By Ties van de Werff
Translated from Dutch by Jane Hardjono
“Echolocation”, interactive installation, Geert Mul, 2009, Roombeek, Enschede.
Geert Mul is one of the four artists working on research projects at BALTAN Laboratories under the umbrella of Poème Numérique. Mul started his career back in the 90s as a VJ in Rotterdam, which later led him towards interactive video and audio works within different contexts. He has exhibited in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, India, China, Japan and South Africa. As a member of the artistic staff at BALTAN, Geert Mul has exciting ideas about Poème Numérique, the synthesis between art and science, the implications of new media for the arts, and the future of BALTAN. An interview with one of BALTAN’s artistic thinkers.
Database as spirit of the times
During my interview with Lucas van der Velden (Telcosystems) it became quite clear that Poème Numérique is completely different to its precursor, Poème Electronique. For the artists at BALTAN, it’s more about the synthesis between different disciplines. Geert Mul: “The idea of interdisciplinarity and the connection of architecture with other disciplines is nothing new. The cathedral is an example of a multidisciplinary building and acoustic design. Poème Numérique is about a possible integration of architecture, imagery and sound. Poème Numérique is literally the starting point, meaning we are leaving it behind. But we are trying to pull the concept into the now, and into the future.” Our current era, according to Geert Mul, is defined through digital media that form a fundamental and structural watershed with everything that has come before: “To me, it’s all to do with the digital database, a tool through which real-time information can be ordered and re-ordered. A library is a wonderful database, but that is where information is always ordered physically, in a space. A digital database does not possess intrinsic ordering; a digital database can be randomly ordered and re-ordered within milliseconds. That to me is the most elementary quality that separates new media from old media.” (more…)
