Leonardo

Kid Friendly, Open SourceAuthor(s): Linda WallaceSource: Leonardo, Vol. 37, No. 5 (2004), pp. 362-363Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1577670 .

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Kid Friendly, Open Source

A dispatch on the arts, technologies and cultures in the metropolitan community served by the Amsterdam airport.

by Linda Wallace, Artist

Amsterdam. It is very small, really- just a village. The other day, push- ing the baby stroller, I walked clear across it. The central area is circu- lar, or semi-circular, at least. Canals such as the Prinsengracht and Keizergracht are also semi-circular and form a kind of readable out- line for the city's heart. Tourists throng the narrow streets, holding maps aloft as they puzzle over direc- tions, half-knowing that they liter- ally have been walking in circles.

It is raining now. Outside my window voices intone in Turkish. Forty percent of people living in the five major Dutch cities are im-

migrants, and I have just joined that statistic. My husband is Dutch, and at birth our son became Dutch, even though he was born in Sydney, Australia. I will have to undergo

interrogation at the blank and inhospitable office of the Nether- lands Foreign Police.

It has been over two months since we arrived with our two-year- old, surviving the 25-hour flight from Australia. Even though I am familiar with the city, having been here many times, there is some-

thing completely different between

arriving and knowing you are stay- ing for good and being a visitor, a tourist with a warm home else- where. The miserable weather does not help.

In Australia I never followed weather reports. I watched with incomprehension as my husband

paid rapt attention to the mainly always sunny predictions. Here, however, the weather people oc-

cupy a special place in everyone's hearts. Do they have good news? Will there be sun, and the possibil- ity of joyous afternoons on the

city's terraces? One hopes and

prays along with the rest of the country. It matters also because the dominant form of transport in Amsterdam is the bike, and biking in the rain is no fun. Biking in gen- eral, however, is very pleasurable. The bikes flow, passing and cross-

ing each other with ease. I have been seeing the city

through our child's eyes. Amster- dam is a great place for kids. There are urban farms dotted all over the

place, with chickens, goats, rabbits and cows. And of course you could not have a decent Dutch farm with- out pigs. Artis, Amsterdam's zoo, is home to thousands of exotic crea- tures. There are also stacks of novel

play areas everywhere. Given a bit of spare space the Amsterdammers will site a kid-friendly artwork there, so one is constantly coming across fun things to climb on and

explore. The community sandpit also has proved a hit.

Netherlands Media Art Institute

(Montevideo/Time Based Arts, <montevideo.nl>) invited me to be

an artist-in-residence for a few months, beginning in June. They are a distribution service, a produc- tion center, a gallery and also now have a media lab, all in one large building in the center of town. The

residency enables artists to work with programmers and other spe- cialists to realize complex projects. I had established a relationship with this organization over the last few years as we co-curated a large new media show of Australian work for March 2001, and they distribute

my own video work.

My residency project is to stream large high-resolution video files over what is called the

gigaport network. This connects a number of cultural and academic institutions from Rotterdam to Amsterdam. The files will stream/multicast from a database server and then be backprojected onto city windows at night. I also will be sending/testing the files as multicast streams to the Australian National University in Canberra, and other institutions that might like to come on board. Where pos- sible we will be using open-source code.

I realize that I am already in the

process of learning a new language, a visual language. The light is dif-

ferent, the forms, the colors. The use of space interests me. There is a

string of new buildings along the southbound train line that will be the focus of the new work. Corpo- rate headquarters, clean lines, empty on weekends save for the car traffic in and out of a huge IKEA

complex. These buildings are right next to the Bijlmer, a modernist

experiment in high-rise, high- density living for migrants and workers that went wrong and is now under reconstruction. This new work <machinehunger.com.au/ art.html> is an experiment with what I have called "architectural media space." It is an interface from the network to the city, and

362 LEONARDO, Vol. 37, No. 5, pp. 362-363, 2004 ? 2004 ISAST

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as such there will be involvement with architects and urban theorists.

The city extends, itself a node in a much larger network. Recently I traveled by train to attend two events in Rotterdam.

The first was a seminar featuring artists and theorists dealing with open-source software. British artist Graham Harwood showed his proj- ect that uses the Gimp, the software often thought of as an open-source Adobe Photoshop. It is, however, not Photoshop, and I think that was one of the big lessons of the day: Do not approach these open-source tools as if they were equivalents of commercial tools; they do not do the same things at all, but instead have an altogether different range of possibilities. What Harwood is doing with the Gimp is astonishing <www.scotoma.org/notes/index.cgi ?GimpImage>.

The second Rotterdam event was at the Witte de With center for contemporary art <www.wdw.nl>, currently under the directorship of Catherine David (who curated the 1997 Documenta). This was a panel discussion with incredible speak- ers-a "real space" extension of the Under Fire e-mail list, a year-long project of New York artistJordon Crandall that explores the organi-

zation and representation of con- temporary armed conflict.

As to the rest of the cultural land- scape, well, I went to my first "art fair" the other day and that was hilarious. One candid gallery owner confided to me that only avant-garde galleries show video/network projects and that of all the participants in the fair, such galleries represented less than 5%, which clarifies where I, and per- haps you, dear reader, are standing, in these global netherlands.

-Linda Wallace Linda Wallace can be contacted at 101A Reinwardstraat 1093 HD Amsterdam, The Netherlands Web: < machinehunger com.au>. E-mail: <linda @machinehunger. com. au>.

Compilation of images from works by Linda Wallace. Top to bottom: Amster- dam market scene (2004); video still from eurovision (2001); video still from lovehotel (2000); video still from eurovision (2001); video still from entanglement (2004). (? Linda Wallace)

If you are interested in writing an "After Midnight" column on your vir- tual or physical city, send a 100-word summary of the basic idea to Greg Neimeyer at < leo@mitpress. mit. edu >.

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