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NOWHERE - Imagining The Global City |
A large panoramic, artificial intelligence driven video projection will be the central element of NOWHERE, an exhibition focusing on the work of Frank van der Salm at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, opening in early 2021. Together with the exhibition, a 368 page book, designed by Irma Boom will be published by Paradox and Hartmann Books.
Key in the development of the exhibition is University of Amsterdam doctoral candidate Gjorgji Strezoski whose research focuses on the stylistic analysis of art collections. Strezoski is training the AI to reveal relationships between Frank van der Salm’s images from the past 25 years, interpreting his critical motives regarding the visual nature of today’s urban environment. During the last few months, the team has been investigating image and sound behaviour to express the values given to various keywords describing the works.
RNDR, design studio for interactive media based in The Hague, is currently working on the final visualisation, while composer Henry Vega is dealing with the sound design. Photography, video, graphic design, sound and science are all pieces of the puzzle coming together. A puzzle that is researching the role of artificial intelligence in an image-saturated world that human curators can no longer handle alone as well as looking at the creative potential of algorithms for the arts.
We’re pleased to confirm additional project support from Mondriaan Fonds, Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds, Stichting Zabawas, Fonds21, Jaap van Harten Fonds and others.
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Houses of Darkness |
Paradox is excited to announce Houses of Darkness, an international multi-platform project dealing with the conflicted heritage of three former concentration camps across Europe. Together with three memorial sites: Falstad Centre (NO), Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre (NL), and Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen (DE) we will commission a team of young professionals including a photographer/filmmaker, journalist/writer and designer.
The team will focus on the role of the perpetrator, starting from the presence of (the remains of) the camp commander’s house on each site. The programme will lead to on-site outdoor exhibitions in combination with a web-based narrative for smartphones, a (travelling) exhibition, an app and workshops.
The main objective of this project, supported by the EU’s Creative Europe Programme, is to link troubled histories with these contemporary topics, and, most importantly, with younger audiences. Houses of Darkness aims to challenge young people to determine their positions with regard to the present by being confronted in a non-standard way with the past: determined by young artists in dialogue with historians, while departing from the perspective of the perpetrator, a position closer than we all would like to acknowledge. Houses of Darkness will be launched in the second half of 2021.
Image: Camp Westerbork Memorial Center (NL), Sake Elzinga
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SOS for early web stories! |
On December 31, 2020 Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player, the once revolutionary technology developed by Macromedia that opened the doors to true multimedia storytelling on the web. This means you have less than three months left to view the pioneering Flash-based websites Paradox developed with Rotterdam based designers Antenna-men for >Play, Carel van Hees’ 2001 project about the youth of Rotterdam, Go No Go, Ad van Denderen’s long term project about migration in Europe (2003), Why Mister Why?, Geert van Kesteren’s 2004 striking story about the war in Iraq, The Last Days of Shishmaref, Dana Lixenberg and Jan Louter’s 2008 project about the Inupiaq community whose island home is threatened by climate change and So Blue So Blue, Ad van Denderen’s 2008 project about the geopolitical tensions facing 17 Mediterranean countries.
>Play, Go No Go, Why Mister Why?, The Last Days of Shishmaref and So Blue So Blue were published during the early days of digital storytelling and have received between 375.000 and 750.000 visitors. The discontinuation of Flash raises important questions about digital archiving. The first digital story ever was Pedro Meyer’s I Photograph to Remember published on CD-ROM by the Voyager Company in 1991. The first graphical browser (Mosaic) became available in 1993 and as of 2000 serious multimedia was possible online. Many projects, that can be seen as successors to the print-based picture story were launched. But where the latter has been documented, collected and researched thoroughly, digital storytelling has been almost completely neglected by photographic institutions worldwide. Analogue material may fade slowly but digital material can disappear overnight. It has happened to hundreds if not thousands of web-based projects and will continue to do so if we do not address this issue urgently. Send an email to info@paradox.nl to share your thoughts!
Please note: to view the projects listed, open the links in the latest version of Mozilla Firefox and download and install Flash Player when requested. Safari, Chrome and others (may) have issues with Flash already, Flash-based sites have never worked on mobile platforms.
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News
Welkom Today among Best Dutch Book Designs |
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October 3 - November 1
Stedelijk Museum |
Every year, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Stichting Best Verzorgde Boeken display an expert jury selection of the most outstanding book designs of the last twelve months. This year, Welkom Today was among a total of 33 books picked from the 278 publisher-submitted titles released in 2019. buy the book |
Looking out for Theo Niekus (1956-2020) |
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Whoever needed to get hold of street photographer Theo Niekus would have stood a fair chance of finding him at the crossing of Prins Hendrikkade and Damrak next to the Victoria Hotel. Until October 5th 2020 that was, when Theo passed away, much too early. You may now find him there again, opposite Amsterdam Central Station, as exactly one year after his death, accompanied by friends, his partner Jocelyne Moreau engraved the letters THEO into the sidewalk. A sticker on an adjacent lamp post offers a QR-link to his website. At the time of his totally unexpected death, Theo was busy working on The Beauty of The Real, showing a dummy for a book at Unseen 2020. We agreed to discuss developing the book as well as an exhibition at a later moment. Paradox is committed to fulfilling that promise.
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Reminder
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| Arab Image Foundation Fundraiser |
Until the end of October, all proceeds from the sale of the Paradox publications and prints available via the link below will go towards helping our friends at the Arab Image Foundation. The AIF's premises was badly damaged in the Beirut port explosions on the 4th August. buy books and prints |
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