VR-augmented Dutch Digital Art app

More art in public spaces is soon to be seen in the Dutch new town of Almere. DDAMA's (Dutch Digital Art Museum Almere) digital art tour app offers opportunities for artists and for local and global use. Moreover, it makes art accessible to more people outside the physical museum.

The operation of the VR-augmented Dutch Digital Art app is similar to Pokémon Go: using the app and your phone's camera, you can virtually discover objects while walking outside. You see art in public spaces through Augmented Reality in the app.

A number of interested parties will be testing the beta version of the DDAMA app on Friday 18 August in Almere Centrum. The app will soon allow you to virtually walk around the art on display and you can even take a photo with it. In squares and at the fairgrounds, testers search for art objects with their phones. Magic mushrooms at the fun fair and aliens over a lake and  storming a theatre? Fun to look at art outside like this you can do alone or together.

Making art accessible
Art outside makes it accessible to everyone and does not require an expensive building. The virtual reality app was developed by DDAMA under the guidance of Jan Coenen, a volunteer at DDAMA, together with students from Windesheim University of Applied Sciences. Artwork produced by the local artist Jan Coenen has been used in the VR tour test app.

Exhibition opportunities for artists
The app can make work by more artists visible and accessible to a wide audience. No groundwork and permit procedures are needed to display art outdoors. More artists can get a stage and more people can enjoy it. With help from the DDAMA-VR app, soon more art can be seen in Almere's public spaces. Supporting the further development of the app, for example, will give Flevoland artists more opportunities to show their work. 

Out of necessity
The Dutch Digital Art Musuem Almere (DDAMA) is a priviate initiative and exists for six years now. The physical museum has changed venues in Almere seven times. The VR-augmented Dutch Digital Art app will offer the museum access and space not only to local and regional artists, but also to global artists. It will also offer access not only to local and regional viewers, but also to global users of the app. 

The VR-augmented Dutch Digital Art app can be found in the Playstore. (For now available only for Android.)
If you can read and listen in Dutch, there is a TV-radio interview with Jan Coenen: https://www.omroepflevoland.nl/gemist/radio/345297/nieuwe-app-is-soort-van-pokemon-go-maar-dan-voor-kunst

Oral history of the Battle of Arnhem

During World War 2 (WW2) there have been two massive evacuations in The Netherlands. During the bombardment on Rotterdam on May 14, 1940 ca. 75.000 people became homeless and ca. 23.000 left the city. The evacuation of Arnhem was really massive as more than 150.000 citizens had to leave the city for the battle of the bridge over the river Rhine in September 1944.

The battle around the bridge of Arnhem has been well documented by memoires of generals and war experts and was the subject of a real Hollywood movie The bridge too far (1977). And some stories of the Arnhem citizens were usually published as memorials around the month of September. But from last year onwards a drive for stories of the ‘evacuees’ was organised in the oral history project I WIIL BE BACK (IK KOM TERUG). Central in this project are the Airborne Museum in Oosterbeek near Arnhem and Bureau van Kessel, based in Arnhem.

The project collects the memories of civilians who had to leave their homes after the Battle of Arnhem. This impact of the war past is collected, recorded and shared in the Airborne Region. In this way, the memories will be recorded and passed on to present and future generations.

Already more than 180 evacuees, surviving relatives and host families have already donated their stories and hope to reach out to other evacuees to start sharing their stories now as well. "Because when we are no longer here, no one will know how bad it was". These stories of the evacuees were recorded and condensed to interviews of 1200 words. Out of the 180 stories 20 stories were selected for presentation on a website, in an outdoor exposition and a podcast. 

 

 

 

 

 

The project 

On the website every selected story tells about leaving home, the flight, the return to Arnhem and the rebuilding of the city and the lives. The stories are illustrated with pictures from the family album and drawings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The outdoor exposition consists of five venues in and around Arnhem (2x), Renkum, Ede en Overbetuwe. Per venue five stories of evacuees from that region tell their story on a panel in the Dutch language; on the back of the panel the story can be read in English. The stories are compact and have been illustrated with historical photographs and drawings.

