TodaysArt is an annual Media Art festival that has taken place in the Dutch city the Hague every autumn since 2005. The festival features audiovisual and modern dance performances, concerts, clubbing, installations, and art exhibitions at the city centre’s two theatres, cinema, and the neighbouring buildings of the city hall. This year’s festival, the eighth one running, opened on the night of September 21st with a speech by its director Olof van Winden and a variety of performances. This year NTV Europe, which is based in Amsterdam, and has been supporting art projects over a period of twenty years, participated for the first time in the capacity of a trial collaboration. Through this, the up-and-coming Japanese artists Ei Wada and Ryoichi Kurokawa were welcomed to the festival, and gave their performances in a grand way.
At the centre of the four main venues was built what should be called a monument, put together out of old furniture and other discarded items found in the city: the Vortex of the Raumlaborberlin. On the inside, space was opened up wide to create a dance floor, and the Vortex seems to just fold itself over its visitors, and like a black hole, suck them in. The work is supposed to represent the state of consumer society. Since this venue was set up outside, it was also accessible to the general public who did not have tickets to the festival.
On the night of the 21st, Ryoichi Kurokawa’s “syn_” was performed in the grand hall of the Lucent Danstheater, one of the main venues of the festival; a delicate combination of digital animation and sound that created the image of countless thin lines interweaving.
This black-and-white contrast was impressive also because of Ei Wada’s Braun Tube Jazz Band. In this performance Wada projects sounds, “altered” into images, on twelve Braun TVs, which he strikes and strokes as if playing percussion, creating music.
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| syn_ by Ryoichi Kurokawa |
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| Braun Tube Jazz Band by Ei Wada |
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| Open Reel Ensemble |
Electricity is indispensable for media art. It is very interesting that the building that supplied electricity, was treated as part of this year’s TodaysArt. At the old power plant building, a short distance from the central venues, in an enormous room, was a group exhibition which took its name from Nam Jun Paik’s artwork “Global Groove”; elsewhere was an exhibition of Turkish media art “Commons Tense”. In the “Global Groove” exhibition, the work “Ideophone 1:36” by Dick Raaijmakers (one of the founders and godparents of electronic music, and of great influence in the development of young people in the Hague), the sound created by the vibration of the speakers making metal spheres jump up, had a delightful ring in that great old power plant. Here, the work of celebrated, masterful artists was on display together with the work of young artists ready to take on the next generation.
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| The exhibition venue |
TODAYSART 2012
21+22 Sept the Hague