“Forget the red-light district, forget the tulip market, and don’t even think about rolling a joint in a coffeehouse. Amsterdam’s Museumnacht has so much to offer, you’ll never see Amsterdam in the same light again.”

English newspaper The Guardian has written an extensive introduction to the Amsterdam museumnacht. Every year, for one night, 41 museums remain open and offer more than 200 free activities to curious visitors. At 2am, when the museums close, the party begins in the nine clubs celebrating the event until dawn.

The even is focussing more and more on non-Dutch visitors, either foreign students and expats, or visitors from abroad. This has resulted a.o. in the new collaboration with Time Out Amsterdam and the cultural newspaper Amsterdam Weekly.

Read the full article, and see you for yourself at n8.nl. Have a great n8!

(disclaimer: as organisor of this event, the editor of this blog is not responsible for any misleading or biassed information. It is really a nice event. Really. Now shoot me)

The Mind’s Museum in Rome addresses myths about mental illness with participatory exhibits and interactive displays.

Overturning preconceptions about mental illness is the leitmotif of the Mind’s Museum (Museo Laboratorio della Mente) in Rome. The museum reopened this month after a high-tech overhaul by Studio Azzurro, a Milan-based art collective that works mostly with interactive and video environments.

Originally, the museum followed a more traditional line, with objects and static panel explanations. But now, the former psychiatric hospital has embraced a dynamic approach and has become more participatory.

In one interactive installation, visitors try to synchronize recorded and mirror images of themselves. In another, visitors sit for a photograph that is projected onto a board along with photos of past patients at the institution, who recount their life stories in sad, lilting taped monologues.

According to the New York Times the Mind’s Museum is a more hands-on experience than other European psychiatric museums like the Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent, Belgium, or the Museum Het Dolhuys in Haarlem, the Netherlands. However, the latter is widely praised for its innovative and humane representation of mental illnesses, even winning a prestigious design award and attracting a lot of attention from both the media and the public.

By stating that Europe is no longer an economic museum, the New York Times praises the old continent for its swift and effective reaction to the global credit crisis. The use of the museum as a metaphor for Europe’s perceived inertia, reflects a widespread attitude among Americans, who often dismissed Europe as a place for languorous meals and vacations, and not economic innovation.

In a time when everything seems turned up side down, perhaps the museum can even become a place for Americans to come to grips with their own failing financial system. Next year the Museum of Modern Art in New York will stage a solo show of work by Dutch video-artist Aernout Mik, including a film that shows the aftermath of a turbulent day of trading on Wall Street.

Video still from ‘Middlemen’, 2001, by Aernout Mik

In “Middlemen” (2001), standing on a trading floor covered with paper, stockbrokers - some of whom are doubled with dummies - stare off into space with empty expressions. In a lavishly constructed set, Mik stages a swarm of latently catastrophic scenes with tragicomic undertones. The museum as a mirror for disillusioned Americans?

A view of the Capitoline Temple in Cologne as depicted the virtual city-model COLONIA|3D.

Der Spiegel Online reports that a team of archaeologists, scientists and software programmers has created a 3D virtual model of the city of Cologne as it was 2,000 years ago. Though not yet online, the program allows visitors to navigate a virtual “flight” around the city, where they will find authentic sights, such as the massive city wall and its monumental gates, the forum, the over 40-meter-high (130-foot) Capitoline Temple, the forum with its semicircular portico and the proconsul’s palace.

COLONIA|3D, as the program is called, is the joint initiative of several German universities and Cologne’s Romano-Germanic Museum. Hamburg and Berlin already have 3D city models that allow users to take virtual flights through the cities using Google Earth. Virtual models of other historical places also exist — for example, for Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum — but in a different form. Those were more like computer-generated animations rather than large-scale models that you could navigate.

Go to the Photo Gallery of the 3D Virtual City Model of Roman Cologne.

Pedestrians pass by a vacant building, at the corner of Fremont and Sixth streets in downtown Las Vegas, where billionaire Poju Zabludowicz hopes to build a new art museum. (Photo by Steve Marcus)

A European billionaire and contemporary art collector wants to convert an old fingerprinting station on East Fremont Street into a museum that would house his extensive collection. The Finnish born billionaire Poju Zabludowicz owns one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world and already initiated and funded Project Space 176 in London’s East End.

His proposal for a 23,000-square-foot Las Vegas Museum of Contemporary Art also includes a club and restaurant. Terry Murphy, a local consultant representing Zabludowicz (pronounced “zah-blue-DOH-vich”), said the museum would help the city move toward its goal of developing a vibrant downtown and reversing its image as a cultural wasteland.

