Trees of Rotterdam will be in the group show A Tree at Onomatopee in Eindhoven from 13 July to 22 September this year. If you like trees, this is the show for you!
More information at the Onomatopee website.
Note: for some reason, only Alice is credited on most of the show promotional materials. So it goes.
Trees of Rotterdam will be at the Metropolis Festival in Rotterdam this Sunday (7 July) as part of the IFFR RTM Short selection. It’s free!
More information at the Metropolis Festival website.
The film Alice Ladenburg and I made – Trees of Rotterdam – will be shown as part of performance presentation at the Modes of Production conference in Coimbra, Portugal, on Friday 28 June. More information about the conference here, and the film here.
Exciting news – I have a solo show opening soon at Natlab in Eindhoven. It’s called Time Frames, and is based on my 2023 live video essay of the same name. It’s about time.
The show features two video works in some specially-made cinematic rooms:
Yes, this video lends its name to the exhibition – and it’s a newly updated version of the film, in a specially-created cinema room. It’s a film essay made using my Reflexive Scripted Design process, about the way that the times we live in shape what we perceive as possible. It’s thirty-something minutes long and features footage I’ve shot from around the world.
A special version of 86400 – a 24-hour film that features a new Google Images search for every second of the day – constructed inside a modified viewer. This work hasn’t been shown since 2017 – previously it was projected on a huge screen at the Palais de Tokyo, and in the hallway of the School of The Art Institute in Chicago. (Do you want to know more about this project? There is a write-up in my PhD here.)
A solo show by Ollie Palmer.
Natlab, Kastanjelaan 500, 5616 LZ Eindhoven
Exhibition open 23 June until 3 October 2024.
Produced by Baltan Labs, supported by CBK R’DAM.
On the 22 June at 17h there will be an opening party, featuring a live performance. Bring your best timepiece.
Thank you to Baltan Labs – Marlou, Sarie, Ishani, and Lorenzo – for making this happen!
More information at Baltan Laboratories’ website
When I first moved to Rotterdam 7 years ago, I was excited to have the Boijmans Museum so close. So many paintings I’d seen in books – so many Jheronymous Bosches! iki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Tower of Babel! – there in real life, in front of my eyes. Then, in 2019 it closed for major renovation…initially, for 7 years, but now it looks like it will be 10.
So imagine my delight when I was asked recently if we could screen Trees of Rotterdam at Boijmans as part of the Rotterdam Architecture Month!
If you’d like to see the film in a pretty rare setting, please come on down on the 8 June at 20h. More information and tickets available at the Rotterdam Architecture Month website. I think there will be a Q&A too.
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I am terrible at keeping news up to date. This is a retrospective post…
Trees of Rotterdam, the short film I made with Alice Ladenburg, premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January. It was paired with Carel van Hees’ beautiful documentary Berichten uit de Hunkerbunker, a moving portrait of a city through the eyes of an elderly woman living in the RVS apartments on the Beukelsdijk in Rotterdam. I absolutely loved Carel’s film, and it was a pleasure sharing the stage for the many Q&A sessions.
Overall, there were six sold-out screenings of the programme. The film will also be shown at a few more venues later in the year, to be confirmed.
Here are some photos. As ever, I’m not great at documenting things as they happen.
I feel honoured to have been interviewed by Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart from Dubmorphology about ants as part of their work Echoes of Disruption. The work forms part of the new exhibition UnNatural History, a major new exhibition exploring natural history and climate change curated by Invisible Dust at The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry.
More about the video:
Echoes of Disruption, 2021
Digital video
18 min
Courtesy of the artists
Echoes of Disruption is video entry 11543.1 from the laboratory log-book of time-travelling researchers, with journal notes narrated by an Artificial Intelligence program. Having travelled back to the 21st century the researchers begin decrypting clues by exploring natural history collections, carrying out observational experiments and assembling interviews and content from scientific researchers, social scientists, cultural theorists, writers and poets. Their objective is to gain an insight into the turning point after which a dramatic change in the Earth’s delicate and precarious ecosystem leads to a catastrophic fracture in the future timeline.
Credits:
In conversation with Deborah Wolton and Ollie Palmer
Voice over Aniruddha Das
Processing ant simulations Ollie Palmer
Soundtrack Dubmorphology and DSPSSSSD
More about the exhibition:
UnNatural History features 26 international artists working in Aotearoa New Zealand, Austria, Belgium, Germany, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Singapore, Turkey, UK and USA. It includes four newly commissioned works responding to the Herbert’s Natural Science Collection by Frances Disley, Dubmorphology, Tania Kovats and Gözde İlkin.
The observational skills and techniques of artists, including their speculations, have enabled us to learn about plants and animals in drawings, long before the advancements of technologies such as microscopes and photography. Featuring drawings, paintings, sculpture, installation, lens-based, digital media and new technologies, UnNatural History will connect these valuable collections to the past, present, and future of our relationship to nature through depictions, scientific representations and imagined realities created by artists.
The exhibition is open from 28 May – 22 August 2021. More information here.
Students of the Scripted Design course I run at MIVC are putting on a show at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media on 17 December, in which they will showcase their work from the course: a series of rules-based videos, and films which compile videos made every day throughout the course into one video artefact.
The show has been curated by Yusuf Deniz, Bregje Horsten, and Leonardo Landoni.
Do come along! 17 December, V2_ Rotterdam, 18-21h.
For more information about the course, see sd.olliepalmer.com
I’m very excited to be giving a lecture as part of the Bartlett’s Constructing Realities lecture series next week. If you are in London, please do pop in on the 15th February. It will also be the first chance I’ve had to see the Bartlett’s shiny new campus.
‘Scripts’ in architecture are usually associated with computer-based design programming. However, this narrow usage belies a rich vein of concepts intrinsic to architecture and authorship. This lecture poses the script as a useful critical and methodological tool within architectural design, absorbing and reinterpreting ideas from behavioural psychology, computation, dance, immersive theatre, the Absurd, and the Oulipo. The lecture is illustrated through a series of projects completed during Palmer’s residency at the Palais de Tokyo and PhD by Design at the Bartlett spanning dance, film, installation, and data manipulation.
Ollie Palmer is an artist and designer based in the Netherlands. He holds an AHRC-funded PhD by design from the Bartlett and was artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2015-16. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at the V&A Museum, Opera Garnier de Paris, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. He co-authored the winning proposal for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018, and sits on the project’s curatorial advisory committee. He formerly taught within the Bartlett’s Interactive Design Lab and at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. He currently teaches at TU Delft.
More information: Bartlett event website / Facebook event page
I am excited to have two films screening at the inaugrural Architectural Film Festival in London from June 7-11 this year. Both were produced during my residency at the Palais de Tokyo.
A film about propaganda and the production of fake news, created entirely using the techniques of the Internet Research Agency propaganda factory in St Petersberg.
Room 11, Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf – free entry
Wed 7 Jun 11:00-13:00 (ArchFilmFest Selection A, 120m total)
Thu 8 Jun 11:00-13:00 (ArchFilmFest Selection A, 120m total)
From the live performance at Opera Garnier de Paris on 18 June 2016, featuring choreography by Simon Valastro. Two dancers attempt to communicate via a new technology which converts their movements to words, using vector space translation.
Bargehouse | free entry
Room 11, Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf
Sun 11 Jun 11:00-11:46 (ArchFilmFest Competition Shortlisted)
Sun 11 Jun 13:40-14:26 (ArchFilmFest Competition Shortlisted)
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) | ticket required
Sun 11 Jun 16:30-18:30 ("From Above" category, with introduction by Competition Director Anna Ulrikke Andersen)
More information