Arnhem - The Dutch Open Air Museum

Arnhem -  Evacuation monument

Oosterbeek -  Airborne Museum

Elst -  Monument the Wing

Ede -  Airborne Monument

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Boumans Brothers talking with Igoné (11 years) during the podcast recording

The podcast series consist of twenty live interviews with the evacuees, who tell about their memories. In the podcast a connection is made with the youth. Teenagers listened to the stories, reacted to them and translated the flight stories into drawings and poems, which were presented to the evacuees. Our podcast has been listened to by Igoné (11 years). My brother and I met her in the Open Air Museum in Arnhem and had a talk about the flight story of my parents. She had illustrated the fragment of my pregnant mother climbing a ladder in a haystack on a plate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The English translation of the family panel in Elst, near Arnhem. On the left bottom is the plate painted by Igoné. (Tick on the picture for enlarging the photograph)

 The Boumans Brothers (Wim 80 years and Jak 78 years) offered the family evacuation story, which was selected as one of the twenty. We researched the family story already in 2020 in the framework of 75 years of liberation of the Netherlands. Earlier I had had produced the lifetime book of our parents in 1999 and lifted the chapter with the war time story from the book to start the research. We plotted their flight from their house which was within 500 meters from the bridge. It took my father and mother, pregnant from me, 69 days and 105 kilometres before they found a lovely family in Varsseveld that took them in and hosted them till the end of the war. During the stay in Varsseveld I was born in a temporary hospital next to an old folk’s home; five months after my birth was announced by a classified advertisement in a regional newspaper. And we found a daughter of the hosting family, who recognised our family name. 

So, now our family story can be read on the web as well as the panel of the open air exposition in Elst (in Dutch and English) and can be listened to in the (Dutch language) podcast IK KOM TERUG on the Apple Podcast, Spotify and Google Podcast. 

UPDATE (August 12th, 2023): The podcast of our family story (sorry in Dutch) can now be listened to: https://app.springcast.fm/18033/jak-en-wim-boumans-igone-loman-ik-kom-terug-herinneringen-aan-de-evacuatie

 Terminology

The letter statue with the Dutch word vlucht (flee) in the centre of Arnhem

In this blog I have used the terms evacuee and refuge interchangeably. In Arnhem the term evacuee has been used till 2022. In that year a letter statue was unveiled stressing the role of the people fleeing for violence(in Dutch vlucht). I personally rather use the term refugee for my parents. In order to indicate the difference between the terms, I use the family story of my father and his brother, my uncle Johan. Both had come to Arnhem to work in a brick factory. Johan got married before the war and had a house close to the central railway station in Arnhem. My father got married during the war and got a home at the southern part of the river Rhine. When people had to flee from Arnhem in September 1944, Johan went to relatives of his wife with his family of 4 people. He had a rather quiet stay there and when the signal for return was given, the family could return to the house and continue with their life. Our family, by contrast, lost their home, walked more than 100 kilometres in 69 days to find a hospitable family, returned to Arnhem with no home to go back to and had to live-in for three years before they could pick up their lives again with a rented house and a job. My uncle could be labelled as an evacuee, while my father was a refugee.

More information

If you want to know more about the flight story of my parents go to the blog with 32 instalments:  https://wegvandebrug.blogspot.com/. The site is in the Dutch language, but use Google Translate or other translation programs. For more information, post a reaction to the blog.

 

The Amsterdam Digital City registerd in UNESCO Memory of the World

The Digital City (DDS) was recently added by Unesco to the international Memory of the World register. This list includes cultural and historical documents and archives of global importance. The regstration of The Digital City is the first time of a digital item, i.c. an online community, in the UNESCO Memory of the World.

With the Memory of the World programme and specifically the register, Unesco aims to conserve valuable archives, library collections and individual works and protect them from neglect, decay or sometimes even deliberate destruction. Memory of the World has been in existence for 30 years, creating awareness of the importance of documentary heritage for humanity's collective memory.

