On to the streets, into the city and look for a confrontation with other people. That seemed tot be the central thema during the presentations of a couple of artists of the Caucus, wednesday morning. Michael Smit, Bastiaan Arler and Allard van Hoorn showed some of their work to the other Caucus-participants.
Michael Smit shows some projects in which he went into the streets. For How Have You Been an Artist Today, Smit had coversations with people he came across in public space. Smit then recorded the conversation. “I always asked ‘how have you been an artist today’first. The rest of the conversation was always a surprise.” After a lot of these conversations over the years, Michael Smit asked volunteers to do these conversations with people on the streets. This way, he wasn’t always a factor in the conversation. With How Have You Been an Artist Today, Smit wants to investigate how far art reaches and he wants to take away the boundaries between artists and the public.
Mapping things, working with concepts and developing new concepts. That’s what Bastiaan Arler really likes. In a videoregistration of a performance in the Austrian city of Graz, we see a group of people walking with a stocking on their heads. They’re following yellow lines that have been put onto the sidewalk. These people are limited in their movement, the lines make people go left or right, eventhough someone else might walk up to them with no way to pass. In that case, they both have to stop for ten seconds, turn around and walk away. “This performance is about how cities push people in certain directions, how people cross the city. People always take the shortest route.” At the end of the performance we see the group walk in line towards a bus. They get onto the bus, where they are freed from the yellow lines.
A cellphone, a chip, credit and a special phone number are all ingredients you need to make rado and tv for Platform for Urban Investigation (PUI) Radio TV Eindhoven. Allard van Hoorn, Ryan Holsopple and Alexandra Verhaest founded the station to allow people to make reports about anything they come across. The reports will be aired without intervention. “Everything goes”, Allard van Hoorn says. “It’s very democratic, everything will be transmitted, there is no buffer.”
The radio station, aired from a carrier cycle (bakfiets) in the Van Abbemuseum, is the most direct way of reporting. When someone, somewhere in Eindhoven, with credit and a chip wants to air an interview or conversation, he or she has to call the special phone number. The conversation then is being recorded and will be aired without intervention. With special receivers that can be collected at the ‘bakfiets’, one can listen to the radio station inside the museum. Outside of the museum, everything will be transmitted via puiradiotveindhoven.blogspot.com. That’s also the place where video footage can be found. Will absolutely everything be aired? After a short discussion between the Caucus-participants, Allard van Hoorn decides that there are no limitations. Everything goes, until the system intervenes.