+20 years for Victory Boogie Woogie

Image and painting (!) by Kiuchi Asami

Invitation: Victory Boogie Woogie – Future Perspectives on a Unfinished Masterpiece

Please join us Friday, December 20 at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag!

Students from the University of Amsterdam, the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and the Hague University of Applied Sciences will present their ideas on the role future technologies will play in the life of Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie.

What:                   Presentations, installations & discussions

Where:                 Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Stadhouderslaan 41

When:                  Friday, December 20, 2013 (14.00 – 16.30)

For whom:         Anyone with an interest in how technology, the future and art could work together

More info:          See below. More details on the program to follow.

Register:              Yes please! Please send an email to Annette Potting (potting@stt.nl)

Costs:                   None

 

About CSI Victory Boogie Woogie

Victory Boogie Woogie is the last work by the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). It  is an iconic work by all standards. A masterpiece, painted from the death bed. An unfinished painting, purchased by the Dutch government at a cost of 35 million euros. An undying source of inspiration to many (artists).

Victory Boogie Woogie has an impressive history. But does it also have a future? In twenty years from now, what (physical) condition will the painting be in? How will Victory Boogie Woogie speak to us then? In what ways will we be able to engage with the work? What will it take for Victory Boogie Woogie to be considered relevant in 2034?  What role will the original painting play in future encounters with Victory Boogie Woogie?

In CSI Victory Boogie Woogie (CSI-VBW) it is our ambition to answer questions like these. Our focus is on technology. In short, we want to figure out what role new technologies will play in the life of the Victory Boogie Woogie. By using the word ‘life’ we want to stress that something valuable is at stake here, something worth preserving. But life also refers to a future – open, mouldable, full of possibilities and opportunities.

This project (1) invites participants to identity new technologies that they believe could become relevant to art, (2) it challenges them to assess where these technologies are going, and (3) it forces participants to imagine the impact of these future technologies on the Victory Boogie Woogie.

Above all, CSI Victory Boogie Woogie is a project that offers participants the opportunity to find out for themselves how art and technology could work together. In that sense, the painting itself – Victory Boogie Woogie – is ‘merely’ a vehicle for imagining a future when art and technology find each other in new, innovative ways.

In eight weeks’ time (November 1 – December 20) forty students were given the opportunity to really make CSI-VBW their own project. They were stimulated to decide for themselves what aspects of the Victory Boogie Woogie they wanted to focus on, which technologies they wanted to dive into and think of innovative ways of applying these technologies to Piet Mondrian’s masterpiece.

On December 20, 2013, these students will present their findings.

About the project

CSI-VBW is joint effort by the Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends (Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek, STT), the University of Amsterdam, the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and the Hague University of Applied Sciences.

Royal Academy of Art (Interactive Media Design): Nick van t End

University of Amsterdam (Art History): Marjolijn Bol and Rogier Brom

The Hague University of Applied Sciences (Industrial Design Engineering): Janneke Sluijs

Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends: Jacco van Uden

Other partners are The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands and Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

CSI Victory Boogie Woogie or CSI-VBW is part of the STT futures study that takes as its subject new relations between art, science and technology. For more on this futures study, go to http://stt.nl/projecten/kunst-techniek/english/