Last Saturday I made it out to the penultimate day of the exhibition of the Selim Varol Collection in the me collectors room here in Berlin. I’m glad I did. This was one of the most complete and stunning collections of contemporary toys and subversive art on display anywhere.

Most of the fun is in the sheer completionism of certain walls and cabinets. Acquiring everything past the point of simple fun. Add to that trying to recognize what everything is about, what the references and twists in the various works are.

What adds to the power of a well done private collection such as this one is its lack of fear. It doesn’t need to be backed up artistically, there’s no curator hedging their bets or trying to cultivate relations, it isn’t afraid not to be taken for full and in short: it isn’t uptight (modern art take note).

I didn’t make it out to dConstruct which I’m a bit torn about. I’ve been to the conference some three times and htis year other priorities trumped it and going to conferences in general. But the program this year was even more stellar than regular years. Seeing either Ben Hammersley, Tom Armitage or James Burke (!) present would be worth the ticket price alone without exaggerating a lot.

When the theme ‘Playing with the Future’ was announced I was already thinking that Paul Virilio should feature in it. Can somebody confirm to me whether he has been referenced at all? Too often designers put their belief wholesale into the notion of progress and a heavy-weight counterpoint to that thinking would be more or less essential.

And best of all was hearing from a distance about Tom Armitage’s presentation which seemed to be really good and focuses on the same things we do in our practice: play and making.

You guys all just missed out. @infovore killed it. Trust in Play. playing is making

— James Governor (@monkchips) September 7, 2012

As fellow game makers that very notion is at the heart of many of the things we do and it is a talk I will definitely be catching on the conference recordings which are already online.

Jan Chipchase’s ‘Red Mat’ design experiment is brilliant by itself, but is goes much further than being just a design experiment.

The opening of the essay that sets the contextual framework for the project is for me the most interesting part:

By now there are very few people left on the planet that aren’t in some way impacted by globalisation – as producers and consumers – those few who make a decision to opt-out must do so consciously. Yet our touch points to this interconnected system that churns out ever more, ever faster inherently limits our understanding of the whole. We can talk about globalisation, buy into it, buy from it, demonstrate against it, but for most of us its scale and complexity defies comprehension. Part of the machine is dedicated to designing, prototyping, testing and pushing to market connected products and services that know more about us, than we ever will about them.

It’s as if we were standing on the top of a hill and are now running at full pelt into the fog below – not quite knowing what lies ahead, letting gravity and momentum carry us, and doing our best to avoid the silhouettes of objects as they loom into view, chased by the fear of stopping.

We are living in an increasingly interconnected, and increasingly automated world. The consequences of our actions may be road-mapped, extrapolated, scenarioed, but ultimately, at best it is smart guesswork.

Chipchase posits products and services as withdrawn objects that are unknowable to us by their scale and complexity but both of those are just symptoms of the unknowability of objects in general. This is in line with most of the current thinking on objects in speculative realism.

For us designers, makers the question then is: given such a bleak view of knowability in the world at large and of objects in particular, what are successful strategies for creating these products and services. More succinctly: How do we design in the face of defeat?

The writing about the new aesthetic that has reached a tipping point in the last week is one way of dealing with —or at least cataloging— the algorithmic complexity in the world around us, but as Chipchase’s welcome mat shows, all objects carry with them so much weight that even the simplest ones become unfathomably complex.

I’m mulling over how to proceed. One preliminary idea: we should do away with all strategic design and business theory and just make things. But then again, we were already doing that.

The year has started nicely and the event line-up is already brimful.

Thursday a week ago saw the iBestuur Congress in the Netherlands where the winners of the Apps voor Nederland competition were announced. I’m happy to see this last app competition to a succesful end and I look forward to what more we can bring. See a write-up of them over at the Hack de Overheid site.

Last weekend I was joined here by fellow game makers from the Netherlands to participate in the Berlin Global Game Jam. We fought hard and managed to crank out the unparalleled Nakatomi Rider. Niels wrote it up for the papers (available over at Bashers).

This week in Berlin the Transmediale takes place to which I hope to go in the following days. I have a difficult relationship with art, especially when it is in the domain of media, but watching the Graham Harman lecture tonight and the introduction to it, it was clear to me that Transmediale is as on top of current developments and artistic relevance as they can be.

Upcoming

There will be a night in Pakhuis de Zwijger to celebrate the Nederland van Boven television series that the VPRO produced in the Netherlands. I will be joining the esteemed panel there as a board member of Hack de Overheid to talk about issues of democracy, participation and truth in cartography.

With Martijn de Waal happily having gotten his PhD, it’s now full steam ahead for the conference he is organizing together with Michiel de Lange called “Social Cities of Tomorrow”. I will be speaking in a brief time slot about Apps for Amsterdam and how data commons happen.

I will probably be attending LIFT to see a certain person speak.

Finally in the near future there is also an undisclosed Berlin event for which I will be speaking which will be my first abroad since I left the Netherlands.

