summ( )n

I wrote about Caviar Rouge Forum, one of the projects by the Caravan Culture agency I was involved (albeit in a minor way, I was just a member of a panel discussing the concept of ‘design-mindedness’). This time it was a much bigger project, a game we designed specially for the project, and played in the premises of Vanabbe Museum in Eindhoven. Instead of just talking about the impact of (national) culture on design, and design – as a discipline and a mindset – on cultures, we suggested to play (with) these ideas and to act them out in a tangible format.

We suggested for the participants (who were both from the Caviar Rouge’s team and the general public; the event was openbaar, public in Dutch) to imagine that they represent different national design team, and from this role to construct a City of Happiness for a imaginary client. We proposed to play with four teams, quite archetypical but also appropriate for the given context: the Chinese, Dutch, Russian, and US ones (we made an effort to not include real Russians in the ‘Russian Team, and likewise, there were no Dutchmen in the “Dutch Team”).

Each team was tasked to design and construct their concept of ‘Happy City” on the given plot of land (we used a beautiful film from the book by Petra Kempf (You Are the City) as a representation of such land). Each team has a set of construction materials (although different for every team, both in quality and quantity), and also some ‘game currency’ to purchase more in due course. Every team has started with heated debates on the meaning of ‘Happiness’ according to the ‘national identity’ which quickly followed with the first sketching/sculpting exercises.

Perhaps, we were to generous game masters, and provided more materials than necessary to the teams, since they didn’t show much interest in the additional supplies and auctions; but there were sporadic exchanges between the teams, including open barters and more hidden appropriations of the poorly overseen resources (e.g., paper cuts).

At the end all the teams presented their ideas, and pretty impressive ones given very limited amount of time they all had (the game lasted just a bit longer than an hour). The ‘Dutch team” (played mostly by Russians) presented their concept of the Soul City, arguing that the key components of happiness is High Spirituality, Natural Beauty, Friendship and Openness (symbolized by various circles, bridges, and flowers).

The “Russian team” (played mostly by Dutch guys) emphasized an importance of History and Roots, and Openness to the Others (you can find a lot of gates and windows in their design).

The ‘Chinese team’ was all about Harmony and Feng-Shui (yet they also accumulated the largest resources of gold in their vault, guarded by the Golden Dragon).

(not so) Surprisingly enough, the winner who took it all was the ‘US team’; not only their concept was seen as the most ‘authentically American’, but they also presented it with wit and self-irony.

The game was concluded with an interesting discussion, and at the end was the best combo of fun and useful learning (as supposed for a ‘serious game’). I plan to make a more detailed presentation, a mini-report of some sort about the game, and will place it later to SlideShare. I also have a few video-clips, to be also incorporated into this report.

A short, but a very interesting performance by Olimdjon Beknazarov opened the Caviar Rouge Project, part of the Dutch Design Week. The artist has combined seemingly uncombinable cultural traditions, blending the Japanese costumes, Christian music and Arabic body language in one impressive dance performance. And, as if it was not diverse enough a cultural cocktail, the performance was happening around a beautiful lighting installation by Chinese (!) artist Li Hui in the Dutch (!!) Museum of Artificial Light in Art (Centrum voor Kunstlicht in de Kunst) in Eindhoven. It surely symbolizes.

The atmosphere of the event was very creative, and very rouge too, because of the mesmerizing beams of red light of the Li Hui’s masterpiece installation called Reincarnation:

The red hue also made very difficult to take good pictures, and I failed to produce anything remotely publishable at the end But I feel I need to post at least two pictures, of Yelena Kharitonova, the founder, organizer, and key driver of the project, and of Peter Nagelkerke, a newly appointed Ambassador of Caviar Rouge in the Netherlands. Kudos to Yelena, and best luck for the coming week!

Logos galore! Summ()n has developed a game (code name ’Happy Street: Better City, Better Life’) for a Caviar Rouge design forum, organized by CaravanCultura , to be held in Van Abbemuseum, during the Dutch Design Week! Pheew!

Ok, an attempt to decipher of this logo thicket: CaravanCultura is an agency that promotes cultural innovation and conducts a range of cross-cultural projects and initiatives. Summ()n is very happy to partner with CC and already participated in its annual CreArt forum in Brussels.

