Work and Theo Janssen

Over the last two weeks I have been freelancing at NorthernLight, which is also one of the companies I may graduate with eventually. Yesterday evening around 7pm, I finally finished the last of my drawings and rushed home (walk really fast for 30 min, get on a ferry, get on a train, switch in Den Haag CS, bike home = 1hr, 45min). The competition deadline was today, so I hope everything got turned in on time and in good order. I rewarded myself by going to some (crappy) jazz event in the Speakers with Inga and Jorn. When we got tired of being the pathway for jazz lovers, we moved ourselves to the Locus Publicus and had a La Trapp Quadrupel (on tap!).

For those who are interested, I will explain a little about what I have been doing at NorthernLight. NorthernLight is a exhibition design company (introduced to me via Inga), which designs exhibitions for mostly science museums, i.e. the Nemo. When I approached the company two weeks ago looking for a graduation project, they asked me to do some freelance work for them. They were bidding for two galleries in the new Macao Science Center, the Space and the Earth Sciences (Disaster!) Galleries, respectively. It was really amazing to witness and participate in the design and execution of the design proposal, especially the acceleration of the the project from start to finish (0-60 in 2 seconds). The project went from 3 people, to more the 30 at different sides of the globe, to done in the space of two weeks.

I spent my first two days there collecting possible relevant exhibitions to our project from a gigantic list of other science centers and museums. We also had a couple of meetings thinking about a unifying concept for the spaces regarding content and architecture of the building. I was working with only two others and the director of the company, so I felt like my ideas really contributed to the process. Suddenly, on the third day a content manager appeared and mysterious phone calls were being placed to 3D modeling companies to model the spaces. Then a couple of days later people in the office who were working on other projects suddenly started also working on the Macao project. On the last two days before the deadline, the original three became 99% of the office. I left early to catch dinner while most were still in the office working working in mysterious Word documents.

After the initial concept making meetings that could last hours, I finally received some individual work to make drawings for exhibits. We had to deliver 70% of our proposed exhibits in drawings and text. Here are some types of images I made:

The first I made by collaging models from the sketchup warehouse to set the type of scene I wanted and then I exported it into Illustrator and Photoshop. It is a picture of a rock lab.

I can't upload another example right now, so I will do it later. Anyways, now I have an appointment with them for next week to talk about a graduation project again, so I am back to where I started.

On another note, today I went to a lecture by Theo Janssen at the faculty of architecture. The room the lecture was in reminded me nostalgically of a small version of 26-100 (I had to ask Ellen to remember the name of this lecture hall. Has it been so long that I was at MIT??). His lecture was basically and extended version of all the other talks I have seen of him online. It was very inspiring though, evolutionary design which reminds me of my goal to learn more about cellular automata and generative design in general. I should start reading a New Kind of Science, which I stole from Jorn but haven't started reading yet.

Now I am busy with framing my graduation project proposal. This means way too much emailing and other boring things.


Upcoming events (in my boring life):
- Tonight! meisje's avond, invented by me and getting bigger and bigger.
- Lanna and friend visit Sat - Tues, dropping off a camera for me since my old one broke.
- Go to Monitor Sculptures curated by Linda who is going to Madrid soon (forever?).
- Christmas dinner/Naomi visits the following Sat for a week (!!!).

long weekend

Every day this weekend has been excruciatingly long, though fun. I wonder if I will feel rested enough to be alive next week.

Daniel: the idea of a whole week of work and study is so depressing after drinking/playing away your whole weekend

Friday, directly after an afternoon of boatweek presentations, I hopped on the train to Amsterdam. The event was the opening of Anouk van Dijk's new studio, Tokoyo Studio's or something. I was there because Jorn was helping one of the dancers compose a live piece for the event. They had ordered green curry for us, which was nice because I went into a feeding frenzy before eating lots of hors d'oeuvres. The whole audience was mostly well dressed old people, dancers, and one or two random sound and lights guys. I felt pretty out of place, but I continued eating and looking like I understood Dutch. I watched a couple of dance performances, but the highlight of the evening was definitely the piece that Jorn had worked on with the one dancer.

To tell the truth, I didn't really understand the whole dance but I liked it. The piece started with the girl huddled in a corner wearing nothing but her underwear. The music was kind of ambient electronic sounds fitting in with the warehouse setting. Eventually she got up and started dancing/thrashing around. The nudity was surprisingly not that distracting and actually added to the dance somehow. The word "nu" (now) was interwoven into the music here and there reaching a climax, while the girl progressively fell on the ground and got dustier and dustier. At the very end she moved to a corner of the room, prompting the audience to also move from their original space. Taking off her underwear, she moved to stand in front of a projecter with an image of her nude self on her belly. On the belly of the projected self, there was also a smaller version of herself, dancing the previous dance. I don't know what it all meant.. maybe I'll try to decipher it later.

After the dance, we drove to Rotterdam picking up Kakee on the way to Ivo's house warming in a record time of 35 min. I was only there shortly because I was so tired, but his house is awesome. It's right in the middle of Schouwburgplein.

Saturday noonish, I started on my way back to Amsterdam to see Jorn play in the Melkweg as part of the band outfit for singer/songwriter (hahahha.. hate that term) Emil. On the way there, I managed to miss both the people I was trying to meet at two separate train stations, but we met up at central station so it didn't matter. Fuck the Writer won second prize in the Grote Prijs van Nederland. Everyone was boohoo sad. It was also conveniently raining to complete the depressing scene.

Having lost the others Pieter, Gaspard, Jorn, and I tramped around in the rain looking for the Koe. When we got there, there was a lot more waiting involved, but my rack of lamb was delicious. Afterwards, we drank some beer so we wouldn't feel like total losers going home so early. We even managed to just catch the 20:10 train back to Delft. Getting home from Amsterdam was, as always, an ordeal, but my spirits were high after watching Breakfast Club again.

On an up side, Lanna and her friend Erika are visiting me next weekend.