I’m incredibly proud of the team and events coming together in our organization of the biggest Hack de Overheid feature yet. Looking back on the past year, it has been an incredible ride with the various Apps for… competitions and no small amount of personal and professional changes.

At the end of this month, on Saturday the 26th, we’ll be holding a Hack de Overheid event like you’re used to with some notable additions that are going to blow everybody’s mind. The event is called Code Camping Amsterdam, it is part of the Apps voor Nederland program in collaboration with Waag Society and you can register on the bottom of the page.

We’ll be having three internationally renowned speakers whose work alone speaks for itself, let alone their presence on our event. Marietje Schaake is our most favourable representation in the European Parliament but as far as I know a politician of her stature has never before spoke in front of an audience of Makers in the Netherlands before. Marius Watz‘s visual art inspires awe and wonder and I have used his software on several occasions in my work for Monster Swell. Matt Biddulph‘s work and shipped products have been used by most of the people I know and inspired me and I think many more programmers to build more and better.

The location in the derelict Toren Overhoeks is a culmination both of convenience and inconvenience. Just across the central train station, but without any facilities left in the building it exemplifies a once and future state of our cities. Remnants of an age gone by where hackers gather with makeshift facilities to create something better.

After the event there is going to be a party by the Eddie the Eagle Museum a formation famous in their own right for holding the most out there awesome parties in the city. It is a privilege working together with people this competent when it comes to fun and so creative when it comes to convention. See their party description:

The future has found us! And its leader is a code. Our digitally hypnotised desire has led to a world without mistakes, governed by spyware and malware. Humanity is an experiment proved inferior. Let’s crack the code to correct it. Enter the Hackathon and exuberantly celebrate a world without errors! With high, low and no-tech, we are the new Trojan Horses marching in, ritually erasing the failings of the past. Let’s roughly and frantic lose our last human bit with a codefest in the Tower of the Shell.

Finally as I have hinted before, the currency for application contests is diminishing along with the consolidation of the open data platforms and the publication of more and more datasets. If after Apps voor Nederland is over, you follow-up with another cookie-cutter competition, that would be missing the point. That also means that this competition is the best moment to get your datasets out and get attention for them in the ecosystem as it is right now. What will be next? We have some ideas, but we don’t know anything for sure yet. The only thing that is certain: you’d better be there next Saturday!

That moment where you’re texting somebody for the first time and the Send button turns blue. The expectations conveyed with that small indicator about the time to response as well as the type of person on the other side.

Ik doe recentelijk een stukje over games voor Fast Moving Targets en wat beter te vertellen dan mijn ervaringen uit de Dutch Game Garden. Het is een leuke plek in Utrecht, waar veel gebeurt, maar wat in Amsterdam bijna niet aankomt. Een poging om een brug te slaan:

We doen het in het vervolg elke keer uit een andere studio (dat moet ook wel lukken met 30 game bedrijven) met korte interviewtjes.

Apps voor Nederland continues apace as it keeps on doing.

Talks about open data and data journalism are ongoing at a number of Dutch parties. After last year’s attention, it seems that this year various parties are indeed getting serious about it.

Then I went to a talk by Michael LaFond at ARCAM in Amsterdam about the Berlin co-housing movement that he started in part. All the more interesting because I am moving to Berlin in January of next year and we’re already registered at several projects on Wohnportal Berlin, the site he setup. Several of the projects he showed during the evening also have our attention as prospective Berlin living space. My notes for the evening and a more elaborate write-up of the Q&A are up on this blog.

I built a next iteration for guadalupe that is indeed becoming more playable as we speak. I am very eager to invite more people to that play experience sometime soon.

Wednesday we announced the first speaker for Code Camping Amsterdam: Matt Biddulph. We’re really excited to have Matt come over to Amsterdam again.

Went to Booreiland to work on culiacan.

At long last I posted the pictures I took of people visiting our office with my Yashica medium format camera.

My review of The Binding of Isaac was published in nrc.next.

Sunday we had a marathon meeting for the constitution of the merged foundation that is going to be the greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts Hack de Overheid and Het Nieuwe Stemmen. I am very excited for the potential of the new organization.

This was a short week. Work on Apps voor Nederland and then off to Playful.

Nice to see that Peter Robinett is running AMStransit in his office on a spare screen:

Hack de Overheid announced Code Camping Amsterdam which is going to be our biggest event yet in a derelict office across the IJ in Amsterdam. Everything is in full effect to organize that.

Playful was great and it’s always nice to be in London for a short stretch. It was a while that I was last in Conway Hall but it was nice to be back. Niels and Kars have written detailed accounts about the day on Hubbub and Bashers.

Then in the same weekend (flying into Schiphol in the morning, directly in the car to Germany) it was off to the Ruhrgebiet in Germany to visit among others the Jahrhunderthallen and the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord.

To all you who have won awards (and to all you who haven’t):

awards handed out by its organiser who wants to be seen handing out awards to people who want to be seen receiving them. It’s a simple formulae, but unsustainable in a world where more of the demographic that attends communicates over the back-channel. —Jan Chipchase