Read more (Las Vegas Sun, October 10, 2008)

The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands is a website set up to preserve the memory of all those who were persecuted as Jews in the Netherlands during the Second World War and who did not survive the Shoah. The Digital Monument is an initiative of the late Professor Emeritus Ies Lipschits, but the responsibility for it was transferred to the Jewish Historical Museum.

Each individual has been given his or her own personal page to which photographs, documents and biographical information can be posted. The Monument also helps surviving relatives to explore their roots and visitors to the website are invited to send in corrections to any mistakes and to provide any additional information they may have.

The home page has been designed to look like a real monument to commemorate all those whose names are included in the Digital Monument. Every coloured dot stands for one person. The colours indicate whether the person was a man (blue) or woman (red), a boy or girl between 6 and 21 years of age (green and yellow, respectively) or a child under 6 years of age (light blue or pink). Clicking a dot opens the personal page of the person concerned.

Members of the same family have been placed together. For most of the families, addresses are known. Clicking on a family’s address will take you to the address page for that family. To the left and right you will see the Jewish families who lived closest to them. Clicking on the address of one of the ‘neighbours’ will take you to that family. In this way you can take a virtual walk down the street or through the neighbourhood, village, or city.

The page of Ruth Emilie Sollinger lists several of her personal documents from the Documents Collection of the Jewish Historical Museum. You can also go on a virtual tour of the house of the Jewish De Jongh family lived at 133 Spanjaardslaan in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden, before their deportation to Auschwitz in November 1942 where all family members died. The virtual tour allows you to roam through the empty rooms, and provides an overview of all objects that were listed in an inventory before being removed by the Nazi’s.

Go to The Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands

Photo by Benjamin Legrain

CENTQUATRE, a former state funeral parlour at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in north-east Paris will reopen this weekend after being transformed into the city’s most daring modern arts centre. It is the latest attempt to make up for 50 years in which Paris has slipped from a world arts capital to a museum city lacking in dynamism, where exasperated artists live in squats or flee to more vibrant scenes in places such as Berlin.

Photo by Jo

Centquatre will offer cutting-edge workshops, studios and film-sets for artists from all over the world, from directors and sound-sculptors to comic-strip artists and fashion designers. The only pay-off is that they must allow the public to wander through and inspect them at work. Some warn it could become an “artists’ zoo” but others hail a revolution in contemporary cultural workspace.

Go to website CENTQUATRE

Source: The Guardian (October 8, 2008)

The Stedelijk Museum’s mobile Construction Cabin in front of the temporary, and recently abandoned premises of the museum.

For more than four years the Stedelijk Museum was temporarily housed in a former postal building near Amsterdam’s central station. After selling the last ticket on September 30, the museum abandoned the space and has become homeless until the end of next year. As late as December 2009, after more than half a decade of renovation and expansion, the illustrious museum will finally re-open at its original location in the centre of the Dutch capital. Due to a combination of legal procedures, financial constraints and construction delays the museum was not finished in time to enable a smooth transition.

However, this forced nomadic existence has not stopped the museum from looking for new and daring ways to stay in touch with its audience and to reach out to new and younger target groups. In a radical attempt to go beyond its own traditional boundaries and to live up to its outspoken ambition to become the fifth museum for modern and contemporary art in the world, the Stedelijk has launched an extensive programme of off-site events that will literally take the museum to the streets of Amsterdam. It consists of both major themed exhibitions of works from the collection at counterpart institutions, such as the Van Gogh Museum and the Nieuwe Kerk, and contemporary art events scattered throughout Amsterdam. The museum has even appointed a group of so-called ‘Eye Openers’, teenagers who (help) organize activities, guided tours and events for people of their own age and act as consultants to the museum.

The newly developed website www.stedelijkindestad.nl contains information in Dutch and English about all activities of the ‘Stedelijk without walls’.

The most striking example of the Stedelijk’s eagerness to overcome the self-created vacuum and to engage with new audiences is the so-called Construction Cabin on Tour. This mobile structure will travel through Amsterdam, from the picture postcard city center to the less picturesque suburbs, and will accommodate various activities. Once installed it unfolds like a Swiss Army Knife, with tilt and turn doors and windows that (un)cover a small coffee corner, an information terminal, and a small flexible space that can be used for film screenings, educational activities and other small-scale gatherings. The mirror-finish look of the polished stainless steel on the inside reflects the surroundings of the Cabin, enabling the museum to blend into the world beyond its own walls.

The Construction Cabin, designed by Niels van Eijk and Miriam van der Lubbe, as a computer rendering (left) and during the official presentation (right).

Click here for a WMV impression (PC) of the new Stedelijk Museum.
Click here for a Quicktime impression (Mac) of the new Stedelijk.
Open the Stedelijk Museum’s photostream in Flickr