Hey Guys,
I landed in Amsterdam, spent the night walking around town and finding food, went to bed, and woke up sick. I was pretty much bed-ridden for four days, so I missed a considerable amount of class related presentations and such. After a few good days of rest and decent Turkish food, I was ready to go get'em again.
Wednesday morning we made a trip out to the Waag Society in central Amsterdam. The Waag society is based in the oldest building in Amsterdam, I believe so anyways. It was either the oldest building or the oldest public building. In any case, it was built as a gate-house a very long time ago. It had changed its purpose many times over the years, ranging from a gate-house, to a center for the different guilds in Amsterdam (such as the masonry guild, with evidence of their craftsmanship at left), to a building used for medical experiments (more on this later), to the new digital media house it is today. The Waag society itself is a very diverse group who work on many different facets of new media, ranging from documentaries, to urban games, to setting up live video conferencing. Our hosts Floor and Sam (left to right above) were very, very happy to see us, and were quite excited to hear about what we were doing. Before we left for lunch, they charged us with the task in using the Waag in any way we could think of to make our own little new media projects.
A little detail which I intentionally left out above was that the sketches and painting of Rembrandt's famous Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp were created there. As such, much history and fame of the building surrounds the creation of one of Rembrandt's most famous paintings. A group of roughly 8 of us though that it'd be fitting, what with the new media focus of the building these days, to recreate the image with a more modern look. We arranged ourselves as closely as we could to match the people in the original painting, but with the "corpse" of an old computer substituting the corpse of the original. Once the photo was taken, the project was then in my hands, as I ran it through Photoshop in an attempt to get it look a bit closer to the original. You can see the comparison of our final product with the original below.
.:August
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