It was a hellishly busy weekend for media types in Amsterdam: Doors of
Perception, the E-cultural fair and the Amsterdam 'museum night' all at
once. No rest for the wicked. The Doors of Perception (DOP) had a very
attractive theme this year. 'Lightness' appearantly was something that
tickled the imagination of many. It was the biggest DOP ever, the
audience numbers even beat Next5Minutes. 1400 people attended the three
days of lectures and presentations, 1400 people of whom many were
students in art and design academies or international design
professionals.

The conference itself was a balanced mixture of lectures and
presentations in the fields of science, design, art and 'philosophy'.
Somehow the theme of lightness very quickly got connected to questions
around the quality of life on the planet. DOP director Thackaray
admitted that the conference theme could have been 'heaviness', a theme
that was replaced by a focus on its counterpart because "otherwise none
of you would have come". Bruce Sterling's Viridian project, in which the
greenhouse effect gets addressed, 'The Clock of the Long Now' by
Alexander Rose and Brian Eno which aims to raise awareness of the
effects of our actions in the long term, Natalie Jeremienko's desktop
tree that grows with every piece of paper you use in your printer–they
all show some kind of awareness and appeal for a more thoughtful use of
resources. Resources of both the earth and of human energy.

Trying to judge the quality of the conference for an art community is
actually quite hard. DOP of course has firm roots in the design world.
The DOP have been organised by the Dutch Design Institute since 1993.
The DOP became a seperate, independent organisation only after the
director of DOP, John Thackaray, and the Dutch Design Institute had
fierce disagreements about Thackaray's focus on (and alledged obsession
with) new media. This conference was the first to come out of
doorsofperception.com. The roots in design are still showing quite
clearly in the DOP set up. Does, by comparison, the next5minutes (n5m)
conference try to manoevre towards some kind of practical outcome during
the course of its event, the DOP do this too but in a different
direction: where n5m looks for possible collaborative projects of
different media activist groups, DOP looks for practical design
solutions for websites, actual spaces and events. Where the emphasis of
n5m lies on politics, the main focus or starting point of DOP is design.
Two different ways to improve the world. What both conferences share is
a basis in new media culture. In both media art serves as inspirational
factor, as mere illustration or as surprising innovation. It rarely can
exist in its own right, as art. There is of course an overlap in
interests and practices of media design, media activism and media art.
This is why conferences like DOP can be interesting for artists, as long
as artists attending such a conference do not loose themselves
completely in the dominating focus of the day and feel obliged to fit
in.

So what was focussed on, apart from the lightness theme, at DOP?
Presentations of architects and 'interior designers' of both offices and
websites all seemed to move towards the same theme: immersion. The way
they presented it ranged from rather plain to fantastic or near insane.
Everything has to move, and has to be adaptable, and prefferably is
connected to the internet. The website that enables us to keep track of
nearly every second of a formule one race by Lisa Strausfeld was the
best example of this imho, even if the immersion was a totally online
experience in this case. The Quokka site shows the development of mass
media in the best possible way: full coverage of an event, yet fully
adaptable to personal preferences. What to think of architects that want
to bring the net into our office literally though, making you sit and
work next to huge adjustable screens/walls, almost or as if you were
part of the virtual environment yourself? I guess it makes the mouths of
some people water, but how long would they be able to cope with it? I am
not saying this adjustable office Fiona Raby showed us was bad, her
thoughts and work were actually quite interesting, but her presentation
was one of a few in which people were talking about full access to and
adjustability of environments through the use of new media. It was
amazing in the sense of 'why?' (why do it, and why spend so much money
on it?) in the building of Diller and Scofidio (a building to look and
feel like a cloud, in which of course amongst other things projections
and scrolling texts from the internet could be wandered through), and it
reached a fantastic, almost insane peak with the lecture of Ole Bouman.
This dutch architect gave a lecture that can be found on the DOP site.
The animation of the building he was proposing, squirming and moving
like a drunk snail behind him on the projection screen, was over the
top. Of course it is one of those things you will never forget, and I
hope the building is actually constructed at some point, yet the thought
of staying in it for more then a few minutes was terrifying. Nothing is
solid, not the building itself, not its content, and certainly not the
look of the 'walls' inside. Fascinating, but is it light?

Of course the examples above are amongst the 'haute couture' of
architecture. They seem like excersizes or experiments that have to be
done in order to improve our 'ordinary' and solid world, which seems to
be in need of an update now, with the evolving of the information
society, more then ever. Most other presentations of DOP 00 had the same
constructive feel on a social or environmental level, yet they seemed
very much chosen from an educational point of view. They were there to
inform the design and the designers. This phenomenon was interesting and
inspiring to witness, even if one has to be critical about DOP's
approach to art. Let's go for Earth 1.1.