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The Virtual Street has it’s roots in the “Bijlmer”, an estate in southeast Amsterdam. It’s virtual nature however, provides it with worldwide accessibility. The Street will be a meetingpoint for art and technology, new yet tested, local as well as global. Art and artists from the Bijlmer are at the centre of the virtual street.

The Virtual Street will be developed as an artwork for the Street of Sculptures, an artproject aimed at developping a permanent collection of contemporary art in the public areas of the Bijlmer. The collection will take shape through five temporary art festivals, where every manifestation leaves it’s trails with a number of permanent objects. This ambitious initiative focuses on art in physical space, whereas the Virtual Street exhibits art in cyber space.

The Virtual Street is supported by three pillars: documentation, creation and participation. This project documents all art works from the manifestations of the ongoing Street of Sculptures (2009-2017) with an online representation of the artist and his, her or their work. Local artists will also create works of art especially for the Virtual Street. They will experiment with creations made specifically for the virtual domain. An ongoing testlab, a meetingpoint for art and technology. Participation from the audience and other parties is very important aswell. The digital character of the Virtual Street provides it with an interactive dimension where you not only visits the site to look at art, but also participate and hence leave tracks within the Virtual Street. We’ll always be looking at new and innovative ways to open up!

Art works in the Virtual Street will be attached to physical locations in the Bijlmer district. By using the internet and Augmented Reality, information will be added to virtual and physical art works. In this way, coinciding material and digital worlds will merge into one interactive experience. The Virtual Street is available on your desktop and on your Iphone or Android. In the App Store you can find LAYAR, download this free reality browser app and come and visit the Bijlmer to walk down the Virtual Street yourself!

From the hart, in the Bijlmer, on the server!

Vinger.nl

Vinger.nl is a collaboration between Jeffrey Croese and Sara Mattens, living and working in Amsterdam Southeast, NL

Rooted in the South-East area of Amsterdam, Vinger.nl works hard in various fields of the creative industry. Our work ranges from concept, strategy and art-direction to design, photography and film. Besides a strong sense of autonomy, Vinger.nl has many clients in the non-profit sector with a specialized focus on youth culture and education. The Vinger.nl approach is to get the most out of the link between our diverse partners; we like to see everyone in our extensive network get ahead. Part of this network we call our creative family. Savvy people exchanging work and good ideas. We are designers, filmmakers, photographers, writers, producers and artists. Most of us grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same school and have been working together for years. This makes us a band apart. It’s about good ideas and getting it done.

www.vinger.nl

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Urban Alliance

Urban Alliance is a collaborative venture involving Illuminate, Studio Klink and Cube in Amsterdam, NL.

Urban Alliance is a collective of artists and designers who work separately under the names Illuminate, which produces moving images, and the architectural firms of Studio Klink and Cube. In the past, they have conducted projects at the interface between architecture, the visual arts and media, a combination that has been dubbed ‘mediatecture’. For the Cruquius Plaza shopping mall in the Haarlemmermeer polder, they created a large landmark. Their design for the Textile Museum in Tilburg consists of a wall measuring roughly eight by eight metres, equipped with thousands of LEDs in an open fabric of silver-grey polyester, that generates images and information.

www.urbanalliance.nl

Hirschhorn believes in what he calls ‘the friendship between Art and Philosophy’. He is a great fan of Spinoza. Spinoza’s ideas about subjects like religious freedom and freedom of expression are still highly relevant today. More specifically, Hirschhorn’s artwork is a sculpture based on Spinoza’s Ethics. But it is also a pavilion that will be a temporary beacon and a nexus of activity. It will host a constant stream of diverse goings-on: lectures and debates, radio and television broadcasts, workshops, and the daily performance of the Spinoza play, written especially for the occasion. There will be a Spinoza museum and library, a Bijlmer documentation centre, and an internet corner. All this is organised in close collaboration with international philosophers and art historians, and more importantly with people living in the immediate vicinity.

