Karsten on Free Software

Yesterday, I hopped over to Amsterdam to speak at Mediamatic about Free Software and FSFE at one of their Ignite events. The format was interesting: A strict time limit of five  minutes per speaker, with slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds.

The Mediamatic Bank is an art and exhibition space in central Amsterdam. Most or all of the other presentations were artists telling the audience about their own work. There were some projects that I liked a lot:

• Miktor and Molf divide their projects into “good work” and “bad work”. Good work is when they get paid, bad work is when they don’t. They’re right now  building an empty swimming pool for skating in, in Amsterdam. Like a number of the other projects presented that evening, it’s crowdfunded.
• Niels van Koevorden and Sabine Lubbe Bakker are making a movie about “The  End of Belgium”. The country hasn’t had a proper government for about a year  now. So these two are now setting off on a month-long tour in a converted army  truck, interviewing people around the country and trying to work out what holds  Belgium together (or not). Given that I live about 200 metres from the Belgian  border, I’ll invite them to come round to my place and look at Belgium from the  outside.
• Journalist Mariette Hummel is kicking off her DigiMe project. For six months, she  will try to document all the traces she is leaving in the digital world, whether  actively (e.g. Tweets) or passively (e.g. mobile phone location records).

There was  much more goodness, such as Alex Fischer carving treesaround the world (my favourite was a tree with a power socket in it), Arthur de Vries turning photos of faceless  mercenaries into statues, and Erik de Graaf with his graphic novel “Scherven” (Fragments)  about a Dutch couple being torn apart in WWII.

The current Piece de Resistance exhibition at Mediamatic Bank (Vijzelstraat 68) looks very  interesting, though I didn’t get time to really see it. In case you’re in the area on May 21, Mediamatic is hosting a fingerprint forgery workshop courtesy of the Chaos Computer Club, along with an RFID Zapper workshop. Should be a treat.