About
Loes Bogers is a concept developer and communicator with a strong interest in managing interdisciplinary collaborative processes. She expresses herself through code and movement and words. Her work is focused on shared experiences of urban spaces through memory, sound and movement, and aim to structurally intervene in the everyday media ecologies we inhabit by distorting or enhancing our experience of our surroundings.
She holds a BA in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Amsterdam and an MA in Interactive Media from Goldsmiths College in London and has studied media arts and production at the University of Technology in Sydney. She is certified salsa teacher and trainer of OneMinutes video workshops. Loes is currently lab manager at the Digital Art Lab in Zoetermeer and teaches at the University of Amsterdam.
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The robotbuilding continues
During the last weekend of October 2011, Emöke Bada and I held a robotbuilding workshop at Bacarobo, the stupid robot competition we were nominated for with Vibrobert/Vibroberci. The Hungarian kids (just as the Dutch kids in Zoetermeer and the Turkish kids in Istanbul) were once again amazing! One could almost say that kids are universally great when it comes to designing silly vibrobots.
This week are the last sessions of robot building for ‘The Art of Hacking’ at NIMK, where high school kids from all over Amsterdam have been coming to show us (Kristina Anders, Audrey Samson and me) what amazing vibrobot designs they have up their sleeves. At Museumn8 we will be open for all those eager grown-ups too (you know who you are) :)
15 Minutes of Spiritual Leadership (in progress)
At the moment I am finalizing the project 15 Minutes of Spiritual Leadership: a networked karma ecology. Any person on this SMS network offers to be your spiritual leader for 15 mins – anonymously – when you text in a problem, worry or despair. You will do the same for others if you are called upon by someone who is stuck, miserable or just cranky. We all know people who are only too willing to give the same old advice. Get a different point of view from a random person whose identity remains unknown to you, and be temporary personal guru to someone else. Share what you know to guide others.
Instructions
1. save +36XXXXXXXXX (tba) as ‘GURU’ in your contact book (note: this number is deactivated at the moment, contact me for more info or download the gateway app and setup a network with your own mobile number!) Continue Reading →
2. send GURU a text about something that bothers you at the moment
3. get linked up to a random personal guru for 15 minutes – anonymously. You can exchange as many messages as you like, but you have only 15 minutes.
4. if your guru is too busy you will be linked up with a better one.
5. wait until you are selected as someone else’s guru and return the favor. And remember…karma is a bitch.
Receiving messages is free, sending is the same price as what you normally pay per SMS.
Livecoding and dance improvisation jams
During [SZOBA|R|T], a German/Hungarian artist collaboration that took place in an abandoned building in the centre of Budapest, I organised a week of livecoding and dance improvisation jams (see all images here). The idea behind these jams is to facilitate a place, the knowledge, equipment, skills and a creative atmosphere for dancers and coders to get together and create synergies in improvisation.
Budapest (HU), Sept 2011
stopmotion play
Victor and I have been spending some of our off-hours at kibu playing with stop-motion technique. We made some series of silly pictures that we are playing with in different ways. We used finder as a stopmotion editor (using screenflow to capture the animation) with an odd flipbook effect. We also printed some strings that we will post on advertising columns in the neighbourhood. Using OCSdroid and processing, we are currently working on an automatic stopmotion sequence remixer that displays stopmotion series at random on a number of connected android phones (who needs digital photoframes anyway).
Budapest (HU), Sept 2011
Guest Researcher at Kitchen Budapest
From July until early October 2011 I will be guest researcher at Kitchen Budapest in Hungary. The next two months I will spend researching some of my own ideas, and working on some projects. Things are very much in flux, but I’m planning to look into life and learning in living labs, growing a karma ecology mediated by mobiles, and a live-coding and dance improvisation jam.
This city in itself is the setting for an adventure game. I’m creating visual semi-fictional narrative of this adventure with the help of comrades back home. I can add you to it if you’re interested too.
ISEA2011 Istanbul: Weird/Wonderful Street Fair
Together with my colleagues from the Digital Art Lab Project, I will be at ISEA2011 in Istanbul for a street workshop this September. With the Weird/Wonderful Fair we want to direct our attention to openness, flow and co-creation. We invite the local residents of Istanbul to explore with us in a mixture of interactive workshop, intervention and collective art piece.
The Fair attempts to transgress the conference’s boundaries and incorporate the city’s public space, transforming the streets of Istanbul into an open space classroom. Instead of the conventional teacher-student approach which still dominates our educational systems, we propose a mobile peer-teaching format, a more subversive structure where we can use simple DIY projects to facilitate insights.
Flee immediately! Issue 0
“Non-automated interactivity: faking it as a methodology in digital arts education”, my essay on teaching methods for digitally augmented dance performance for teenagers was recently published in:
Flee immediately! Issue 0, summer 2011. Editors: Renee Carmichael and Timothy Cooper. http://fleeimmediately.co.uk
Continue Reading →
At the Arcade
This video shows the process and the final performance of an ongoing project with a classical ballet teacher and her young adults class (16-24 years old) at CKC Zoetermeer (NL). I’ve been developing a teaching format that lets teenagers think about dance as interactive performance and make their own production. This performance is the result of the first course that ran over a period of 2 months, 30 mins a week. The kids developed a story about gamers at an arcade that get sucked into their game and start to live inside it. It seems serious and real – is this what parents are afraid of? – but they know that real life goes on after game over. More images on flickr.
Zoetermeer (NL), June 2011
4-day Digital Dance Theater workshop
The latest session of Digitaal Danstheater was one for the Projectweek (also called Ludic Week) at Erasmus College, one of the local high schools. Twelve girls ranging from 12-15 years old chose this workshop to fill their week, that aims to introduce kids to more sports oriented or creative fields, to engage them socially in ways that aren’t traditionally offered in school setting and to stimulate developing personal talents. All girls worked incredibly hard these four days, during the various warmups (classical, hip hop, salsa, modern), made their own little choreographies and experimented with interactivity: thinking relationships between the body and the computer.
Two groups each made their own interactive dance piece that they performed at the end of the week. It was a fabulous experiment and a good experience that gave a lot of insight into ways to guide group processes, playing attention spans, and scaleability: the most recent Digital Dance Theater workshop was a 4-hour workshop whereas now participants had 4 x 4 = 16 hours in total to get an introduction to virtual theater and produce their own piece. Having more time is a pure luxury for running this workshop and I liked seeing that kids got the opportunity to get thoroughly engaged working towards their own end project over the course of the week.
Zoetermeer (NL), May 2011