of the 1960’s. It was intended to last for three weeks. Participating artists included included Yayoi Kusama and George Rickey from New York, Hans Haacke, Heinz Mack, Otto Piene and Günther Uecker from Germany, Jiro Yoshihara and his Tokyo Gutai colleagues, Pol Bury and Walter Leblanc from Belgium, Arman from France, Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Nanda Vigo and Lucio Fontana from Italy, Jesús Rafael Soto from Venezuela and the Dutch Nul group.3 Around 1960, point ZERO in art had been reached by eliminating all traditional artistic tools and concepts and in this way, issue a blank page on which to start afresh with a new kind of art that would express the contemporary world. This gave the artists unlimited freedom to explore everything around them as potential material for their work, in one seemingly endless experiment. The excitement of this novel approach must have been tremendous and in retrospect, certainly sounds enviable. It was, however, also inevitable that the results of this expansion could no longer be contained within the museum space. Much ZERO art felt ‘captive’ within museum walls. On Scheveningen pier, out in the open, the elements, art and exhibition space would merge into one giant, anonymous Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. It was a challenge, worthy of the ZERO credo.
The venue According to some, Scheveningen Pier itself was already a typical ZERO structure.4 The previous Art Nouveau fin de siecle promenade pier had burnt down in the Second World War and the ‘new’ Scheveningen pier, a creation by modernist Rotterdam architects Maaskant, Dijk and Apon, had opened to the public in 1961. Four years later, the new pier covered 12.000 m2 and could house 6000 people. It consisted of an about 400 m long, ascending promenade bridge, built on concrete stilts into the sea, and four ‘islands’: a ‘sun island’ where people could sun bathe and have lunch, an ‘underwater wonderland’ island; a ‘tower island’, so called because of a tall watch tower and finally, an island with attractions for children.5 The choice of the venue For 'ZERO on Sea' was more or less coincidental. It wasn’t so much The Pier as its surroundings that - 34
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1965-1966: ‘ZERO on Sea’ by Caroline de Westenholz
On 25 September 2015 it is exactly fifty years ago that a visionary international project called ‘ZERO on Sea’ was meant to launch on Scheveningen pier.1 Scheveningen is the sea side resort of the Dutch city of The Hague and The Pier is a modernist construction stretching deep into the North sea. ‘ZERO on Sea’ was the brain child of Henk Peeters and his fellow German ZERO artists. On a walk along the Scheveningen sea shore after the opening of the first Amsterdam NUL 62 exhibition, they developed ‘wild plans about what one could do with that sea.’2 In 1965, they were given a chance to elaborate on those plans. The owner of The Pier, Reinder Zwolsman and his Exploitatie Maatschappij Scheveningen, needed some publicity. He agreed to finance the event and Orez International Gallery would organise it. Orez was an avant-garde gallery that specialized in the latest trends in the arts. Its name was a reversal of the word ‘ZERO’ and it was run by Albert Vogel and Leo Verboon. Orez represented the Dutch Nul group, consisting of - 35
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‘ZERO on Sea’ Contributor: Caroline de Westenholz We would like to thank the ZERO foundation, Mattijs Visser, for sharing the photomontages and sketches from ‘ZERO on Sea’. All copyrights reserved to their respective owners. Photo page: - 18 + - 26 Archiv Henk Peeters / ZERO foundation Photo page: - 15 + - 26 Familiearchief Anthing Vogel / Haags Gemeentearchief, Den Haag
1965