Visit a big exhibition during the day, watch some crazy art performances, and then go to a big concert - how does that sound to you? Last Saturday, me and some friends and colleagues visited the STRP festival in Eindhoven. The organisation of the festival describe it the following way: “STRP is unique because it presents visual arts and music ranking alongside film, games, and robots”. So a promising concept! And yes, despite the messy built-up of the exhibition, the dominance of rather older installation works (actually, some of them were developed in the Netherlands and so have been shown plenty of times before), there were some gems! Overall there was a great atmosphere, and since I guess a big part of the public came for the concerts of Roisin Murphy, Trentemoeller, Goose, 2many djs, and so on and so forth, the exhibition did give a lot of people who are normally not involved with media art a chance to experience it! So in that way it seems successful - they had over 18.000 visitors in 3 days!

I will just quickly give you a glimpse of what was to be seen / experienced at STRP.

Let’s start with the exhibition. As I said, some older works were present, such as Daan Roosegaarde’s Duin 4.1, or Sonia Cillari’s Se mi sei vicino (If you are close to me), both developed at the Netherlands Media Art Institute where I work. Here a quick impression of Sonia’s lovely installation. An actress is standing on an interface. Whenever visitors touch her, this changes the graphics on the screen. In a way, the installation ’senses’ contact between humans.

Then there were some gems, as I said, for example Theo Watson’s Vinyl Workout, a big projection of an LP on the ground that starts to play music whenever you start walking on it - it actually adjusts the music to your tempo, you can even play it backwards or scratch! Simple concept, so effective. Lovely!

I also loved Jiacong Yan’s work Whisper. A table with beautiful flowers that will speak to you and whisper erotic poetry in your red ears when you listen closely! So that’s what flowers could tell us if they could speak?!

I also quite liked the Electric moOns by WHITEvoid / Christopher Bauder, it was a really quite impressive big installation of white ballons and light, which can be moved up and down, fast and slow, to form images like pixels on an enormous grid. I did not quite see the images though I have to admit - maybe a bit too farfetched! Anyways it looked beautiful, and there was a performance (ATOM) together with Monolake, here an impression.

…and for everyone who always wanted to know how a robot sees the world, there was Johannes Taelman’s I-Robot. Put on the headset and see the world out of the perspective of a little robot trapped in a miniature world next to you!

Last but not least (for my STRP experience) there was also a nice performance by Die Audio Gruppe who create mobile, multi-acoustical artworks such as electro-acoustic clothing equipped with amplifiers and speakers. The Audio Ballerinas were wearing plastic tutus with speakers and all built in, giving off different sounds that could be controlled with sensors in their hands. Check out this video from youtube showing one of their performances in public space!

thanks to Meinder for taking such nice pictures!