The STRP Festival is a gigantic Dutch party with art, technology, and music all smooshed together into a ten day love triangle. It's the biggest festival of its kind in Europe, and is held at Strijp-S, a huge industrial area in Eindhoven. This year I brought my mom, whose idea of art begins and ends with whatever is currently hanging in the IKEA poster gallery.
This year's featured artist was the Belgian Lawrence Malstaf. STRP's exhibition presented nine of his intriguing works, one of which is that nightmare above. Some sort of sucking device gradually removes the air from between two large, transparent plastic sheets to leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended.
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When I told the nice lady who was in charge of brushing away people's bad breath from between the plastic that I didn't want to be a hyperventilating smoked sausage for even one minute, she tried to reassure me: "The panic is actually excluded," she said, "because you can't move anywhere. If you just continue to breathe you'll see it's a very relaxing experience. Almost like meditation." Yeah fucking right.
This is an installation by Zilvinas Kempinas that the STRP described as "a visual puzzle." It takes some big artballs to describe a couple strands of videotape having a dance for two fans as a "visual puzzle." Incidentally, to me this was a bit like a work of Thomas Hill's I saw earlier this year at the Flux/S festival.
This installation asks you to sit down in a chair. When you press a button you become the eye of a category 4 polystyrene foam ball hurricane. As the balls are roaring past you can calmly think about, for example, the yin and yang of creativity and business in the art world. They describe it as some sort of hypnotic meditation machine; an external contrast of chaos and inner peace. Fancy words for a room with a bunch of balls, but I would welcome this in my house over a yoga mat any day.
This was a weird thingy. There was something going on inside that tube that was supposed to put me in a trance, but all I could think about was that the couch I was lying on was more comfortable than any bed I've ever slept in.
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That futuristic hula-hoop is called an orientation machine. The device pulls you in one direction and you can choose to carry yourself with or against it. I chose the latter, and now I know what it feels like to be bullied by a spastic robotic ring. The guy in the corner spent minutes laughing at me, but that was probably more because my skirt got shoved up to my tummy and I was wearing 40 dernier tights (quite a scanty thickness) than the fact that I had some weird circle around my waist.
In these tanks are 12 species of electric fish from the Amazon river. Their sonic electric fields provide a weird audiovisual environment, and by pressing buttons simultaneously you can hear the sound of each individual fish. After you listen to this you will decide that you want a singing fish for your next birthday.
Rotterdam artist Marnix de Nijs made this "Physiognomic Scrutinizer," which analyzes your face. Based on your facial features you'll be matched up to one of the many profiles in the database consisting of sex and/or drug-addicted celebrities, suicidal artists, or bloodthirsty serial killers. I have something in common with Ilona Staller, Jeff Koons' ex-wife and a hardcore porn star who likes to give political speeches with her titty out.
That's my mom up there on the right. She is rubbing a mountain of tape with an audio plug, which caused a fuzzy composition that made a noise a lot like what heartburn might sound like. On the way home I told her that the organic tape mountain was visualizing a broken cultural memory of the sound of the 70s that will soon disappear forever. She said, "I suppose that's art, right?" I love my mom. And weirdo festivals like STRP.TEXT: GIDI HEESAKKERS
PHOTOS: GIDI HEESAKKERS AND GIDI'S MOMFor photos of the nightlife side of the festival click here and here.
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