Graphic Design Festival Catalogue

After a 2-day exhibition at Tweakfest in Zurich I am now exhibiting Bitquid for the next 3 weeks at the Graphic Design Festival in Breda, The Netherlands. Bitquid will be shown at the festival’s Decoding exhibition among several other interesting projects.

This time, Bitquid will render a series of images of which I will make exclusive full colour silkscreen prints. If you are interested in these prints, please contact me at: info [*at*]  jeroenholthuis [*dot*] nl.

Finally some proper HD video documentation of Bitquid. This video has been shot while exhibiting in Riga. All credits go out to Laura Frinberga and her colleague Ritvars Lasmanis from Ideju Forums. Thank you for filming, montaging and generously sharing this material! I hope you like the edits I made afterwards.

The High Definition version can be viewed on Vimeo.

Poster of event, Art+Communication 2009: Energy

Currently I am exhibiting Bitquid on the 11th International Festival for New Media Culture ‘Art+Communication 2009: Energy‘ in Riga, Latvia. The whole event is organized by the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture and will be open from 8 October till 1 November 2009. The exhibition looks very nice and started with an inspiring 2-day symposium on the theme energy. Here, people working in the crossover of philosophy, science and art shared their ideas and concepts. For me this is the first time I had to prepare Bitquid for such a transport abroad. A lot of work got into packaging the whole system safely into wooden boxes I made. On arrival the system was in perfect shape. Unfortunately, during the process of the setup, an important part of the system was broken. Eventually with the great help of the guys from RIXC I was able to continue with this exhibition after the part was fixed. My thanks go out for that!

The location: RIXC gallery in Spikeri warehouse

Bitquid data

Bitquid overview

My thanks go out to my sister Jolien Holthuis for making these photographs.

Bitquid renders 02

Here I have made a screenshot while I was comparing original images to the images that have been build by the system after the data was transported in the liquid. With this current setup, it takes about 40 minutes to transport an image of 100 x 75 pixels. It’s not really efficient, but that isn’t what I am going for. The nice thing is that the binary information has been traveling through our tangible environment. The results are not perfect, and they shouldn’t be. I even think they are beautiful. There will be some more tweaking on the system to find out the best settings.

Bitquid overview

Bitquid close-up

Bitquid 1st renders

It was hard work, but finally it is there. From the 2nd of Arpil till the 13th Bitquid is exhibited at the STRP Festival in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. So far the system works really great and I already have got lots of positive feedback.

The concept:

“Jeroen Holthuis tries to explore the relationships between two parallel worlds, our digital and analogue environment. Bitquid explores the relationship between these environments by transforming bits to atoms. It is a system with parallel hoses through which, in turn, coloured and colourless fluids are pumped, in order to represend the liquid ones and zeros. The computer features software that drives specially developed hardware. Literally, rows of bits are send to the system, which are then translated into their liquid equivalents.

From bits to atoms…

The repetitive sound of the valves opening and closing, along with the continuous stream of visual information, confers the feeling of being in an analogue cyberspace. The ticking signifies the moment when a bit goes analogue. In this way the system plays around with the imaginary border at which the digital world ceases to exist and the analogue world takes over. At the end of the system, the liquid analogue data, or ‘bitquid’, is decoded and reproduced again into a new image. The effect of the analogue world on the information will be shown on the two screens. The first screen will show a digital image, the other one will display the same image on the other side, but mediated by the imprint of the analogue world.”

Results

I haven’t got to test the sensors and software for rendering the images after being transported in the fluids. At STRP this experiment is being premiered. The resulting images are really interesting. I can actually see a good resemblance with the original ones. The sensors which read the information in the hoses need to be tweeked a bit and there is some syncing to be done between both computers. I am glad that this experiment really comes together now.

Bitquid valve system

At the moment I am working hard to get my Bitquid ready for my exhibition at the STRP Festival. Bitquid will be exhibited there from April 2nd till April 13th. More info follows.