I spent Saturday in The Hague for the Mastermundo conference which turned out to be a really good event. Icing on the cake, the city was under the spell of TodaysArt. The Dutch city is as tiny as the programme of the festival was dense so you couldn’t walk 50 meters without some performance, Pictoplasma exhibition, electronic music or installation jumping at you.

Pilot, Pictoplasma, and projection of a work by Kustaa Saski

Going for lunch i realized i was walking on the runway of THX: The Hague International Airport. The festival had just turned the Grote Marktstraat, one of the city’s busiest streets, into a virtual landing strip, complete with the noise of a Boeing 747 taking off and landing, super bright landing lights and 100 loudspeakers (video.)

At the end of the strip was Onno Poiesz‘ Pilot, an airplane hanging upside down. The suspended aircraft is transformed from a modern machine to an archaeological object, which is linked to a period that is not yet over: our time. The whole seems to be reduced to a reflection of reality: the scale model.

Two minutes from the urban runway was yet another awesome interactive light sculpture by United Visual Artists. The monumental Tryptich is made of three brooding LED sculptures that respond to the movements of people approaching them by changing colour, getting brighter and chirpier. While the installation fitted perfectly the festival, it was so quiet and peaceful that it made also an interesting contrast to the rest of the programme (the video should give you a very vague idea of what the work is like.)

Ha! Now i realize that this post was supposed to be filled with the notes i took during the UNStudio presentation at Mastermundo. Well… it will have to be for later.

Ze photo set.