During my lunchbrake at the Ubiscribe event I went to the Boymans van Beuningen museum to check out the DEAF installation and the Joost Conijn exhibition. What intrigued me most however were the Four Vegetative Sleeping Rooms by Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger. This is one of the beautiful rooms (and unfortunately the only one you are not allowed to enter):

More Boymans van Beuningen pictures on Flickr.

The eighth edition of the Dutch Electronic Art festival is titled “Interact or Die!” and I am more than ready to interact. This is my third visit to the DEAF festival and the amount of installations seems to have slunk to a third. Due to funding problems the quantity has gone down but the quality seems absolutely stable. The only problem I had with the topic of the festival and the artworks is that my favorite artworks were not interactive at all. My favorite objects were the kind of objects that leave you in complete awe over their aesthetic beauty.

Roots ( Roman Kirschner )
Pulsing electronic energy creates tiny explosive crystals leaving you in complete awe for at least ten minutes.

Harddisko: Noise & Disturbance Amplifier System for Harddisks ( Valentina Vuksic )

Scratching harddisks producing (un)dancable disko sounds.

Pakhuismeesteren, one of the DEAF locations.

Ondulation ( Thomas McIntosh )

My absolute favorite due to its incredibly fine and balanced aesthetic nature. Subtle changes in the light, water and color composition bring you into a calming state of mind where the only thing you can do is stare and enjoy the beauty of it.

Ondulation (Thomas McIntosh with Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan) is a composition for water, sound and light. A two ton pool of water is set into motion using sound, beams of light are projected onto the surface of the water and reflect onto a projection screen. The pool becomes a liquid mirror that is slowly sculpted into perfect three-dimensional expressions of a musical composition.

All my DEAF07 pictures on Flickr