At the registry, mostly relatively old items are recited. Material that meets the image that many people have of documentary heritage: parchment, handwritten pieces, silk-screened paper, weathered books with leather bindings. And at the same time, over the past three or four decades, we have made huge strides in the digital field. Not just in digitising that old material. But digital communities, games and digital art have also made their appearance.

The first design of the map of the Digital City (Amsterdam)

The Digital City - precisely also with the story behind it, with web archaeology and with an enormous effort as digital born heritage has been brought back to life - now gets this Unesco status is important. It is a recognition that relatively young and digital-born heritage is also eligible. It inspires others to look at more recent digital heritage with the same perspective'.

The map of the Digital City 

The Digital City (De Digitale Stad, DDS) was founded in Amsterdam in 1994 as one of the world's first online communities. Users could communicate via chat rooms, build virtual houses and participate in online events. It was an inspiration for later online networks. Amsterdam Museum launched a project to preserve and display DDS in 2011. Beeld & Geluid manages the audiovisual archive, while the Koninklijke Bibliotheek maintains the reconstructions and documentation.

Archive Dutch game magazine Power Unlimited on USB stick

The Dutch video game magazine Power Unlimited is digitising its 30-year archive and is offering this archive for sale to its fans. Power Unlimited is celebrating its 30th anniversary. The first edition of the magazine appeared in July 1993. Over the years, the magazine, which now appears ten times a year, has grown into the largest games magazine in the Benelux.

The archive, consisting of almost 350 issues, will not appear online, but will be delivered in a one-off action on a USB stick for 39,95 euro. The USB stick archive will be delivered in September. The supply will be limited. In September the printed jubilee edition will be available with a review of history of the magazine. The combination of the USB stick and jubilee magazine will be available at 47,50 euro.

The first Power Unlimited magazine was published in July 1993 by defunct VNU Media. From 2007 Power Unlimited was published by HUB Publishers, which went bankrupt in 2013. But the magazine was saved by Reshift Digital.

Power Unlimited has not limited itself to print. It has organised game competitions such as Unlimited Game Awards, published DVDs, presented television programs on TMF-Netherlands and MTV and has its own YouTube channel Power Unlimited

 

Dutch theologian and poet Huub Oosterhuis passed away

On Easter Day, theologian and poet Huub Oosterhuis passed away at the age of 89.

I had the pleasure of arranging the rights for a selection of his prayers and poems for the English anthology Times of Life for the Paulist Press in New York. The selection is from the Dutch language collections Hoe ver is de nacht and Dan zal ik leven. The translation is by N.D. Smith (Norfolk UK).

Publisher: Paulist Press 

Year of publication: 1979

Editions: 3

Paperback: 114 pages

ISBN-10 : 0809122456

ISBN-13 : 978-0809122455

 

 

Other translations (translations by N.D. Smith and rights managed by Frank Fehmers): 

- Your Word is Near (1968);

-  Fifty Psalms (1973)

-  At Times I See (1974);

-  Prayers, Poems and Songs (1975)

 

Tears from heaven...

When the Dutch radio news service interrupted regular programmes on the last day of 2022 for the obituary of the retired pope, Benedict XVI, it rained in the Netherlands.

Benedict XVI was averse to tradition. The only tradition he broke with as pope was his retirement. Otherwise, as pope, he was a fanatical guardian of tradition and the doctrine of faith.

Before taking office as pope, he was, among other things, the head of the Department of the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican. Originally from Bavaria, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger had risen through the archdiocese of Munich to become prefect of the department of religious doctrine in the Vatican from 1981. He had become a kind of minister in charge of guarding the purity of religious doctrine. And he did so with great vehemence.

And Catholics in the Netherlands noticed that. In the 1960s, Dutch theology became known at home and abroad. Theologians from Nijmegen Catholic University became well-known Dutchmen, despite the Flemish origin of some. Schillebeeckx and Schoonenberg, in particular, trained a whole group of new theologians in the Netherlands and in Europe and regularly appeared on television programmes. 

