Metahaven Studio for Design and Research

News 2005-2007December 21, 2007
Multipolarity
Phase 1 proposal for a Virtual Embassy for the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the Netherlands

To design the web site for the Embassy of Venezuela in the Netherlands is a political act. It is providing Venezuela with a carrier for its diplomacy abroad.
Venezuela – by voice of its president Hugo Chavez – is one of the countries advocating a world with a multi-polar division of power. This is a clear departure from the bipolar model of the Cold War and the unipolar model that came next.
Venezuela has been the chief South American actor to put a hold on the influence of supra-national policy instruments like the IMF and the World Bank, which were in effect often used to promote and install neoliberal reforms and secure foreign investment interests.
These gestures and acts are not without symbolical consequences and the setting of new borders. Venezuela has recently introduced its own time zone. The horse featured in its coat of arms, previously running to the right, has been changed and now runs into the left direction.
The design proposals for the Embassy of Venezuela in the Netherlands seek to find structural designs for the multi-polar power model.

Coming soon
Metahaven
White Night before A Manifesto
ISBN/EAN: 978-90-78454-10-6

48 pages, softcover. Advance order.

White Night Before A Manifesto was written in 2007. In it, three people – two boys and a girl – are trying to write a new manifesto for design. They do this for the duration of an entire ‘white’ night. The aim is to deliver the manifesto – an ideological pamphlet – before the break of day. The three hope that a global multitude of designers, architects and ‘creative people’, currently uninspired by ideologies, may be interested to read it, despite the fact that no one at present seems to really know what a manifesto is. The manifesto, its authors claim, should fit on a single page. Will they be able to finish it before dawn?
This publication, on every right hand page, will feature a version of the manifesto as it develops. Every left hand page shows the discussion its three writers have during the single night they take to write it, and includes the sketches and models they use to make their point. A performative construction, this publication seeks the non-professional space and time of night as opposed to daytime – the space and time where 'professional design decisions' are made.

Available soon. Published by Onomatopee.

October 8 - October 31, 2007
Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design
Group exhibition at the Architectural Association, London
Curated by Zak Kyes

September 29 & 30, 2007
Forum on Quaero
Day One

Forum on Quaero

Michael Zimmer

Florian Cramer

Florian Schneider

Metahaven

Tsila Hassine

Ingmar Weber

Sabine Niederer

Maurits de Bruijn

September 29 & 30, 2007
Forum on Quaero
Day Two

Forum on Quaero

Florian Schneider

Bureau d'Études

Jodi Dean

Richard Rogers

Florian Cramer

Open Search; Erik Borra

IvIR; Joris van Hoboken

September 11, 2007
Building 7

The World Trade Center Complex in Manhattan consisted of a number of different buildings made by different architects. The structure known as 7 World Trade Center, and alternatively as the ‘Salomon Brothers Building’, named after its main tenant, was opened in 1987. It was designed by an architectural firm called Emery Roth & Sons. A family business, whose approach went from ‘international style’ to ‘postmodern’, and whose position was often that of the project architect assisting a more famous counterpart, like Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (who are currently building the world’s tallest structure, Burj Dubai).
7 World Trade Center or simply ‘Building 7’ stood in the shadow of the Twin Towers as they fell on September 11, 2001, after being hit by airplanes. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m.
But that day, at 5:20 p.m, 7 World Trade Center collapsed too, without being hit by a plane. The reported cause was the damage that had been inflicted on its structure by fire, resulting from falling debris from the Twin Towers.
7 World Trade Center was an average, almost anonymous office building; it didn’t have the iconic quality of the Twin Towers. Hence also its destruction did not acquire a symbolic status. Its collapse went by almost unnoticed as a footnote to the day’s ‘real’ events.
Yet, there is an unsettling series of footnotes to that footnote. In a stunning news report, BBC World television told its viewers that the Salomon Brothers Building had collapsed, more than 20 minutes before it actually happened. The building was even visible on screen in the Manhattan skyline, as reporter Jane Standley stood in front of and a ‘newsbar’ reported its collapse. To date, no credible explanation was given for the report.

