Kid Friendly, Open Source

A dispatch on the arts, technologies and cultures in the metropolitan community served by the Amsterdam airport.

Amsterdam. It is very small, really—just a village. The other day, pushing the baby stroller, I walked clear across it. The central area is circular, or semi-circular, at least. Canals such as the Prinsengracht and Keizergracht are also semi-circular and form a kind of readable outline for the city's heart. Tourists throng the narrow streets, holding maps aloft as they puzzle over directions, half-knowing that they literally have been walking in circles.

It is raining now. Outside my window voices intone in Turkish. Forty percent of people living in the five major Dutch cities are immigrants, and I have just joined that statistic. My husband is Dutch, and at birth our son became Dutch, even though he was born in Sydney, Australia. I will have to undergo interrogation at the blank and inhospitable office of the Netherlands Foreign Police.

It has been over two months since we arrived with our two-year-old, surviving the 25-hour flight from Australia. Even though I am familiar with the city, having been here many times, there is something completely different between arriving and knowing you are staying for good and being a visitor, a tourist with a warm home elsewhere. The miserable weather does not help.

In Australia I never followed weather reports. I watched with incomprehension as my husband paid rapt attention to the mainly always sunny predictions. Here, however, the weather people occupy a special place in everyone's hearts. Do they have good news? Will there be sun, and the possibility of joyous afternoons on the city's terraces? One hopes and prays along with the rest of the country. It matters also because the dominant form of transport in Amsterdam is the bike, and biking in the rain is no fun. Biking in general, however, is very pleasurable. The bikes flow, passing and crossing each other with ease.

I have been seeing the city through our child's eyes. Amsterdam is a great place for kids. There are urban farms dotted all over the place, with chickens, goats, rabbits and cows. And of course you could not have a decent Dutch farm without pigs. Artis, Amsterdam's zoo, is home to thousands of exotic creatures. There are also stacks of novel play areas everywhere. Given a bit of spare space the Amsterdammers will site a kid-friendly artwork there, so one is constantly coming across fun things to climb on and explore. The community sandpit also has proved a hit.

Netherlands Media Art Institute (Montevideo/Time Based Arts, <montevideo.nl>) invited me to be an artist-in-residence for a few months, beginning in June. They are a distribution service, a production center, a gallery and also now have a media lab, all in one large building in the center of town. The residency enables artists to work with programmers and other specialists to realize complex projects. I had established a relationship with this organization over the last few years as we co-curated a large new media show of Australian work for March 2001, and they distribute my own video work.

My residency project is to stream large high-resolution video files over what is called the gigaport network. This connects a number of cultural and academic institutions from Rotterdam to Amsterdam. The files will stream/multicast from a database server and then be backprojected onto city windows at night. I also will be sending/testing the files as multicast streams to the Australian National University in Canberra, and other institutions that might like to come on board. Where possible we will be using open-source code.

I realize that I am already in the process of learning a new language, a visual language. The light is different, the forms, the colors. The use of space interests me. There is a string of new buildings along the southbound train line that will be the focus of the new work. Corporate headquarters, clean lines, empty on weekends save for the car traffic...