Week 243

Look­ing at my log for last week it’s clear a lot has been going on; work con­tin­ued on Stand­ing (code­name AJI) and we (main­ly Alper) did some sup­port work on Beestenbende.

In the mean­time we are start­ing up new projects; one is code­named KEGANI, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between us and Sub­alekha who resides in NYC. We will be seek­ing fund­ing for KEGANI, which is shap­ing up to be a (series of) games explor­ing con­tem­po­rary glob­al war­fare. It’s grim but impor­tant sub­ject mat­ter. We’ve pro­gressed from exchang­ing ideas to doing paper pro­to­types in par­al­lel and dis­cussing them over Google Hang­out. I’ve strug­gled to find the right approach, but it appears stick­ing to earnest­ness and play­ful­ness is helpful.

Final­ly, on the new projects front, we’re talk­ing with peo­ple in pro­fes­sion­al sports which is an inter­sec­tion of games and cul­ture that has long fas­ci­nat­ed us.

In between we squeezed var­i­ous vis­its and con­ver­sa­tions. I was inter­viewed by Mare, the Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty week­ly paper, for a lec­ture I’ll be giv­ing there in two weeks. We dis­cussed plans for a Stand­ing-relat­ed event at Media­mat­ic lat­er this year with Dirk Vis.

I par­tic­i­pat­ed in an event organ­ised by REZONE in which they looked back on their play­ful inter­ven­tions project and start­ed up dis­cus­sions around pos­si­ble new projects, includ­ing “solv­ing” the vacan­cy prob­lem plagu­ing real-estate, for which Hei­j­mans has sug­gest­ed a rather intrigu­ing approach inspired by land consolidation.

Alper had a very Apple week with both a vis­it the local genius bar and to the local Cocoa­Heads. Mean­while, I end­ed the week with a vis­it to Joris Wei­j­dom at MAPLAB, a lab set up by the Utrecht School of the Arts to enable research into, well, Media and Per­for­mance. They have a pret­ty sweet set­up for doing all kinds of exper­i­ments in which image, sound and space converge.