Building 7 had been hit by burning pieces of twin tower but not by a fuel-stocked airliner. However, it collapsed, straight into its own footprint. According to those who argue that 9/11 was a false flag operation by the U.S. government, the collapse bears the hallmarks of a controlled demolition. And the property developer Larry Silverstein, who owns the entire World Trade Center complex, knew about it, they claim. In one video fragment, widely available on the internet, Silverstein says that he’d decided ‘to pull’ Building 7 – meaning, in common language, to bring it down by explosives. This interpretation of ‘to pull’ was later denied by Silverstein: 7 WTC had been ablaze and the decision was just let it burn. But could that have caused a complete collapse? Even those who do not like the conspiracy theories cannot help wondering why the building came down like it did and why BBC World reported that before it did.
Unremarkable Building 7 is an anti-symbol in the 9/11 aftermath, in almost complete contrast to the Twin Towers. The architect of the towers, Minoru Yamasaki, had previously built the famous Pruitt-Igoe residential complex in St. Louis. A controversial attempt at large scale social housing, the complex was soon declared to have ‘failed’ and was demolished in 1972. For the postmodern architect and writer Charles Jencks, ‘modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972’.[1] The image of the demolition of Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe became, with Jencks’ help, a microscopic version of 9/11, especially for architects: destruction as the icon for the end of an idea.
Slavoj Zizek wrote: ‘The point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle, reading it as a catastrophe version of the snuff porno movies; the question we should have asked ourselves as we stared at the TV screens on September 11 is simply: Where have we already seen the same thing over and over again?
The fact that the September 11 attacks were the stuff of popular fantasies long before they actually took place provides yet another case of the twisted logic of dreams: it is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming Americans – so what do the well-to-do Americans, immobilized in their well-being, dream about? About a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives – why? This is what psychoanalysis is about: to explain why, in the midst of well-being, we are haunted by nightmarish visions of catastophies.’[2]
Is the falldown of the Salomon Brothers Building a disaster? Even though directly connected to the 9/11 attacks, it lacks not only iconic impact but also victims, as it was fully evacuated prior to its collapse. The anonymous corporate architecture of 7 WTC allows for its reading beyond ‘Iconomy’[3] , beyond the regime of destination architecture and city branding.
In 7 WTC, architecture is only postponed collapse, the force that makes a structure stand upright until something brings it down, as its inevitable fate. That ‘something’ (a political or ideological act) that destroyed it paradoxically renders the building visible. Meanwhile, investigations continue into what that has really caused the collapse. Conclusive inquiry seems an impossibility, as the Salomon Brothers Building is gone forever.

1. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1984
2. Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2002
3. Terry Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006

Under development in the context of Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design. Group exhibition at the Architectural Association, London

August 22, 2007
A Europe Game - Intra Muros - Grande Banlieue

Contribution to a book on spatial experiences of Europe, edited by Markus Miessen.

July 20, 2007
Neocon Black Metal - A Study in Secrecy

Contribution to Pyramid Power magazine, Vancouver.

Fukuyama Black Metal

Wolfowitz Black Metal

Strauss Black Metal

Plato Black Metal

Fukuyama - Sticks

Fukuyama - Sculpture

Wolfowitz - Falling

Plato - Block/Corridors

Perle - Barbed Wire (Camp)

Perle - Barbed Wire (Signature)

June 15, 2007
New team member: Gon Zifroni
Meta Haven: Design Research is pleased to announce that Gon Zifroni has become part of its core team. Gon is at present a researcher at the design department of the Jan van Eyck Academie. A spatial designer with a critical practice in architectural thinking, Gon Zifroni previously has worked with Daniel van der Velden on the Logo Parc project. He is also working on the Meta Haven research into the Quaero search engine.

June 10 – November 21, 2007
Memosphere. Rethinking Monuments
Mihnea Mircan & Meta Haven: Design Research (eds.)
Publication, Romanian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennial.
Published by Revolver Archiv für Aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt

A publication on new strategies for the contemporary monument. With contributions by Alon Levin, Azra Aksamija & Khadija Z. Carroll, Laurent Liefooghe, Malkit Shoshan, Doryun Chung & Sean Snyder, Zbynek Baladran, Daniel Kurjakovic, Victor Man, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Cristi Pogacean, Anca Mihulet, Emily Katrencik, Mechtild Wildrich, LUST, Branimir Stojanovic, Christophe van Gerrewey, Office Kersten Geers & David van Severen, Wouter Davidts, Calin Dan, Markus Miessen, Mark Jarzombek, Mihnea Mircan, and Meta Haven: Design Research.

