November 6, 2013

Modern art exhibit in historical Amsterdam canal houses

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 10:44 pm

Amsterdam’s famous canal ring turned 400 this year and as part of the celebrations an art exhibit is being held in 15 historical canal houses.

The houses include the mayor’s residence just past the Golden Bend. The artists were selected by curator Siebe Tettero because they had some connection with Amsterdam. They include current darlings of the Dutch art scene Joep van Lieshout and Viviane Sassen.

The exhibit—called Chambres des Canaux—started this week and will run until 17 November except on Mondays. You can buy a ticket for 14 euro at the tourists offices which will give you access to all the venues.

Getting access to the former homes of rich traders sounds like a pretty unique in itself. Should you not be able to make it before 17 November, there is always the Museum Willet-Holthuysen on the Herengracht, which is the home of 19th century art collector Abraham Willet and which has been preserved in the style of its last residents.

(Link: I Amsterdam. Illustration: Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde, public domain)

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November 5, 2013

Lou Reed’s Perfect Day rings out in Groningen

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 10:36 am

The story goes that the late Lou Reed was in Groningen in November 2008 for one of Laurie Anderson’s (one of his wife’s) concerts. He was invited to visit the Martini tower to have a look at its carillon. The city’s bell ringer Auke de Boer gave Lou and Laurie a tour and let them play the carillon. Lou was very interested in this historical instrument and later gave his permission to use Perfect Day for a special event on the carillon. The tribute was played on Saturday 2 November 2013 exactly 5 years and one day after Lou and Laurie visited Groningen.

The bells kick in at 0:27.

(Link: trendbeheer.com)

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November 4, 2013

Erwin Olaf’s euro coin criticized for cheap typography

Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 2:35 pm

Erwin Olaf is a kick-ass photographer, but does that make him a good coin designer? The Netherlands do have to uphold a reputation in this respect.

When Willem-Alexander became king of the Netherlands the need arose to design new coins. The job was given to Mr Olaf this time around. He seems to have done a respectable job, except for the lettering. Fonts In Use says: “It’s highly questionable whether such a bold wide retro-futuristic letterstyle in mixed case is suited for the medium and the topic—and whether it had to be a font (as distinguished from custom lettering) in the first place.”

The alleged lettering.

Mr Olaf used a free font he found on the web called Days, which is according to a commenter over at Fonts In Use “a display typeface meant for use in large sizes.”

The choice for an off-the-shelf type is also remarkable when contrasted with the fact that the country “today has more type designers per capita than any other country in the world, a remarkable fact considering that there is now not one surviving Dutch type foundry”, typographer Gerard Unger is quoted as saying on Typotheque.

See also:

(Illustrations: Fonts In Use)

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November 3, 2013

Documentary De Nieuwe Wildernis draws 400,000 visitors

Filed under: Nature by Branko Collin @ 1:33 pm

Dutch nature documentary De Nieuwe Wildernis has managed to lure 400,000 people to the cinema in just a month, Vroege Vogels wrote last Monday.

The documentary about wildlife in the Oostvaardersplassen (‘the lakes of those who sailed to the East’) was released on 26 September 2013. For feature films 400,000 visitors is considered pretty successful, but for a documentary it’s practically a miracle. As a comparison, last year Hollywood blockbuster The Hunger Games took the number 13 spot with 458,816 visitors.

Part of the attraction of Ruben Smit’s De Nieuwe Wildernis may be that there is very little original nature left in the Netherlands. Biodiversity is at an all time low in this country, the Mean Species Abundance having dropped from 40% in 1900 to 15% in 2000. The average MSA for Europe is 40%.

The nature reserve Oostvaardersplassen came about by accident. It is situated on the north end of Flevoland, the largest artificial island in the world. Originally reclaimed in 1986, the area was to be bordered by another artificial island, Markerwaard, and intended for housing business parks, but in 1986 the national government decided not to build the extra island. With businesses also staying away, nature took over. In 1986 the area was designated a national nature reserve.

See also: Searching and capturing that elusive horse wind.

(Photo: crop from the video)

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Dave Hakkens partners with Motorola for Phonebloks

Filed under: Design,Sustainability,Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:01 am

Mobile phone manufacturer Motorola has announced it will be working with Dave Hakkens on his modular phone project Phonebloks.

More precisely, Motorola has been working on its own modular system in the past year called Project Ara, which is designed to be “a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”

The manufacturer will now be “engaging with the Phonebloks community throughout [Project Ara’s] development process.” The idea behind Phonebloks is to create a modular phone to combat electronic waste—instead of throwing out an entire phone because a component is broken, you swap out the broken component instead. Phonebloks is looking for manufacturers who want to work in their ecosystem.

Motorola was once a major player on the mobile phone market. It was recently acquired by Google. Dave Hakkens is a 2013 graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven.

