FREEEVERYWEDNESDAY

Volume3, Issue 43

WEEKOF 2 NOVEMBERTO 8 NOVEMBER 2006

Inside: Music,Film, Art and Events

PEACE VERSUS PEACE PAGE 4 / INUIT THROAT SINGING BINGO BONANZA PAGE 4

SMART TOILETS OF THE FUTURE PAGE 5 / CRAZY CARTOON WORLD PAGE 8

GOING, GONG AND BACK AGAIN PAGE 13 / CRAZY JAPANESE WORLD PAGE 22

Plug into our Museumnacht pull-out

ART versus NATURE

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SPR

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6 Amsterdam Weekly 2-8 November 2006

lthough Amsterdam has 28parks within the greatercity area, it’s often easy tofeel disconnected fromnature as you go about

your daily life. Even in some of the green-est parts of our city—the Vondelpark,Oosterpark, Rembrandtpark, Park Frank-endael—the plants grow on land that hasbeen cultivated for centuries. As trees arefelled on streets like Singel and—per-haps—Bilderdijkstraat in the name ofwidening roads, and as increasingly effi-cient building techniques mean thatindigenous birds lose their traditional nest-ing places in open gutters and crumblingwalls, even the smallest signs of the naturalworld are being removed from the citylandscape and pushed within the bound-aries of the parks. This has produced astrange series of cultivated nature reservesto which city-dwellers can go to experi-ence the ‘natural’ environment. Thismodern paradox of the borders, bound-aries and overlaps of nature, culture andtechnology is the subject of Natural Habi-tat, the newest exhibition at theNetherlands media arts institute Montev-ideo/Time Based Arts.

Set to launch just a few hours beforethe official beginning of Museumn8, theexhibition gathers together works frommore than 10 different artists and artgroups, from countries as varied as Russia,Iceland, the UK, France and the Nether-lands. The wide variety of works all haveone thing in common: they examinenature. But the question, of course, is howdo we define ‘nature’? Artist, scientist and

mastermind behind nextnature.net Koertvan Mensvoort explains how he beganthinking about the topic. ‘[It] started with astory about a young girl who grew up in thecity. She washed her hair regularly withpine-scented shampoo. Then one day,when she went for a walk in the woodswith her father, she said, “Daddy, thewoods smell of shampoo!”’

The Next Nature movement is basedon the idea that nature need not be some-thing that is pre-formed and static; instead,like culture, it can also be something thatdevelops and changes along with society.

Van Mensvoort continues: ‘Nowadaysthe average child recognises more logosand brands than bird or tree species. In theNetherlands, prehistoric woods are beinglaid out at locations designated by politi-cians; our image of nature is being carefullyconstructed as a recreational simulation. Istarted wondering: do we still have genuineexperiences of nature? Or are we living in apicture of it?’ These thoughts led VanMensvoort and Mieke Gerritzen to launchthe ‘Biggest Visual Power Show’ at Par-adiso last year, with various artists andother creative types giving presentations on‘culturally emerged nature’ and the increas-ingly blurred lines between nature andculture. The Next Nature movement organ-ise events, make movies and write textsexamining the topic.

Alongside a collection of Next Natureimages, the artistic team of ErwinDriessens and Maria Verstappen will pre-sent two contrasting works. Frankendaelis a collection of nine short films, each

composing a dreamy merging of pho-tographs taken in the park of the samename. Driessens and Verstappen took onephoto each week for 12 months, takingcare to place their camera in exactly thesame position each time at the variouslocations they chose around the park. Lat-er, using self-designed software, theymerged the pictures to give a slowly chang-ing view of the transformation of thelandscape throughout the year. The resultis a subtle, barely perceptible journeythrough the seasons. Just as in nature, ifyou stare closely it doesn’t seem like any-thing much is happening—but look awayto look back later and the changes areobvious and dramatic.

Driessens and Verstappen say that oneof the big problems they had with makingthe Frankendael works was that the land-scape changed so much in some of theirchosen locations that they turned out to beinappropriate for the films. ‘We started inwinter,’ Verstappen says, ‘so the trees werequite bare and the grass was brown.’ Butby the time summer came, some of theareas were so overgrown that the camerasaw nothing but green. The changes hadbeen so striking that they rendered thisreproduction of the supposedly ‘gentle’changes in nature implausible.

I make my own trip to Park Frankendael inWatergraafsmeer, along with agriculturalengineer Willem Van haecke, to see thecity’s ‘nature’ for myself. In the 18th centu-ry, this was a remote area where thewealthy built country houses and got awayfrom the hustle and bustle of town. But

that was more than 200 years ago. Today,the park mostly seems to consist of richgreen lawns, as smooth and flat as onlyreclaimed Dutch land can be. If we couldsomehow turn the sound off perhaps itwould be relaxing, but the noise of the traf-fic seems to be even louder against thepeaceful appearance of the surroundings.Over the treetops, the unmistakable shapesof the RAI and the Delta Lloyd building arevisible in the distance. On the far edge ofthe park, the Klein Dantzig volkstuinenprovide locals with a little piece of natureto call their own, as long as they follow therules: all paths must be kept clean and tidy,about 20% of the garden space must beused for ornamental plants and shrubs, therest must be kept free of weeds. Throughthe window of one of the little allotmenthouses I catch sight of a man pouring a cupof tea. Getting back to nature, city style.

On the other side of the volkstuinen we seethe Insectenkring, a series of small curvedbrick walls nestled between two largersemi-circles. It turns out that not all beesare social insects—who’d have thoughtit?—according to Van haecke; instead,many of them live alone and raise only theirown young rather than taking care of ahive. These solitary insects used to live inthe rough places on tree bark or brickwork.But trees are getting few and far between intown, and the nooks and crannies in mortarare not nearly as common as they used tobe, due to the modern building products.

