I started a new blog on Crowdfunding called artistandaudience.net.
Crowdfunding is not only a new form of collective cooperation by people who pool their money together to support cultural projects - in my opinion it’s also a crucial shift in the relationship of artist & their audiences in general.

As I am planning to finance my next short film via crowdfunding I am sharing my questions, thoughts & experiences on the subject, visit the blog to get to know more!

The internet is the dominant cultural memory of our time. Video hosting web sites like YouTube are cumulate enormous archives of moving images (in YouTube’s case 20 hours of footage are uploa-ded every minute), nourishing the old story of the information overlaod. But indeed, structuring the-se archives is an important question, and besides technical developments in search algorhythms and semantics, the personal recommendation has become one of the most important organisation prin-ciples of web. Blogs, Playlists, Channels, Links and Likes have become important entry points, and as the archives of visual culture have become inexhaustible, access is no longer the paradigm but selection.

At this point the curator steps in and is confrontated with the new medium challeging his profession. Not only she herself has to find ways to discover the gems in this ocean of videos, but there are so-me demanding questions she has to deal with. First of all there are no proper terms for what forms of online video exist. On the internet the borders blur between commercial and private content, ama-teur and professional and there are no rules how to define their aesthetic qualities. So while the big-gest question for the curator is how and what to choose for exhibiting it, the medium also bears new questions of where to exhibit (physical or virtual spaces) and questions of authorship and copyright. Moreover curators are experimenting with how to exhibit works online and are crossing the edge to artistic expression when they arrange footage in video sculptures (e.g. the exhibition „3 Hours in 1 Second“ at http://grid.curatingyoutube.net/show/index.html).

The project Curating the Web contributes to the discourse of how web video can be categorized and conceptualized from curational points of view.

I’ll start off the project with a lecture&screening at Cluj, Romania, and as a seminar/exhibition at University of Siegen.

I’m invited to speak at the cinema Lumière in Maastricht on May 15th. The event is called Digitally Unreel and presents filmmakers, who incorporate digital effects in their work. I will show my short film Palindrome and some other works in progress. I will speak about how technology influences my work, but will also present some more general ideas on the the interplay of technology and art.

About:
“Film lovers define key moments in their lives by the movies that have accompanied them, but what is often lost in the ether is the technology that punctuates their emotional effectiveness and makes them memorable. It is for that reason that we decided to highlight the technological side of film making in discussing the digitization of film, but steer clear from getting bogged down in technologically determined rhetoric, we simply wish to showcase great film making techniques and leave the repercussions, knowing now how the digital was involved in the process, up to you, the audience, to determine.”

Brussels based ARGOS centre for Media and Art organized a conference on VIDEO VORTEX: Responses to YouTube. I was invited and held a talk on “The Artist Moving through the Web - new forms of Artists’ production and distribution on the Internet.”

It was a very inspiring conference!
Thanks to Stoffel, Maria, Adre, Bram and the whole team at ARGOS for the wonderful weekend!

“Over the past years the moving image has claimed an increasingly prominent place on the internet. Thanks to a wide range of technologies and web applications it has become possible, not only to record and distribute video, but to edit and remix it on-line as well. With this world of possibilities within reach of a multitude of social actors, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has arrived at a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and activists react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What is the impact of the availability of massive on-line images and sound databases on aesthetics and narrativity? How is Cinema, as an art form and experience, influenced by the development of widely spreading internet practices? What does YouTube tell us about the state of art in visual culture? And how does the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?”

Speakers are JOHAN GRIMONPREZ, PETER HORVATH, LEV MANOVICH, ANA KRONSCHNABL & TOMAS RAWLINGS, ADRIAN MILES, SIMON RUSCHMEYER, KEITH SANBORN, PETER WESTENBERG.

I was invited to the OFFF Festival for Post Digital Creation Culture 2006 in Barcelona, Spain, to show my short Film Palindrome in their 6th annual Competition. OFFF is an amzing festival with loads of great speakers, a very nice venue (in a very nice city) and a great atmosphere. This year it was also hold in Ney York and in 2008 the festival is moving to Lisboa.

Thanks to Fred for hosting me and to Sergi for taking care while the festival.

My short film Cave of Memories was chosen for the Berlinale Talent Campus 2005.

The Campus is a workshop for 500 aspiring filmmakers from all over the world, which takes place during the Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin. The Campus was an amazing experience, 5 days of talks, discussions and screenings. Moreover, it’s is an extraordinary oppurtunity to meet other filmmakers and get in touch with the industry.

My foot on the red carpet :-)