(Via The Verge)

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November 1, 2013

English colonial stamp sold for record amount

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:30 am

Originally valued at 150,000 euro, an African postage stamp from Kenya-Uganda has fetched 208,000 euro at an auction house in Weesp, North Holland this week. The stamp was sold for 170,00, but with a 20% commission on top, the total comes to the record amount of 208,000 euro, the most ever paid for a stamp at a Dutch auction.

The stamp features the portrait of British King George V who ruled over East Africa, and was bought by a German collector. The stamp was never hinged, with only four other known copies of such a high quality left in the world.

(Links: nos.nl, ed.nl, Photo by Wikimedia user Jonathunder, some rights reserved)

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October 31, 2013

Pimp up your camera with Kapsones lens hoods

Filed under: Design,Photography by Orangemaster @ 3:21 pm

Kapsones, the Dutch word for ‘putting on airs’, is a colourful line of custom lens hoods — a bit like covers for your smartphone — recently launched in design-friendly Eindhoven.

“There are four styles to choose from: Baroque (an old fashioned look), Knitted (self explanatory), Stealth (sharp and angled), and Street (looks like a cobblestone road). Each design comes in several colours that you can choose from when ordering.”

Since it is a start-up, the lineup of compatible lenses isn’t very extensive yet: Canon 28-80, 28-90, 18-55 mm IS, and 18-35 mm IS II. The price starts at 20 euro.

Check out their promotional video:

Kapsones from Van Alles Wat Ontwerp on Vimeo.

(Link and image: petapixel.com)

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October 30, 2013

Famous Dutch game show invites nudists to audition

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:55 pm

A few years back, we had going to church naked and naked fitness, and now it’s time for a naked game show on television, with words and balls.

The Dutch game show Lingo, based on an American game show, has been a household viewing staple for decades. It features guessing words of a certain length and unscrambling longer words. Winning a round entitles you to pick balls with numbers to be checked off a bingo card, hence the name.

Lingo is auditioning nudists for a special naked version of the television program. First thing the producers make clear is that participants won’t be chosen based on what they look like, which in TV land has to be partially untrue. And the popular game show host Lucille Werner says she will join in by taking it all off. The show is scheduled to air on May 2014.

Back in 2011 this episode of Lingo went viral, as a smart guy used the word ‘cumshot’ and everyone had a good laugh.

(Link: www.nieuws.nl, Photo of the first Philips colour TV from 1964 by Philips, used with permission)

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October 29, 2013

Dutch museums own some 139 contentious artworks

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 1:57 pm

According to years of research carried out by the Netherlands Museums Association on the origins of artworks, some 139 pieces of art acquired by Dutch museums between 1933 and 1945 (during the Nazi regime) are suspected of being stolen, confiscated or were sold to them by force. Some 41 museums have such artworks in their collections, many of which were owned by Jews.

The research, started in 2009, had as a goal of establishing what the extent was of the possession of contentious paintings after the end of WWII. Some 162 Dutch museums collaborated with researchers in order to help return artworks to their rightful owners and/or their heirs. A special website will go live at 4 pm has now gone live on Tuesday, 29 October (CET) for everyone to peruse and maybe even help.

The museum with the most ‘stolen’ artworks is the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague Municipal Museum), followed by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Museum and Stedelijk Museum.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl, www.museumvereniging.nl, (Illustration: Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet. Source: politie.nl)

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October 28, 2013

Runner’s chip took away the need to cheat

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 3:31 pm

On Sunday 17 November the 30th edition of the Seven Hills Run in Nijmegen will be held.

About 20 years ago I was a volunteer for the event and I had to guard one of the four starting cages, which taught me a thing or two about human nature.

The Seven Hills Run was and is an immensely popular race along 15 kilometres of undulating roads in and near Nijmegen. Both the global running elite and recreational runners take part. To ensure that the latter would not rob the former of fast finishes—the outdoor world records for 15 kilometre runs have been set at the Seven Hills course for both men and women—the runners were divided into four cages before the start, with the fastest group in the first and the slowest in the last.

At the start of the race, the cages would be opened back and front. The inevitable result was that the slower runners would not pass the starting line until minutes after the start, so that their official time would be composed of their running time and then some. My job at cage three was to make sure that only the people with the right starting number were allowed in and to redirect the others to their cage.

I received threats of violence that day and at one point a runner was so livid that he blocked the entrance to the cage and refused to go away. Thirty runners (my personal count) were sure that the faster cage was their rightful place. I got to redirect exactly one runner to a faster cage—I assumed that she was genuinely mistaken.

Around that time a company was founded by several students of the local university that produced an RFID transponder, the ChampionChip, that would make skewed race times a thing of the past. A computer would register the runners both when they passed the starting line and when they passed the finish line, and immediately spit out the right times. During the 25th anniversary of the race, the organisers even used the ChampionChip transponder (now owned by MYLAPS from Haarlem) to honour the 250,000th runner right after her finish.

I imagine that getting one’s exact time took some of the edge off the aggression and the need to cheat of some runners.

(Photo by Peter van der Sluijs, some rights reserved)

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