To get some inspiration I dug up one of my old favorites, Wim Crouwel. In the sixties and seventies he designed all printed material for City Art Museum in Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum. He treats text always as an autonomous form, where words not only function to describe something, but also to create an image, composition, layout and feeling. Crouwel always mentioned how modernists movements such as Bauhaus and De Stijl inspired him. You can recognize their functionality, but at the same time his typography is very life-felt and sometimes it almost feels like the letters are vibrating on the paper.

At the moment I’m working on the layout of the text and the image of one of the contributions. The text is about an artificial forest that was being built at Delft, The Netherlands in the mid nineties. The forest is designed in squares with rows of trees and is a hilarious mathematical Dutch interpretation of what a forest is supposed to look like. Below you find sketches for the layout:

This came to my mind yesterday when I saw the film Shattered Glass, which tells the true story of Stephen Glass, journalist and editor at The New Republic, who cooked up at least a dozen articles for the magazine. It’s one of the big scandals in the history of American journalism, The New Republic is one of the most influential political magazines in the USA, but it also reveals a lot about how we perceive reality.

“I wanted a story that I thought would be the perfect story. And that the readers would most enjoy to read.”
- Stephen Glass

Glass later explained in an interview how it all started with a fantasy about how a certain quote would really make an article work. It expanded to the devising of details and small events that never happened and ultimately climaxed into the cooking up of entire articles. Glass was known for being a kind, soft-spoken person and later he explained his motives were of social nature. He wanted to be appreciated.  A similar incident occurred at the New York Times and led to a crisis in the entire journalistic industry.

But obviously there is a problem in the rejection of such practices. Inevitably, journalism is always a representation of reality. And as such, all journalistic reporting is a manipulation of events through rhetoric, perception, editing, dramatization and so on and so forth. In fact, condemning what Glass did might even be dangerous. It dissimulates the corrupt and manipulative potential of news production. The status quo disarms any possible insinuation of news manipulation by excluding Glass’s practice. Denouncing Glass as a liar implies that conventional journalism is truthful and, needless to say, it isn’t. Or rather: it can’t be. It is interesting, instead, to rethink Glass’s way of writing in relation to our conventional conception of reality. It might prove the plot is thicker than Glass’s manipulation and not only conventional journalism is corrupting reality, but everyday existence is enhanced, dramatized and manipulated in great many ways.

The article that ultimately exposed his fraud, Hack Heaven, can be read here. It tells the story of a 15-year old pimpled hacker who gets a lucrative contract from a major software company after hacking their database. The entire article turned out to be cooked up.

Click picture to watch the video

Besides sensational claims like this, Haeckel also had the unforgivable tendency, like many of his contemporaries, to mix biology with anthropology. So, despite the discovery, he claimed that the Caucasian race had developed to become a superior race. It is no wonder that naturalists in that time traveled the world in the slipstream of colonialism and were financed by colonial regimes. They  were an essential part of the wicked business of justifying the exploitation of the colonies, since they provided the scientific proof of ‘so called’ Western superiority.

But in one area Haeckel managed to direct his vivid imagination into something slightly more positive: he was a remarkable artist and produced a great heap of fantastic illustrations of nature. Again, with an imagination larger than reality, he  idealized the plants and animals he had discovered and rendered them slightly more spectacular and aesthetic than in reality. As if on acid he created somewhat haluncinary images of plants and animals he discovered and ultimately bundled them in a book tentatively titled Art Forms Of Nature. You can find hi res images of all the pictures in the book here.

No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope
studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
- war of the worlds

- Jesper Just, A Vicious Undertow

More and more great art videos are coming available at Ubuweb and more in particular, it’s more and more contemporary art coming available, such as this video by Jesper Just. Whereas they were initially very much focused on early video art – also fantastically interesting, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman (among others, Stamping in the Studio, love that one!!), John Baldessari (among others, Time/temperature, love that one too!!!) – more and more contemporary, recent art becomes availabe. Such as a few episodes out of the Art Safari program that Ben Lewis made for the BBC – the ones on Andreas Gursky and Relational Aesthetics. Also check:
- Francis Alÿs, When faith moves a mountain
- Guy Ben-Ner, Stealing Beauty (full version)
- Johan Grimonprez – Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (full version!!!)
and Brian Eno, Joseph Beuys, Sophie Calle, John Cage, the list is perpetual… perhaps i should just get back with some favorites.

In addition I have added a splendid tool in right column where you can find a collection of art videos on the internet.

Despite its remoteness, the residency has build a reputation and became a spider in a network of artists and organizers – or perhaps rather ‘the web’ that holds them together. So I met loads of interesting people there that are still among my best friends and at the heart of my network. Even though I am still figuring out what the magic is, I reckon that the combination of remoteness, quietness and emptiness on the one hand, and the creative minds and energies that gather there on the other, must have something to do with it. The mind starts wandering, stimulated by inspiration and the space and freedom to go wild. So, not in the last place due to my nostalgic disposition, you might find, once in a while, an article about Nykarleby on this weblog.

If you have the chance, go and visit it!
Click here to read all articles on this weblog related to Nykarleby.

Nykarleby artists’ residency studio