1. Rob, could you explain in some sentences what it means to be co-chair of the transmediale.09  Making / Thinking-conference? What is your mission, your concern and motivation for doing this?

My mission has always been clear to me: world domination of artists and
poets for a change, as Shelley said: poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of this world. My concern is for the loss of in between
spaces, of what Heidegger called aletheia - the clearing in the woods,
which I have understood as the promise of the living to relate in some way
to the dead and those to come. So my motivation is, well, if I had words
to make a day for you, I'd sing you a morning golden and new :)

2. What do you usually do, when you´re not organising transmediale
conferences?

Travelling up and to Amsterdam from Ghent, where I live with my girfriend
Kitty. For the past eight years I have been teaching at University of
Amsterdam, Design Academy Eindhoven, Industrial Design at Technical
University Eindhoven, MA Interaction Design at HKU and worked at de Balie
( public debates on media education), Doors of Perception 7 on Flow ( as
Flow editor), Virtual Platform (policy) and now I have been at Waag
Society for a year, as Head of Programme Public Domain. I'm making a
framework on Smart Environments that can host small projects that
intervene in public domain.

3. In short, what is the /Thinking Making/-conference going to be about?

The key is, as de Certeau argued, there is so much belief and so little
credibility. In coming together, it seems we need to come undone. Yet this
clarity, this credibility comes with a terrible price. In disambiguiating
what we might think is in store for us, we are being caught up in
scenarios beyond our control. We get tunnelvisioned.
So what could be an artist response to the threat of us all drowning? How
come it has not yet forced the current political and economic powers to
acknowledge climate change as a paradigm shift of the magnitude of an
alien threat to human, animal, and plant life? (probably the fish are
having a ball). Maybe exactly because there seems to be no agency, no
heroic 'other', no identifyable enemy. Hydras with a zillion heads. We
look up and all around us ice is melting, strange flies appear on our
doorsteps, ants we've never had before roam our houses, plants wake up
among new neigbours. Those among us who pack their clothes for summer and
winter are continuously at loss as of where to put what. The environment
itself is changing themes, as if the scenes in her play are becoming
slightly off. If we would wear the world as a coat, it would start to grow
larger at our sleeves, tighter at the waist, leave cracks so as to expose
our throat to winds.
And we feel it, we seem to care. And yet we act as if are quite helpless.
In not being able to identify clear agency we seem to freeze in fear as we
feel we can not do - do as in act: change - anything. All we seem to be
able to do is to encourage ourselves with our work. (i have to enourage
myself with my work, Tim Krohne) This we do very well.
This Transmediale will ask the question: how easy, how at all - can we
give up on this?

4. What is your vision for the conference? Are you challenged by something
special?

In recent years we have seen many experiments going away from the paper
presenting, panel driven set up of the places that we use to come
together, where we air our successes, aim to transcend oppositions that do
not really harm or hurt us, and long for the drinks and the party at the
end. These unconferences however, formed in opposition are rapidly
becoming their own standard. We need a discourse in between the
manifesto's and how to's. In recent weeks we have seen the triumph of this
in between, the story as protocol. We have seen tears, we may have shed
one or two. For a moment a rhetoric so bland, so rhytmic, so...cheap,
so...true, rose up to capture the hearts and minds of lots of people. For
a moment we had not to hide our love away. And as the song then goes: how
can we even try in the state we are in?
The aim of this year's Transmediale is to transcend these oppositions and
be the platform for emergent new meaningful practices.

5. What kind of outcomes do you expect?

It is clear that we do not need more data, more statistics, more figures
when we can feel the change in the winds of climates, clutching tighter to
our coats as it gets chilly. It is also clear that we do not need more
visualizations or mappings, or renderings of any kind to begin to argue
that we might understand better. We do. Words are pushing themselves
forward in particular sentences, bridges and narrative, it seems. Weary of
the challenge of the pun, the riposte, the clever retorte, stream of
consciousness for theory, we begin to look for fresh air. See how they
shine, Nietzsche says, my words buried in ice, feel the air, clear as a
fountain spring. Now Nietzsche's glaciers are melting, and yet we feel we
have protect this clarity of what becomes, guard it with our lives. Every
time artists did respond with all their might, hearts and heads, something
was cut, mangled and maimed. And all for no reason, the sacrifices seemed.

6. What is going to be your personal highlight during the conference?

Well, if I could say that in advance, we would have done not so good a job
:) For me meeting people is always the highlight and hearing ideas that
resonate with something that you have been seeing or thinking.