The thinking of Dutch theologians was not only confined to the Netherlands. The second half of the 1960s saw a whole wave of translations of their works. For instance, Frank Fehmers, the later producer of the international television series Barbapappa, was an adviser to a religious book publisher in New York, the Paulist Press. He put books from Dutch publishers out for reading reports among theologians and theology students and, if the report was favourable, for translations. However, when Ratzinger started agitating against the new-lighters like Kung, Schillebeeckx and Schoonenberg and others as a scholar from 1972 and became prefect of religious doctrine at the Vatican from 1981, the wave slowly rolled to its death and churches in the Netherlands emptied.

Tears will be shed in heaven, but in the Netherlands it rained and people prepared to say farewell tot the year 2022.

Jak Boumans (aka James M. Boumans) M.Div. (Master of Divinity) translated Dutch theology books ( The Sacrament of the Eucharist) during his studies from 1966 to 1970 at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, La.  In 1979, he handled the translation rights for Time of Life by Huub Oosterhuis.

Dutch vintage PC auctioned for 3.100 euro

The illustration is of a Holborn 6500 and not of a Holborn 6110, which is up for auction.

Catawiki organised an auction of vintage computer objects last week.  This new section at Catawiki of vintage computer objects differs from the other offered computer objects of common portable computers and tablets. The vintage objects on offer come from the eighties and nineties. They are so far old calculators, but also Apple machines like MacIntosh and Indigo as well as Commodore machines (with or without packaging). But at this auction it was possible to bid on a unique machine. And that was done by 10 bidders with a hefty price for the winner of the auction. It is not about millions as with the first Apple machines, but for a Dutch PC, 3,100 euros, excluding auction and shipping costs, is a considerable amount. This while the machine is no longer functioning due to a problem with the motherboard.operational.

But it is a Holborn (Born in Holland), made in a company that from 1979, exclusively manufactured PCs. The hardware of the machine was designed by Hans Polak together with Henny Bevers and the design of the futuristic terminal was made by Vos Industrial Designers. Inside, the terminal was a modified MicroBee monitor and used a Z80 processor. The Holborn used the operating system CP/M.

Article in the Tubantia of 21 May 2021, saying that this Dutch invention from 1978 could have beaten Apple: unbelievable, but no one saw it.
 
The company Holborn started with its headquarters in Holten in 1978. The first manufacturing facility was in Hengelo and later in Enschede. The company operated only briefly, from 1979 to 1983, when it went bankrupt. The company developed two production lines: the growth computer the multi 9100, an expandable, customised business system with a self-developed operating system Holborn Operating System (HOS); later the 7100 version was released, which could be expanded to the 9100. But Holborn is better known for the stand-alone Holborn 6110 under CP/M and the prototype 6500 both with the science-fiction-like monitor. There were probably only 100 devices of the 6110 produced and sold, mostly to small companies for administrative purposes. The styled and ergonomic machine was initially priced at 30,000 guilders (approx. 14,000 euros). In the Netherlands, the company had to compete against larger home-grown machines such as Elektrologica and Philips, but also against cheaper office machines such as Wang. And the real competition came in 1981 with the introduction of the PC by IBM and later clones.
 
The auction item is a Holborn 6110. The offered system consists of a keyboard monitor console and an external box with two floppy disk drives. The system was originally purchased in the early 1980s for about 20,000 guilders as a medium-sized business computer.

This computer stopped working in 1996. Recently, the computer has been turned on, the disk drives turn on and the fan on the computer turns on. The screen does not turn on and it seems, that it failed to repair a part on the motherboard.
 

