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
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.
A breathtaking journey through the skies, streets and trees of Rotterdam, telling the story of past, present, and possible futures of trees in the city.
Filmed in a single shot, captured using high-tech point cloud scanners, the film takes the audience through the cityscape from a series of unique viewpoints. The camera moves over, under, and through the urban environment, whilst narration from experts (an architectural historian, a tree advocate, a naturalist and the city council tree expert) offers insights into how the urban and natural can co-exist.
In these times of environmental catastrophe, what can we learn from nature that already surrounds us? This film asks the audience to question their own relationship with trees: When’s the last time you really looked at a tree?
A collaboration with artist Alice Ladenburg. Full project information and press pack available at treesofrotterdam.com
Short film, 12 minutes; 4k UHD Apple ProRes file.
A film by Alice Ladenburg and Ollie Palmer
Through the use of a special headset, a member of the public is transported into a parallel cinematic world, where the familiar urban landscape, people and landmarks still seem to be there, but are now part of an immersive film plot. The player become a central figure in a dramatic story – but what is real and what is not? And who is pulling the strings?
Three parallel filmic worlds exist simultaneously.
Immersive reality theatrical experience; live. Project in development.
Sign up for updates on this project (find out when we’re testing, etc).
Tryday
V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media
Rotterdam, NL10 April 2020
Cancelled due to Coronavirus lockdowns, to be rescheduled soon.
I’m excited to announce that I am working on a new project called All the Worlds, along with writer Ross Sutherland, and creative technologists Adriaan Wormgoor and Mark Selby. The project builds on work I completed during my residency at V2_, and is a highly filmic immersive reality experience, creating cinematic worlds on real city streets.
We received a grant from the Stimuleringsfonds and Film Fonds to develop the concept, technology, and stories to a proof-of-concept stage. Over the coming months we’ll be making things and testing them in and out of the studio in Rotterdam.
Watch this space!
A directory of fictional companies, complete with mottoes, addresses, and phone numbers. Made for NaNoGenMo 2019, a month-long generative writing challenge.
See the directory online at directory.olliepalmer.com, and find the code for the text and website generation on GitHub.
I decided to participate in NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) this year with a project called Directory Directory – an online directory of fictional companies, all located within the Alphaville-Zulutown region. It’s organised like an old phone book, by service type, and each company has a name, slogan, address, and phone number.
Some day in the future I’ll update the directory to have more information, and use more advanced grammar, and maybe even be printable. But the project was a nice excuse to learn some new things (the Tracery library for python is fun to play with; it’s also the first time I’ve built a workflow to build a whole generative website).
You can see the project at directory.olliepalmer.com, and play with the code that wrote it at GitHub. Enjoy!
