ART at PICNIC

Dre Wapenaar – Tent village
Location: PICNIC club

Dre Wapenaar doesn't understand how one moment you can be neighbors, and the next, enemies at war. He doesn't understand how people can talk about the beauty of vulnerability, yet never allow themselves to be truly exposed. He doesn't understand, and so ... Dre Wapenaar makes tents.
"Tents are a result of my quest to find out how groups of people and individual persons relate. Tents are, with their universal language, an excellent means to understand at least something of the chemistry between people. No matter what culture or background you're coming from, a tent is a common universal home.’

Natwerk – Mobile artworks
Location : All Areas

Designers of furniture and party art and mobile works. Their playful attitude towards design is shown on picnic through several works: their ‘light heart’ in the PICNIC Club, their re-vamped SRV (old-style fresh food door-to-door) truck and their tarsh truck that is transformed into a podium for live bands.

Glimp.se – Interactive audiovisual arts
Location: PICNIC club

Glimpse is an art collective, formed by four artists/photographers: Malou Bergman, Alvaro Campo, Nadja Ekman and Mattias Larson. At PICNIC, do not forget the visit the GLIMPSE mobile digital studio. The studio is equipped with a mixture of sculptural and inspiring outfits and sound system with the purpose to inspire creativity. The aim is to create a space for experiences where the cameras function as catalysts. The interaction between participants (visitors and artists) in this environment becomes a play with appearance and identity and the resulting images after being processed in different ways are arranged in a growing installation and will later be collected in a book.

Eboman – PICNIC artist in residence
Location: On PICNIC Eboman has his own little studio in Picnic club

Dutch video artist Eboman develops and presents audiovisual interactive sample compositions. His energetic and pioneering methods of using audiovisual technology on stage have taken him all over the world for numerous performances. Eboman’s innovative creations are also expressed through all kinds of special events.
From 27 August to 27 September, the audience has had the chance to work alongside Eboman on video sample compositions for the ¡Viva la Creación! event at PICNIC on 27 September. Anyone could upload movies so that Eboman can remix this material with a unique and highly advanced video sampler.

Atelier van Lieshout - Heads
Location: PICNIC club

Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) is a multidisciplinary company that operates internationally in the field of contemporary art, design and architecture. AVL was founded in 1995 by Joep van Lieshout. The name Atelier Van Lieshout emphasises the fact that the works of art do not stem solely from the creative brain of Joep van Lieshout, but are produced by a creative team. At PICNIC one of the PICNIC Pavillions is formed by the Atelier van Lieshout Heads installation.

Exilhauser architects - Zusatsraum
Location: PICNIC club

The "Zusatzraum" system of the Exilhauser architects, presented at the latest Biennale of Contemporary Art at Anghien-les Bains, originated within the sphere of a project which the group directed toward the search for an architecture of functionality and beautiful forms, able to respect existing urban contexts and realizable at limited costs.
This is a mobile element (its name literally means "extra room") which can be added to any existing building or positioned in any space, so as to define interiors having different functions. A small multi-functional space, built of simple, economical materials (glass and fabric), adaptable to different situations, including those of information stand for particular events, to be positioned according to the various requisites of the urban contexts, in a sort of "office anywhere".

Annemieke Fanoy & Nanda Runge – Atelier Trailer
Location: Conference room

Dutch visual artists Fanoy and Runge both are interested in the home as a haven from the world. Runge’s usual medium is paper and ink, Fanoy is a textile artist who works with threads and wool. Together they built a wooden caravan

Baldrick Buckle – Pieces
Location: Conference room

Baldrick Buckle is an artist currently based in New York. Often socially or politically motivated his sculpture and instillation work accent his ironic view on current social climates, hegemonic culture systems and globalization.
‘Pieces’ is a tribute to the changing times, the 24 hour working day and a shrinking, technologically compelled world.

Studio Roosegaarde – Duin / Dune 4.0 / 4.1
Location: Conference room entrance

Studio Roosegaarde is the home of artist Daan Roosegaarde which explores and materializes projects in art and technology. Studio Roosegaarde functions as an artistic laboratory in which, for each project, alliances are made with whizzkids, material manufacturers and cultural foundations.
Studio Roosegaarde currently develops a series of interactive artworks such as smart surface '4D-Pixel' and interactive landscape 'Dune 4.1'. It continuously researches and upgrades its projects for public space and architecture.

Theodore Watson - Daisies
Location: PICNIC club

Theodore Watson is an interactive artist and designer living in Amsterdam. Theodore has shown his work at Ars Electronica, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, the Dumbo Video Art festival, Deitch Projects, Resfest and at the ICHIM 05 conference in Paris.
Daisies die under your feet if you walk over them. Only to quickly grow back a few seconds later.
www.muonics.net

Maarten Bennis, Wim van Eck, Willem van Vliet - The Big Mean Steam Machine
Location: PICNIC club

The Big Mean Steam Machine is an installation that combines old and new technology. By sending sms-messages, the machine will display the message by filling a grid of a thousand glass bottles with a liquid. The writing of the message goes very slow and makes lot of noise.

Martin Butler - The girlfriend experience
Location: PICNIC club

Martin Butler presents four human avatars to play with. Log in at home with your character of choice. Direct the avatar, explore the space and challenge him or her. The avatars can also be observed live in their Analog Villa in the PICNIC Club.
The rampant growth of online avatar communities such as Second Life and World of Warcraft has enabled the creation of a personal online social and economic existence. Simultaneously this triggers inherent questions about this existence, as it questions what the consequences will be for first life, or reality. In The Girlfriend Experience you will have to get to know each other first. Player and avatar explore what they can do for each other and how far the avatar wants to go to execute specific desires.

NEPCO (Lennart Vader en Pinky Keijser)
Location: All areas

Amsterdam artists NEPCO specialise in the development of original characters used for tv, commercial, movie, and performance art. They are famous for creating characters inspired on animal and plant life. But anything can be translated into a character: a scissor, a traffic light, a coffee table or even a q-tip.

Aram Bartholl - Speech Bubble
Location: unexpected places where lots of people gather

Aram Bartholl is an artist in Berlin, with his art related to Web, Net and physical objects. Speech Bubble is a performance which thematizes the very common text based communication form chat in online computer games like World of Warcarft or Second Life. To have a "conversation" via the keyboard has become a communication standard during the development of the internet.
Aram is using the Shoutbox of Picnic during his perfomance. So beware of what you are writing...

Jonathan Harris – We Feel Fine
Location: PICNIC club

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved and presented in several formats.

Thecla Schiphorst - Soft(n)hive
Location: PICNIC club

Thecla Schiphorst lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is a computer media artist, computer systems designer, choreographer, and dancer. Situated in a café or club, this first stage prototype of move.me uses the fabric of urban space, urban environment, and social interaction as a site for re-mixing its own movement, via a specially designed touch surface embedded within the surface of a cushion.

Theo Jansen - Strandbeest
Location: unexpected

Since about ten years Dutch artist Theo Jansen is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.