Personal note. I was introduced to PCs in 1980 at the new media laboratory VNU Database Publishing International (VNU DPI). in Amsterdam. There was an Apple IIe present, but the automation department of VNU had bought a large batch of Superbrains (talking about AI) and handed out these machines, which worked with the CP/M operating system. The Superbrain was ergonomically a clunky machine, where you could get problems with your right hand from the raised edge at the keyboard. Sitting behind the Superbrain in 1980. (Photo Coll. JB)

First .nl novel in LHBT+ collection National Dutch Library

The Internet and the Dutch web have been important media for the emancipation of gay and lesbian people and/or transgender people in the Netherlands. The KB has therefore built up a special web collection of lhbt+ websites between 2018 and 2022. The abbreviation "lhbt+" stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and the sign "+" for all other possible sexual and gender identities of people who are also considered part of the lhbt+ community or who consider themselves part of it.

The special lhbt+ web collection includes websites from the Dutch web domain that can be a source of the lhbt+ community and culture or a reflection on them in Dutch society. These sites may not only reflect lhbt+ culture or heritage, but may also be the online harbingers of trends and developments in society and as such are worth preserving for future research. In addition, a site can also be a historical source of the difficult position this group of people was and is in, and of the discrimination and exclusion this community still faces today.  With this special web collection of websites with the lhbt+ theme, the KB aims to preserve digital information from the past about this population group and their culture for research in the present and the future. This way, the digital history of lhbt+ is kept alive and the preservation of this heritage and social acceptance of this group is promoted. We also show that the lhbt+-past is an important and underexposed part of Dutch history.

First online .nl novel had a lhbt+ theme

The first Dutch novel on the Dutch web appeared online in 1994 and was written by Marcel Bullinga. This was also a novel with an lhbt+ theme. The first Dutch language internet novel 'Roes der Zinnen' was published by the author at his own expense and risk. ... Thanks to web archaeologist and digital historian Jak Boumans from Almere, it was possible to acquire a physical copy of this novel for the KB collection. The floppy disk was still present in his personal collection.

https://zenodo.org/record/6624358 + powerpoint presentation

  

Read more about the Roes der Zinnen and the 'excavation' in the blog First .nl novel 'excavated'
https://buziaulane.blogspot.com/2020/06/first-dutch-online-nl-novel-surfaced.html

Exhibition Water-Polder-Weerwater in new city Almere (The Netherlands)

Press release

The Almere City Archives Department has put together the exhibition Water-Polder-Weerwater (lake in the center of the city).  By means of photographs, design sketches and letters from the collection of the city archive, the special history of the polder, Almere and the Weerwater is told. The exhibition, in Dutch and English, especially for Floriade visitors, can be seen from July 1st to December 2022. 

The name Weerwater explained: When you put the press release through translation software, Weerwater is translated as Weatherwater. But this is not the proper translation. Weerwater means Water again. The city arose from the water of the IJsselmeer in a polder. And in the city a lake was created, so there was water again.

Water-Polder-Weerwater shows step-by-step how in the 1960s land was reclaimed from the water of the IJsselmeer and how, in the middle of the just-drained polder, a lake was created. How do you actually create a polder? And why a lake in the middle of the city?  The exhibition also takes a look at the primeval forest and the Weerwater Island on the Floriade grounds, as well as future developments around the Weerwater. The exhibition also unravels the story of why the Weerwater is not called Central Lake or Placenta.

 

The creation of the new city of Almere from the water in four illustrations: the design of the polders, the construction of the dikes, the sketching of the new city, the Weerwater as the heart of the new city. 

During the preparation of Water-Polder-Weerwater, special design sketches by urban planner Teun Koolhaas from 1973 were rediscovered in the archives of the City Archives Department. In addition to a large number of sources from the collection of the city archive, the exhibition also includes photographs from the Flevolands Archief, newspaper archive Delpher, the Bart Hofmeester/AeroCamera archive and Het Nieuwe Instituut (.Museum for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture, where the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning is being preserved). 

Water-Polder-Weerwater is aimed at Almere residents who want to know more about the history of their city and at (Floriade) visitors who may not realise that they are walking and travelling on the former seabed of the IJsselmeer. On the wall of Stadsarchief Almere there will be a mark indicating how high the water would be without the dikes.

