Pecha Kucha Night – The Hague Edition

One gap in an international festival’s programming, one room, one bar, 14 speakers, 280 slides and tons of energy. We had fun last Saturday. Now let’s look back at our one year anniversary edition of Pecha Kucha Den Haag, at TodaysArt 2010.

When we first heard TodaysArt would give us the opportunity to host our fifth edition at their 2010 edition and we would be able to approach speakers through them, we immediately broke out in enthusiasm over the international character we could give the one year edition of our beloved PKDH. After four editions at Pip, we felt it was not only time to move to a different location, but also reinvent the direction we would take with our local Pecha Kucha. And it was great, it felt fresh and the talks were more versatile than ever!

First of all, thanks to all the speakers (in order of appearance)

Willem van der Sluis

Thomas McIntosh – [The User]

Akinori Oishi

Martin Bricelj

Chris Kuhlen

Alexis O’Hara

Marc Boumeester

Adrian Woods

Ergün Erkoçu

Luka Ivanovic

Justus Bruns

Hicham Khalidi

Peter Zuiderwijk & Onno Dirker

Cornelius Harris

Once again, our “house” designers Dayna Casey and Tanja Busking did a great job on making the visual outlet of this edition a true feast for the eye. So a big thank you to them! Also, Steef and Lucy for making some delicious food and managing to get this to Filmhuis on time! Let’s not forget the lovely Anna Czyzewska for the beautiful pictures you’re looking at. See the rest of the pictures either on our Facebook or our Flickr.

Two organisations who deserve our gratitude; Filmhuis Den Haag for the location and very sleek production setup, and of course;  TodaysArt. Thank you so much for all the support we received for not only making it happen, but also have the most powerful line-up we could possibly hope for.

We had fun, we were inspired and we were intrigued by the talks. We hope you were too, thanks for all the people attending this legendary edition of PKDH! We hope to see you for our next edition, which will take place somewhere in December. Check our twitter, Facebook and this blog to stay updated on all announcements!

Martin Bricelj Baraga is a visual and media artist and cultural activist. His works, audiovisual performances and several collaborations research the relation between man and machine, social aspects of contemporary pop culture, future monumentalism and political dimensions of our mediated realities.
He is author of interactive works based on creation of new situations in public space, a term he interprets very broadly: comprising anything from actual city spaces to virtual worlds.
In his works he positions time as a key element, as his works are often time-based and processual. He aims to engage a broad audience, even masses in creation of the work. The materialization of the work -the actual object- is often only the trigger which initiates the project, which is then evolving in interaction with its users. His work is marked by a fascination with media and technology combining it with concepts of science fiction- as an author, he defines his language in relation to contemporary everyday life, politics and pop culture. In this sense all his works can be understood as social experiments, which research artistic representation and production in extraordinary contexts as well.
He has exhibited in many galleries and spaces worldwide. He is the director of Spring Festival in Ljubljana (an open air festival of electronic music and visual arts) and started artistic-curatorial initiative MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art, which is the first AiR programme in Ljubljana and a network of foreign artists, curators in the so called ‘East’.
(from www.martinbricelj.com)

[The User] is a contemporary art collective comprised of architect and installation artist Thomas McIntosh, and composer and sound artist Emmanuel Madan. The duo’s collaborative projects re-imagine relationships between technological systems, culture and human experience in striking ways.

Formed in 1997 in Montreal, [The User] has attained wide international recognition in international media arts circuits. The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers project has toured extensively on the international stage, while the ongoing Silophone project, active since 2000, transforms an abandoned grain elevator in the Port of Montreal into a musical instrument which is accessible the world over via internet and telephone. In 2008, [The User] launched the first in a series of homages to György Ligeti entitled Coincidence Engines.

The collective has been awarded numerous prizes and distinctions, including the Telefilm Canada Prize for Canadian New Media work (FCMM, Montreal, 1998), An Honourable Mention at Prix Ars electronica (Linz, 1999), an Honourable mention at Festival Interférences (CICV, Belfort, 2000), First Prize in the Performance Section of the FCMM (Montreal, 2001) and a Nomination to the Nam June Paik Prize (Kunststiftung NRW, Dortmund, 2004).

[The User] takes its name from a term employed by our technocratic society, especially in design-related fields such as engineering, architecture and software development. The term ‘user’ objectifies and reduces individuality to an abstract and generic ideal. This reduction is employed wherever abstract rational methodology is applied to situations involving real people. The precepts of mass production and the economies of scale necessitate a boiling down of the individuality of the subject, a reduction to generic anonymity and a constraining of the subject’s agency and creative possibility.

Alexis O’Hara is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Montreal whose practice exploits allegories of the human voice via electronic improvisation, video and installation. In 2003, she began an exploration of interactive documentary performance with the project Subject to Change, followed by The Sorrow Sponge, both projects involve wearable electronics and direct interaction with her audience. O’Hara won a Canada Council grant in 2002 to produce her debut album, In Abulia, and has presented her performances, recordings and installations across Europe.

Be sure to check out her website for other projects!