Thomas Hirschhorn

1957, Bern, CH. Lives and works in Paris, FR

Hirschhorn started his career as a member of the communist graphic artists’ collective Grapus in Paris. To this day, his work reflects his activism and strong commitment to social change. He became known most notably for large, temporary installations of disposable materials such as cardboard, foil, tape and plastic. He made most of these site-specific sculptures outside the galleries, in the public space. Hirschhorn’s watchwords are ‘Presence & Production’. This means that the focus of his work is on the process of its creation – frequently together with local inhabitants – and that he is always present, not just during the production stage, but during the entire period that the work is in place. He is driven by an underlying belief that in every human being there is a place for art and philosophy. His combination of ‘high art’ and ‘high ideas’ with a low tech installation in the public space is one of the unique aspects of his work.

Sanja Medic

1974, Bihac, RS. Lives and works in Amsterdam, NL

In her work Medic plays with time and space. She creates vacuums: frozen moments, poetical, confusing, on the border of the two- and threedimensional, old and new, inside and out. Old photo’s are often her starting-point for complex collages, drawings and spatial installations. Historical event, like the tear down of a library by an earthquacke, inspire her. In 2007 she caught the eye with her work ‘Free Fall’, a video-projection on the wall of the Dutch House of Representatives near the centre of documentation, in which endless piles of documents are thrown up and swirl down in slow-motion. The term ‘motion’ comes – just like emotion – from moving or being moved.

www.sanjamedic.com

Peter Stel

1964, Vlaardingen, NL, Lives and works in Amsterdam Zuidoost, NL

One of Stel’s main stylistic devices is presenting mundane visual elements in an unconventional context. In doing so he plays with language, and with concepts such as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, for instance producing large-scale sculptures resembling stage settings that initially appear to jar with their surroundings. On the other hand, his subtle, carefully modulated interventions may teach us new ways of looking. So he often places his work in locations that people would not normally visit to see works of art, such as a waiting room or a car park next to a motorway. By doing so, he draws attention to the surroundings, or rather, to the behavior of the people who go there.

www.peterstel.nl

Pascale Marthine Tayou uses a wide variety of materials and forms of expression in his work. He paints and draws, does collages, sculptures, installations and performances. Tayou’s sculptures are often richly decorated with objects he has found; junk that appear to have been picked up from the rubbish dump. His use of everyday objects, stacked up and repeated, gives his work an alienating quality. A central theme – one of many – in Tayou’s work is the light and playful manner in which he uses kitsch and folklore. He uses materials from African daily life and popular culture, playing with the clichéd images people have of his country of birth as well as his current resident country. Tayou weaves a host of different threads through his work in the most subtle way. Or even better, he lets us do the weaving. The ‘black man’ might represent the immigrant, his urinating the decay that has plagued the Bijlmer for so long. At the same time, it is an ironic self-portrait of an African artist who lives in Belgium. We could for instance find references to the Cameroon and Dutch flags in the colours used. Tayou gives new meaning to the transitional area under the bridge as a monumental frontier between the old and the new Bijlmer, the high-rise of the 70’s from the previous century and the low-rise of more recent times. But also to the pleasure of mixing and combining cultural clichés, especially in times when the debate about cultural identity is as serious and heavy as it is today.

Pascale Marthine Tayou

1967, Yaoundé, CM. Lives and works in Ghent, BE

Tayou belongs to a generation of African artists who are redefining post-colonial culture and blending the experiences of their origins with those of Europe, where they have made their home. Tayou’s work ranges from drawings, sculptures and installations to videos and performances. It raises uncomfortable questions about cultural and national identity and provokes existential reflections on subjects such as AIDS or the cacophony of city life. Africa is ever-present in Tayou’s work. In Import/Export, Tayou combined the logos of Cameroonian companies in a collage of stickers, photos, packaging labels and neon lights. These symbols of Western-style commerce are juxtaposed with typical African street markets in Fashion Street, a series of photos of local fabric and clothing merchants.

www.pascalemarthinetayou.com

Michael Beutler

1976, Oldenburg, DE. Lives and works in Berlin, DE

Michael Beutler makes temporary structures out of what appear at first sight to be found materials. In fact he chooses his materials with great deliberation – whether fabrics or plastic, iron, fencing materials or paper – in response to the place and context of the project at hand. Beutler ‘occupies’ locations, changing the nature of a site or creating completely new spaces. He has a very people-oriented working method; besides specialist professionals he also works with amateurs, giving them precise instructions but also challenging them to devise their own solutions as part of the construction process he sets in motion.