The exhibition and the accompanying brochure (32p) are bilingual  in Dutch and English. The exhibition is also accompanied by two videos with teh City's godfather Paul de Maar, policy officer , city ecologist Annemiek Eggenhuizen and researcher/artist Krijn Christiaansen.

Information on the exhibition and venue 

Opening times: The Water-Polder-Water exhibition is open from 1 July to December 2022 on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 13.00 - 17.00 and on request at the City Archives venue, Stadhuispromenade 2, 1315 XP Almere, opposite Stadhuis, left side under the library. 

Visit stadsarchief.almere.nl/weerwater for more information and current opening hours. Eventually the exhibition will be available online.

 

Growth Dutch new town Almere seen from the clouds

This book is about the new town Almere in The Netherlands. This city does not count its age in centuries, but in less than 50 years. The first eight families got keys to their cabin chalets in 1975 and the 400 first occupants received their keys to the constructed houses in 1976. It is a city that arose from the water, when in 1964 the construction of dykes began and in 1968 the polder Zuidelijk Flevoland was reclaimed. Almere is the newest city in the Netherlands since 1975 and became a municipality in 1984 and is now the eighth largest municipality in the Netherlands with 230,000 inhabitants.

Unique book 

The book Almere vanuit de wolken (Almere from the clouds) is a large and weighty book. The book contains more than 200 aerial photos in landscape A4 format and weighs almost 2 kilos. It is also a unique book, because the 200+ aerial photographs show the development of the new town Almere from 1964 to 2021. Publishing house Watermerk has made similar books of The Hague, Rotterdam and Dordrecht, but Almere can show its entire history in aerial photos.The book was created as a sequel to the exhibition Almere from Above, organised by the City Archive of Almere from August 2020 to September 2021, with aerial photographs of the development of the city, on display at the City Archive and at three other locations in the city. 

The exhibition showed a limited selection of aerial photos from the collection of the City Archive, from old black-and-white photos from the 1960s to recent colour shots. From these, a selection was made for Almere Boven, which together tell the story of the multi-kernel city and its enormous growth over the past 50 years.

The exhibition showed a limited selection of the 25,000 aerial photographs in the collection of the City Archive Almere. But the reactions to the exhibitions asked for more. That was the reason for Michel Langendijk, together with Bart Hofmeester of Aero Camera and Roel Dijkstra, to research material for a book. Michel Langendijk had been involved in the composition of Almere Boven and Bart Hofmeester (1921-2021), who had made aerial photographs of Almere since 1964. Roel Dijkstra manages the collection of Aero Camera since the death of Bart Hofmeester and he made the actual photos of 2020 and 2021. The book contains a foreword by one of the pioneer urban planner Brans Stassen. There is also a short introduction.

The photos do not form just a series of sequential historical photographs, but show the historical photograph with a current photograph, taken from the same point of view. For example, the eight mobile homes surrounded by a wasteland in Almere Haven are shown with photograph of the present buildings. This editorial formula is maintained throughout almost the entire book.

Use 

The book is a nice book for an Almere resident to leave on a coffee table when welcoming visitors, or to give as a present. But the book deserves a wider distribution.

For the early inhabitants of Almere, the book is not only interesting to leaf through and to search for their house (and/or former houses). I had the pleasure of looking for photographs of the Bivak in Almere Harbour with the very first Almere resident, a mobile home owner and police officer Wim Leeman.

(Insert) Mr Wim Leeman indicates where the eight mobile homes of the Bivak were situated; (left) the Bivak, (right) mobile offices.  

But the book can also be used by professionals in urban design and planning such as urban developers, urban planners and architects. For them the book presents the creation and rapid growth of a new town within half a century. The photographs show the development of the city kernels, the green spaces in the neighbourhoods and between the kernels, the infrastructure, the separation of residential areas and industrial estates, the bus lanes and the network of cycle paths. 

Almere from the clouds, compiled by Michel Langendijk, publisher Watermerk BV, Dutch language, EAN 9789078388302, 264 pages, 1853 grams, 39.95 euros