Lectures & exploratory workshop
I am really looking forward to the lectures of next Thursday by Maaike Lauwaert (Mondriaan Foundation) and Agnes Petho (Sapientia-Hungarian University, Cluj, Romania). The Mondriaan Foundation started a special ‘Inter-arrangement’ for cross-over projects some time ago, in particular for projects that combine new media with older ones; Maaike will tell us more about it, I am sure. Agnes Petho instead tickled our fancy by sending us a fascinating text on the use of word & image within the early and the late films by Jean-Luc Godard, as a kind of entree to her speech. It made me anxious to view the Godard dvd’s I bought over the last couple of months (Histoire(s) du cinéma, Détective, Le weekend).
But first we have our European Science Foundation exploratory workshop Intermedialities: Theory, History, Practice, Friday 12th to Sunday 14th of June at De Rode Hoed (Amsterdam). With attendees coming from seven different countries, with attractive and promising presentations, with a desire to come up with concrete plans for the future while being surrounded by the past, I am sure we’ll have an intense but also a productive and satisfying encounter. Next to serious business, there will be relaxation too. The guests will enter their hotel through the facade and lobby of a former theatre, dating 1908 (the rest used to be a gold trading company building). Our venue is the ‘Emperor’s Room’ of an almost four centuries old canal house, once a hidden church (the oldest and largest in its kind). We’ll have dinner in a former cigar factory, named after a Belgian television hero from the sixties, and located in an alley named Endless Prayer. We’ll serve drinks aboard a canal boat tour, of course. That should loosen the tongues a bit and bring on some inspiration… The weather forecast is good: the sun comes back Friday and temperatures will rise a bit.
Ivo Blom 
