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Dear Letter Readers, I am writing from a sunny Rotterdam as we hurtle towards the spring equinox. My last time writing to you, was nine months ago now! It was a deep dive into our first ideas around income pooling and a possible new guild socialism (here). I decided that this letter was not going to be about the conditions for working and living but instead about the stuff that comes out of these conditions. I am currently in a period, emerging from winter, where there are lots of things brewing, both metaphorically and literally. With that in mind, in this newsletter I hope can bring some bubbling thoughts to fruition or at least show my collection of fermenting jars*.
*This bubbling season and
feeling in the air was the idea behind Emma and Renée's recent
regenerative dinner held at Extra Practice. (Photo by Gijs de Boer) Making Alcohol I’ve been experimenting with fermenting fruit and veg for a little while now, and have also used it at some food events; on Pizza with Maurik at Stedelijk Rotterdam last year and recently cooking with Alina for the amazing Jazz bar/living room Vrijmoed. Since Ben and Wietske gifted me the brilliant book The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz I have been delving more into brewing alcohol. Those reading from Topolò will have already experienced some of my experiments in this field in the form of elderflower wine. After doing few batches recently in Kat’z laid back low intervention style and as it gets less and less financially viable to drink or to go to your local boozer in a regular fashion, it has begged the question why are we not ALL brewing our own booze ALL the time! I am surprised this didn’t take off in the same way sourdough did in the pandemic (bread is a lot more complicated than alcohol I think, it just takes more time). Many YouTube video comments are full with something to the tune of “...this is a recession indicator” which, well yes. But for me it also taps into the same joy of making a pirate radio station, learning to make your own clothes or creating a system for sharing income...It’s something that culturally and legally (I guess law is culture?) we have been deliberately separated from doing together, so discovering how again feels great. I have had this urge (as I am sure many of you reading have) since I was a kid and have the memory of a shed full of smashed glass and sticky elderflower wine to prove it. Together with members of my house we will be putting all this to the test in the creation of our own medieval tavern for a night. Maybe there is a connection back to the Guild Socialism here...breweries have historically had a lot of power in the cities. But I digress...we have 15 litres of beetroot wine on the go and 20 litres of Smokey English Ale that we boiled over a fire in the garden courtesy of Felix Bell and a few other special fruit wine elixirs by Sophie Allerding. Needless to say I am in my witch era. There is a whole essay's worth of content possible here about the connection of Alchemy and the birth of modern medicine etc. but these are just bubbling pots, not matured wines so instead, I will leave some articles and this extract from “The Art of Fermentation” for you. MEAD-MAKER ALCHEMIST –Turtle T. Turtlington We humans have made quite a lot of hype around yeasts, these invisible little elves. Stories abound of how it was up to the shaman or medicine woman of a village or tribe to produce the sacred brews, and there was much chanting and dancing around needed, in order to invite into the jars the proper spirit. Many people, upon finding a “spirit” they liked working with, would place branches or logs, of either spruce or birch, at the bottom of their fermenting vats; the yeasts would dig into the wood to find the sweet saps, thus making it easy for a brewer to transfer the friendlies to another fermentation vat. It was even common for parents to give a log loaded with the family strain of wine yeast as a wedding gift. Talk about heirloom! And so here we stand, just barely into the 21st century, rediscovering our roots as herbalists and brewers, witch doctors and alchemists, asking ourselves, “What is tradition?” And when it comes to yeast and brewing, there is no definable answer. It’s all traditional, from packages of Montrachet and Premier Cuvée to the all-around classic “Champagne Yeast.” Each brings its own flavor, its own style, each selected and bred for different characteristics. Each passed from brewer to brewer, through the millennia to this day. And we have the strains floating about us, same as they ever were, wild and mysterious! Descending from the heavens, alighting upon our meads, working their magic and then vanishing till needed again.
Alchemy
Attending to my
potions Learning to play Go So many thoughts have been coming out of this endeavour. This ancient Chinese board game (probably the oldest unchanged game to have ever been played) has got me thinking a lot about culture and what it means to be human, to learn and structure thought. Go is an extremely complex game especially for my dyslexic ass brain. There are basically three rules that lead to more possible outcomes of game play than atoms in the observable universe.* From an art perspective this reminds me of Sol Lewitt rules for creating artworks or Isaac Azimov’s Rules of Robotics, which from simple rules create infinitely complex scenarios. Following rules alone however will only take you as far as playing probably as the first people inventing the game played it 2000+ years ago. You rely on the limitations of the human brain to read ahead a certain sequence of moves and be able to spatially imagine several branches of possibilities (something I am particularly bad at, and is therefore nice to be able to train). In order to delve deeper you have to tap into all this knowledge which has been stored throughout history in proverbs, idioms, rhymes, names for shapes…in other words culture. This is all made even more stark with the advent of Large Language Models (LLM) and how they are now learning and playing the game without all this ‘cultural fluff’. Fast forward 2000 years from now and if we manage to survive I’m sure there will be a new cultural lore surrounding all these LLM strategies.