Caviar Rouge is another branded annual project of Caravan Cultura and Yelena Kharitonova, its passionate leader. A week-long event is aligned with the Dutch Design Week, a nation-wide festival of design and creativity traditionally held in Eindhoven in October. This year’s edition of Caviar Rouge is already a third in a raw and as before will provide an excellent opportunity for designers and other creative professionals to see and learn from the DDW, and to share their own ideas with the peers. From what I know, the Caviar Rouge program is completely filled with formal meetings and informal discussions, debates, workshops, and lectures; if you need a total cultural immersion, this is it.

This year we will add another format to the already very interesting program of the forum: following Summ()n’s philosophy, we will play a game, to challenge people’s ideas about the future of creative spaces and co-create the prototypes of ‘Better Life’ (yes, we always aim at modest goals). A very interesting dimension is that the game will be played in Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, one of the most original and creative institutions, not only in the Netherlands, but also worldwide, I believe. The museum itself is currently progressing to the third, and the final stage of the ‘Play”, its own program of cultural research and art provocation, and it seems only logical to play our game in its premises.

We look forward to the game, it should be an exiting event! It is announced as an ‘openbaar’ (=public), so hurry up to register and secure your place among the players, and not only the observers.

PS: When writing this post, I’ve discovered another game, to be also played in Van Abbemuseum during the DDW. A Tricksters Tricked workshop by Chris Lee will explore “alternative currencies as a starting point to think about economic networks”. Sounds fascinating too, and I will try to attend this event as well. I wonder how close it will be to the Kashklash game/initiative (I’ve been to one of their sessions in Geneva, during Lift’09).

This was one of the presentations in Vanabbe Museum, as a part of the Dutch Design Week program; I need to write more about this particular program, I liked quite a lot of the works and projects presented there. This one, by the UK duo [names?] was quite hilarious. The plot is they allegedly designed a very sophisticated system of measuring the ‘true value of art’, based on the analysis of brain activities. Visitors had been asked to fill a ‘scientific questionnaire’, after which they watched a few art-work while wearing a ‘brain wave detector’ (a helm). Their ‘brain activity’ was projected in a ‘real time’ on the wall, illustrating their ‘true’ attitudes to the objects they’ve seen.

An excellent example of a very provocative ‘design probe’ (and sooo close to what we ourselves wanted to do at the DDW, with our Walking Backward to the Future installation. Great job!

Great news – our concept, of Walking Backward to the Future, was accepted by the Dutch Design Week‘s committee! I presented both Summ()n and the concept yesterday, and it was very well received by both main project manager of DDW and one of their curators. They were ‘slightly’ concerned with the size of the installation – first, because they were afraid we wouldn’t be able to ‘summon’ it in time, but more importantly – because they didn’t have any more space left in the main building of the event (so called Klokgebouw).

But they loved the concept and wanted to have it at the DDW, so they invited us to come today again, and think about a. perhaps a slightly simplified version of the installation, and b. possibility to place it in the exit area of the building. The last options is really worth to explore, in that case the WBF will be the *very last* impression of the visitors, a great chance to place it deep into their memories.

So, today we met and were finally accepted into the show; the exact location and shape of the installation is still to be decided later, but in principle the deal is done!

‘Walking Backward to the Futures’ is an interactive installation where people – literally – walk backward and try navigating their way to the ‘future’ using complex visual cues and audiovisual feedback.

In our culture we tend to see the future laying ‘ahead of us”; we walk ‘toward the future”, leaving the past “behind us”. We try get higher to ‘look far and further’. For many people, however, these time/space relationships are different. What they see in front is, in fact, the past, the already known. The future is what lies “behind their back”; It can not be seen.

We would like to reply this experience and suggest people to walk backward and find their way using the clues they see in front of them (in the ‘past’). We will use a set of abstract visuals (photographs) as such visual cues. When walking in an installation space, a person will be wearing a hood, a helmet of some kind. This hood will be preventing the person from ‘cheating’ and looking behind. But more importantly, the hood will provide a positive, reinforcing feedback if the person correctly follows the pattern of the picture, and a negative feedback (an alarming sound) if the person deviates from the ‘correct’ route. To do that, the helmet will have an in-mounted headset and a device to track person’s location within the installation.

Of course, the futures will not be predefined – otherwise it will be a mere ‘Pavlovian dog’ type of experiment. The ‘future’ in this installation will be constantly changing, depending on the actions (or inactions) of the participants. The experience of the installation will people to revisit – re-walk – their ideas about possible and desirable futures, and explore how their actions change these futurescapes.