Thomas voor ‘t Hekke and I, working under our new name FRONT404, made an interactive video installation based on railway lost and found departments. We wanted to recreate the feeling of mystery and adventure of the famous old train voyages, like the Orient Express. Using a vintage railway lantern visitors illuminate a lost and found cabinet, searching through the objects within. When discovered these forgotten objects tell stories of their past lives.
The video below shows the installation at Rocket Cinema Festival. Because of the locations of the festival, including the railway museum in Utrecht and the First Class Grand-Café in Amsterdam Central Station, our installation fit in very well with the general atmosphere of Rocket Cinema.
Wisse Stolk asked me to help him with a project he was doing with Cantiamo Amersfoort. He made visuals to accompany their performance of Händel’s “Israel in Egypt” and he needed a way to control the live playback of the visuals using four projectors at the same time. After talking the project through I made a program in Max/MSP/Jitter so he could control up to 26 movies using keyboard commands to start/stop/fade-out et cetera.
On the 29th of October they had an awesome performance with a choir, an orchestra and live visuals controlled by Wisse.
This is the propaganda poster I made to draw more attention to my panoptICONS project. “Veilig onder moeders vleugels” means “safe under mother’s wings”. The version on the left was made specifically to be posted in Utrecht, where the panoptICONS project first began. That version has some generically official sounding text about surveillance being for our own good and that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. When we started to place camerabirds in other cities, like Amsterdam, the Hague and Brussels, I also made a more general version of the poster, which is the poster on the right.
I sell A3 size prints of both versions of the poster for €15 + shipping. Just email me at bas@front404.com and we can work something out.
Thomas and I were invited (as Helden) to give a talk about our Chemistree project and our use of sensors for Ignite #3 Amsterdam at Mediamatic. There were lots of interesting speakers and giving our own talk was a lot of fun!
Wednesday 13 october I will be speaking at the PechaKucha night in Amsterdam, together with Thomas voor ‘t Hekke. We’ll give a short presentation about the projects we’ve done together as Helden. There will be 11 other speakers, drinks and music, so it should be pretty cool!
I decided to change my old website ekunnn.nl to the somewhat more logical basvanoerle.com, which also gave me the much needed chance to completely redesign the look and backend of the site. Hopefully you agree that it doesn’t look as bad as it did before.
panoptICONS addresses the fact that we are constantly being watched by surveillance cameras in city centres. The surveillance camera seems to have become a real pest that feeds on our privacy. To represent this, camera birds – city birds with cameras instead of heads – were placed throughout the city centre of Utrecht where they feed on the presence of people. In addition, a camera bird in captivity was displayed to show the feeding process and to make the everyday breach of our privacy more personal and tangible.
Made together with Thomas voor ‘t Hekke as our graduation project at Utrecht school of the arts. Also see the panoptICONS website.
Update: Damn, I saw someone wearing a t-shirt with this same joke on it a while ago, so I’m not the only one to think of it. Well, at least I like my version of monkey-Che better than his, hehe.
I made this t-shirt featuring my own face (looking exceptionally heroic) and the words “a hero” in Dutch, after seeing another person wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. That got me thinking: who’s face could I put on a t-shirt that I wouldn’t feel like a hypocrite wearing? Well, the obvious answer was my own face, of course! The one person I completely agree with (most of the time anyway)!
This is an interactive installation Thomas voor ‘t Hekke, Remco Bos, Jan Jonk, Tim Terpstra and I made for the Dutch non-profit company Globalicious. I built all the electronics and software for this project.
The Chemistree plays sad music, but when you hug it the music starts getting happier and the tree starts waving its branches around in a happy dance. It also starts opening its flowers. The more people hug it, the happier it gets.
We presented it at two Dutch festivals, Indian Summer Festival and Butter Pieper Festival. At the Butter pieper festival there were a lot of parents with children, so the chemistree had a constant clump of happy, squealing children around it, which was a lot of fun to see.
This is a proof of concept I made as a school assignment with Kars Kremers and Eefke Burg for a Dutch power company, in connection with their participation in the World Solar Challenge. When visitors put effort into the installation by waving their arms and moving about, they create a better, greener world. The visuals were made by Kars, while I worked on the technical aspects of the installation.
I made this t-shirt for a contest on the website somethingawful. The three designs with the most votes got printed and were sold through a webstore. I finished third and my t-shirt was sold to a bunch of people I’ve never met across the world, which I thought was pretty awesome.
This is a school project I did with Martin Overmars, Jeroen van Loon and Laura Wagenaars. We had an assignment in which we had to create an interactive narrative featuring a dystopic version of the city of Rotterdam. After doing research we decided to focus on the amazing amount of surveillance cameras in Rotterdam. I did most of the video editing in this project.
This is a video installation I made together with Jessica Dreu and Sarah Kuipers. We projected windows onto toilet doors. People having to go to the toilet where simultaneously put into the role of voyeur and uh…. voyee.