Some patterns from
my online Go games
Dance by Lucinda Childs, Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt. 1979
The Article that
kicked it all off
Isaac Asimov’s
Rules of Robotics (The Complete Robot)
Further Reading
Ref: Building Lights For our studio space here at Extra practice I have been developing a lighting system. The idea was that XP would pay for this first set of lights and that would allow me to develop along with them an affordable lighting system which, in turn could be sold to other spaces with a similar need to us. The model has allowed me to delve into lighting research I part of spatial design which I think is often over looked (especially in design education). I would love to do some work with in a theatre with a lighting designer. Watching the Nederlands Dans Theater you quickly notice that most of the space was designed with light. This recent project from Studio Dennis Vanderbroeck is a great simple example of this.) I think interior design and architecture in general has a lot to learn from the theatre scenography field. This process has also been interesting in that it has focused on repeat production. A product that I want to be buildable by others with limited tools/skills. Using ‘standard parts’ in an Enzo Mari inspired system today also brings into light the processes that the assembler is not involved in, the extruding of aluminium, the forming of the plastic WAGO clips, the felling of the tree and the planing of the wood. In this way the less you rely on the skill of the local you rely on the skill of the global. I have landed on designing a light that is made using easily obtainable ‘standard’ parts which are modified using local crafts people (Steven the carpenter round the corner) or soldering by Extra Practice. This is all designed in such a away that a cruder less refined, bootlegged version is easily made.
I always think of
this project when thinking about hidden industrial processes
I have been reading
this more intently
*If you are
interested in a lighting system for your studio space get in touch with
jack.
Light prototyping at XP
Local skills in the form of XP solderers and knotters Everyday Fictions This name came out of a short lived venture to form a spatial design studio around a competition with friends Emilie Loiseleur and Richard Fussey. The project never took off but the name keeps coming back to me and it is perhaps developing into a bit of a theory or methodology. I think it encapsulates a lot of the above ideas around culture and our ability to shape it. Everyday Fictions starts from the notion that everything is fiction. From this starting point life becomes more accessible to intervention and transformation. Fiction in this sense can be understood both as the creation of novel realities and as a tool to disrupt existing realities and social norms/constraints. From a design perspective this would necessitate that all design is ‘speculative design’, that by creating something you are suggesting a slightly different branch of reality or re-enforcing an existing one. I need a version of RuPaul’s “You are born naked everything else is drag” but for design.
I am working on a few design projects at the moment which I am able to use this
both as a methodology for gaining insight into the context and as physical
world-building. In the renovation of ZIP’s space I’m using game play to imagine
their space anew. Then working together with Sophie Allerding we are creating
an additional spatial narrative/framework for her sculptural installation on
show at Art Rotterdam in two weeks time.
Shiny new blue entrance design for Minus One and the Niewe Insituute.
Invention Game workshop with Zip members. XP's Bubbling Jars Emma is currently cheating on XP with a residency at Maurik and Ceola’s studio at Delftsestraat. Two months she gets to use their huge sunny space to do something she hasn’t done in a very long time: making whatever comes out of her hands without thinking what it means or what value it has. Currently they take the shape of puppets, hats and masks :) On April 3rd, she and fellow resident George will host an evening event to celebrate their creations - keep an eye on Emma’s site/ig for the announcement. Ben is spending his time putting together workshops for publishing on the handmade web, making first steps towards exciting site-specific websites with Kirsten, and doing publishing, infrastructure and maintenance work at Varia. He's thinking about contradictions, incompatibilities and other tensions between living ecologies and digital technologies. He's looking for workshop/website work from May/June onwards.
Gijs has had collectivity on his mind.
Many exciting experiments in ways of living, earning, loving, researching,
making, reading and prepping more together. Slowly unlearning the safety of the
isolated self. Maybe quite aligned with the seasons. Concluding some projects –
like the self-model-making research group, more info on that soon! – to make
space for spring.
Elliott
is on the search for new website projects for winter & spring. Rates and
past work at https://bellkiosk.website
The first one with walkie-talkies, the second with LoRa devices. Thanks to Maisa Imamović for inviting us! More info at https://strp.nl and email us if you want to join with a discount.
Most of XP have already joined this Broodfonds – a Dutch collective welfare initiative that effectively allows independent entrepreneurs to provide each other with temporary sick leave from work. It is a beautiful trust-based model that has also very much inspired our income pooling plans. If you are a freelancer in search of better worker protections—or know of fellow freelancers wanting the same— consider joining this risk-free social alternative or spreading the word. For more info and contact details: https://a-tub.org/en/broodfonds
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Extra Practice is a space for working and learning in the North of Rotterdam,
shared by six friends who are active in the field of art and design: Benjamin
Earl, Emma Verhoeven, Gijs de Boer, Jack Bardwell, Kirsten Spruit, Elliott
Cost. --- You received this email because you signed up on our website or during an event. It is a newsletter with reflections on supporting each other's artistic practices and news, sent out roughly each month. |
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