| TUUR VAN BALEN |
2007
[This is a part-time project for Intel, researching and illustrating 'The Future of Money']
When you go out for dinner and you pay the bill with your card, there will always be that awkward moment where the waitress asks whether you want to leave a tip. Compare this to casually leaving the change on the table or tipping a bellboy with a folded note in your handshake. It seems as if the more our money becomes invisible, the more elaborate, orchestrated and explicit the transaction becomes. To illustrate this paradox, I made three filmclips, starring an object which allows you make your electronic transactions more subtle and bring back a bit of the comforting ambiguity of hard cash.
click 'read more' to see the films.
Until now, action to improve the lives of children and young people has tended to focus on the institutional spheres of home and school. Yet quality of life also depends on the access to and quality of shared resources such as streets, parks, town centres and playgrounds. And here, in the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. In the pursuit of sustainable communities and urban renaissance, children and young people are too often left out of the script.
This is the point thinktank Demos makes in their latest report 'Seen and Heard: Reclaiming the public realm with children and young people'. To launch this report, Demos organised an event with Lord Richard Rogers and the Rt Hon Beverly Hughes MP, Minister of State for Children, Young People and Families.
I was asked to make the content of this report more tangible. Working in collaboration with Revital Cohen, we made a subtle intervention in the street in front of the event. Based on the way the lines drawn on the street tell us how to behave in a public space, we created an abstract pattern of more playful lines. By mixing different game-structures, words and objects, the installation still prompts playful behaviour but doesn't impose a closed set of rules.
In 1950, Alan Turing described what later became famous as the 'Turing test': a proposal to test a machine's intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine has passed the test. Since the 50's, no machine or computer has ever passed the test.
Angelina sings a version of Yesterday, created through several computer-translations. Project with Catherine Kramer and Steven Ounanian.
click 'read more' to see the film
During my internship at Demos, a London based thinktank, I worked on the Bristol Urban Beach project. With the help of 800 tons of sand, some deckchairs and a stage, a ran-down carpark got transformed in a temporary urban beach. The beach was an experiment after the publication "People make places". More than a place, the beach was a platform: access was free and there were a lot of events going on, both organised by Demos and the people of Bristol. To support this, we created a website where people could announce their yoga-classes or exchange pictures.
The beach made all of us think about the value and possibilities of public space, putting pressure on the developer of the site to focus more on the public realm. The Architect’s Journal, a leading independent architecture magazine, wrote an article on the Bristol Urban Beach. It praised the influence of the Urban Beach project on the future development of Redcliffe Wharf, an iconic site steeped in history.
Found on my harddrive somewhere: a small electronics project I did last year. It was an introduction in working with RFID readers and chips and together with Kenichi Okada, I built a small music machine. By placing the different figures on the turning disc, you create a little sound loop with three different sounds. You can adjust the sounds by putting the solenoids on a different surface.
How does it work? The figures have an rfid (radio frequency identification) chip on the bottom, something like an electronic barcode. Under the disc, there's a reader which reads the chips and knows which figure it is. We used two basicstamps: one for the reading and making sounds, the other one for the motor.
This project started with gathering stories. Stories of real people in extreme situations, stories of people suffering from paranoid personality disorder and paranoid thoughts. The stories were the starting point for questioning and designing new ways of mobile communication, embodied in three concepts. This was a project for O2 in collaboration with Industrial Design Engineering.
Dave Bowman always believed domestic appliances would liberate him. He thought he could use technology as a tool to control the world around him. The Story of Dave Bowman is a short-film about a man and his washing machine and wants to question our relationship with technology. Are we the master with domestic appliances as our slaves or might it be the other way around?
click 'read more' to see the film
The stewardess just told you about the oxygen mask, the life vest and the brace position. You're in an aeroplane and you believe her, you think these things will save your life. But they can't. The only thing the brace position can do for you is preserve your dental records in case of a crash. It keeps your teeth close to your seat number and makes identification easier for the forensic team. In an aeroplane, you are totally out of control.
Larry's Pillow puts you back in control. In case of an emergency, it helps you to take the brace position and straps you up securely. If you then choose to pull the tag, the pillow will inflate and suffocate you. With that choice comes control. You're in control over life and death. You are in control.
