Graphic Design Festival Breda 8 t/m 30 May 2010

If You Could Collaborate — Job Wouters & Roel Wouters from If You Could

Seminar on Decoding and Graphic Design

On Tuesday, May 25 in line with the Graphic Design Festival Breda 2010 a seminar is organized with presentations of seven designers and scientists from home and abroad. They will go deeper into the Decoding theme of the festival. Using examples from their practice and results from research show them how the increasing digitization influenced and changed the field of the graphic designer.The increasing accessibility of information and the growth of communications has changed the media landscape at a rapid pace. What is the impact on the design profession? How can we be innovative, but also socially responsible to go along? The speakers provide insight into developments such as open source software and DIY hardware. Sharing knowledge and collaborating with other experts is inevitable. Designers are more often directing that process rather than being the producers of the end result.The seminar will be held in the MEZZ,
Dommels Zaal, Keizerstraat 101,
4811 HL Breda.

If you would like to attend the seminar, reserve your tickets quickly. Tickets are € 50,- (students With valid student Ids pay € 25,-). The online Presale has started.
You can buy them here.

The lecturers are: Hans Bouwknegt, LUST Design Studio, Michiel Schuurman, Sven Ehmann, Oliver Vodeb, Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters, Karsten Schmidt.

For more information follow this link

What is Mezz?

Pop Music has become an important part of our contemporary culture is increasingly the attention it deserves. In Breda, Mezz concerts & dance where the heart of all activities within the Pop Culture. Of pop concerts and dance nights to several crossovers.The spectacular building Mezz is not only an eye-catcher in the center of Breda, but it is completely designed to suit the task to staged pop music.

Letterpress: Two of not so high quality images from the GDFB website, Mezz photgraphed by Christian Richters.

De Fantasiefabriek, Noord-Brabants Museum

So Anything is possible ?

Belief it or not but since as a little kid, the story of Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was read to me, I was a believer and convinced that any sooner of later anything is possible.

Later on when I was happy to see the first manuscript of Alice’s Adventures Underground with the writing and drawings of Lewis Caroll, (Go online to British Library Lewis Caroll and see it youself ) the real power was concealed in the ’animated’ drawings he made aside his writings of impossible realities.

Not long after that, animation movie making was a play to experiment with to make impossible things come true. As a youngster I became quite handy in the art of clipbook animation. Lot’s of girlfriends to be were surprised by my gift of little clipbooks I composed out of a combination of photo collages and drawings in which the impossible thought became true, they fell in love with me... Of course in the things I succeeded in my little clipbooks, real life was a lot bigger burden.

In Nowadays life we have innumerable tools to create the impossible but still there is no other discipline which give so much pleasure as in simple movie animation. Okay, it hard work if you real want to use drawings and stop motion pictures, but even if you are as lazy as I am you still can have a lot of fun creating little booklets with easy simple line drawings.

This exhibition in the Noord Brabants Museum called “De Fantasiefabriek” you get a realy nice impression of the state of the art of the Animation Movie Making in The Netherlands in the Noordbrabant Museum there is a focus on the contribution which is made by animation makers in Brabant. At the opening event in her welcoming speech, Lily Jacobs, Member of the Provincial Executive of Noord Brabant for Economic development and Sustainability introduced the AV-Broker, the new promoter of this industry in Noord Brabant. So I hope Freek van ‘t Ooster will put extra effort in the expansion of talent and quality results in the development and support of this fine submissive tool of transformation to make dream come true. In the high art of movie making all kind of computer animated tools strait out from the toolbox of animation movies helps them to make their filming become as close as possible to reality. Did you see Avatar? Do you play computer games… Life in the second reality is becoming dangerously close to the look and feel of our ordinary daily life reality isn’t it?

But the Art Animation Movie like to of William Kentridge and others still have an other powerful force because they are booby trapped in that twilight zone, not the to seek for real reality but to put a slice in between, not the genuine faked impossible, not genuine real reality but the tricky part in between. Real enough the start you doubting, but drawn in animation to set it apart form daily life.

The Animated movie is everywhere and in abundance that we often accept the animated for real or are even disappointed if we discover that daily life didn’t yet adapt to the world of the animate world. Hmm its still a love story I think. See for your self.

Noord Brabants Museum ‘s Hertogenbosch in show until April 25th 2010. The exhibition ‘De Fantasiefabriek – Animatie in Nederland’ is dedicated to the art of animation movie making in the Netherlands. Over fifty films, unique artwork and ‘making offs’ reveal the quality of Dutch animation, both today and in the past. Artists featured include: Gerrit van Dijk, Paul Driessen, Michael Dudok de Wit, Han Hoogerbrugge, Floris Kaayk, Frodo Kuipers, Patrick Raats and Academy Award 2010 nominee Roelef van den Bergh. The exhibition has been made in partnership with the NIAf, the Netherlands Institute for Animation film in Tilburg