When art is natureA new exhibition highlights the blurring lines

between nature, culture and technology.

BY KELLY ATKINSON

E-volver. Breeding natural images?

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2-8 November 2006 Amsterdam Weekly 7

‘There are some kinds of flowers thatare only pollinated by solitary bees, not bysocial bees,’ Van haecke tells me, ‘so whenthe solitary bees disappear from the urbanenvironment, so do some of the plants wehave as well.’ Artist Agnes van Genderendesigned the piece to serve the purpose ofartwork and environmental aid in one.

As we head back through the mainpark we approach the former stadskweker-ij, a building left over from the days theproperty was owned by Gemeente Amster-dam and used as the breeding ground forall the seedlings needed for the city’s parksand gardens.

Van haecke says that there is nothingnew about human growing and harvestingof plants. ‘People have been cultivating theearth for thousands of years. It’s hardlysomething you could call “unnatural.”’

Truly nature repurposed as culturenow, the enormous glasshouse has becomethe acclaimed high-end restaurant De Kas,with its own herb garden and vegetablesgrowing outside. The stadskwekerij hasmoved elsewhere, as we city-dwellers needthis park for ‘nature’. I can’t see any birdsapart from pigeons, but the park benchesare decorated with enormous white swanson each side.

But a different kind of kwekerij has beendeveloped by Driessens and Verstappen.The E-volver is a beeldkwekerij, or ‘image-cultivating machine’, which takesinspiration from the methods of evolution-ary biology to produce colourful,ever-changing images. ‘We did a lot of dif-ferent experiments, also with physical

algorithms and processes, and we used thecomputer to create virtual processes,’explains Verstappen. Tiny creatures on thescreen travel around interacting with thepixels, which are each pre-programmed toreact in various ways according to theirsurroundings. The viewer selects a numberof variables, such as colour and basic pat-tern, and the result is an unpredictable,uncontrollable image that is constantly andrapidly changing.

When the work is in action, it’s uncan-ny how much some of the resulting imagesresemble patterns that occur in nature.One output looks exactly like spores ofmould, growing so fast it’s as though theyare seen under time-lapse photography.Another of the images could at one pointbe mistaken for an aerial view of a moun-taintop, complete with craggy outcropsand snow caps. Yet another ‘painting’ pro-duced by the E-volver looks like a satellitephoto, showing the earth from a distance.No two illustrations produced by themachine are alike, and Verstappen saysthat many viewers have difficulty believingthat the images are computer-generatedbecause they bear so much resemblance toscenes that we might see in nature. ‘Whenthey see a print produced by the E-volver, alot of people cannot believe that it wasmade by a computer,’ she says.

I began to wonder if these images werethe future of nature in the city, butDriessens didn’t think so. ‘I think that therewill always be interaction with nature,because nature is just the world aroundus,’ he told me. ‘So, even if you’re in thecity, that’s also nature in a sense. It’s not

nature like rural places... but to be con-fronted with things you cannot reallycontrol, that’s nature.

If that is true, then many of the works atNatural Habitat are in fact ‘nature’. LikeDriessens and Verstappen, the UK duoVicky Isley and Paul Smith, collaboratingas Boredom Research, have produced acomputer-based work that in a sense isable to take on a life of its own, uncon-trolled by its creator. Their 2005 project,‘Biomes’, consists of six ‘computationalartworks’ each using a small screen thatcan be either wall or table mounted. Thescreens, only about the size of a television,provide the windows to six different virtualworlds of about a mile in circumference.This means that just a tiny part of the worldis visible at one time. Small bodies of vari-ous types, some looking like colourful fishor bugs, others more abstract, are visibleas they pass by the screen window beforedisappearing into other areas of their virtu-al environment. As with the E-volver’spixel creatures, these bodies have evolvedover time in ways that the creators couldnot have predicted.

‘When [the biomes] were firstlaunched,’ says Isley, ‘the bodies thatinhabit the space were bland andunmarked. It would have been fair to saythat all bodies were basically a single-coloured gel-like blob. Within the space ofan hour, this was no longer true as somehad developed simple lines and colouredbandings.’ As time went on, the bodiesdeveloped increasingly complex markingsbefore their evolution began to level off.

The biomes are quite addictive, andIsley reports that they often see viewerswalking away from the screens and thenchecking back to see what else might becoming into view. ‘[W]e’re keen to developworks that are rewarding to just watch andtherefore you don’t have to read a manualto understand how they work,’ she says.

Isley hopes that exhibitions like Natu-ral Habitat are not going to be the onlyway that city-dwellers will interact withnature in the future, although she admitsthat even though she lives in south-westEngland’s New Forest, she often finds her-self only viewing nature through windows.‘We do attempt to capture some of the mag-ic of [nature] but prefer to see this as anextension rather than an alternative. Itwould be a sad day indeed if our systemswere considered a city-dweller’s alterna-tive to the natural world.

At least, until that happens, we stillhave places like Park Frankendael. In ourcrowded city, it’s hardly surprising that ourversion of ‘back to nature’ is relatively con-trived. It seems that it’s enough to have alittle green space around, a home for beesand possibly even a garden hut of one’sown nearby, in what is arguably Amster-dam’s alternative to the natural world.

Natural Habitat opens 4 November, 15.00,until 16 December, Montevideo/ TimeBased Arts (Tue-Sat 13.00-18.00), Keiz-ersgracht 264, 623 7101,www.montevideo.nl

and nature is art

Frankendael. An unnatural park.?