Download Pdf

June 2 - July 7, 2007
A Number of Worlds Resembling Our Own
Group exhibition at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam
with Carlos Garaicoa, Richard Grayson, Pia Roenicke, Anu Pennanen, Vangelis Vlahos and Meta Haven: Design Research.

Models for the Political
In our work, architecture is a consistent source of inspiration and discussion. More than graphic design, architecture has in recent years provided a series of ‘icons’ that can only be measured against the unfolding of globalization.
Globalization as an aesthetic-economical regime consistently favors reflexive monumentality – see the so-called ‘Bilbao Effect’ referring to Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum – to denote aspiring ‘world cities’ as travel destinations, business investments and cultural hot spots.
Reflexive monumentality also seeks to include architectural landmarks at, or beyond, its ideological borders. This becomes apparent through the roles that former communist landmarks get to play in pinpointing their host cities.
The strong ideological and symbolic potential still present in these buildings (if only through their size) brings to the fore a conflict between ‘smooth’ globalization and the actualization of democracy in the here and now. One could say, a conflict between a building’s usage as image, and its physical, social and political reality.
Among the largest of totalitarian architectural icons is Casa Poporului in Bucharest. This Ceausescu-designed government building, for which one fifth of the Romanian capital was erased, has been ‘privatized in public’. Its troubled past and present were buried under fictitious legitimacy as the building now serves as the seat of the Romanian parliament, is a choice location for trade fairs and congresses, and is also hosting, in its rear wing, a contemporary art museum.
In the attempt to let Casa Poporului do to Bucharest what Gehry’s Guggenheim did to Bilbao, it is presupposed not only that the Romanian people are ready and willing to let go of the past, but also that there is a routine operation available in order to achieve the desired effect.
At the same time, Casa Poporului presents the opportunity to rethink public space precisely in the face of a three-dimensional symbol that is forbidding and anti-public in its essence.
An entirely different case is presented by the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, a 330 metre high, unfinished concrete structure that North Korea’s stalinist regime had wanted to become the world’s greatest hotel, albeit for a city that is not prepared to receive tourists. Like Casa Poporului, the Ryugyong Hotel is a pure symbol, a direct translation of totalitarian architectural thinking into (of course) forbidding symmetry and immense size. It can, however, not directly be occupied by any outside conquering force and is structurally unfit for any usage.
This does not limit the imagination of the West to launch visions for this bizarre icon – notably a recent competition initiated by the Italian magazine Domus – by which a kind of retrospective inscription into globalization is brought into effect. Indeed, also the Ryugyong Hotel is, in a strange sense, a future Guggenheim Bilbao.
(Former) communist iconographies can, at present, not be seen without involving the new roles of semi-state actors, the market, the military, the church, and ‘criminal’ activities such as smuggling and money counterfeiting. The connection between architecture, iconography and the political is – in a very wide sense – key to our works shown at SMART Project Space. Among these works are models, chessboards, newspapers, posters, stamps, grids and other proposals that attempt to formulate a reflection on the twisted state of symbolic power today.

May, 2007
Chess City

Neutrality Chess

Clash of Civilizations / Coalition of the Willing

May, 2007
Quaero work in progress

Asteroid punched by the forces that separate web spheres

Web pages – 'hits' or 'impacts'

Web pages – impact rings

May, 2007
Art & Democracy work in progress

Toxic Politics

March 26, 2007
The Design of Evil
visual excerpts

Carl Schmitt vs. Tony Blair

Cuneiform - Passport

Bic - Armageddon

Neocons as satanic black metal: Wolfowitz

Neocons as satanic black metal: Fukuyama

Neocons as satanic black metal: Perle

March 1, 2007
Art & Democracy work in progress

The Gazprom Garden

February 1, 2007
Quaero research project started

Meta Haven has started its research on the French search engine project Quaero in collaboration with Tsila Hassine and Gon Zifroni. Tsila Hassine is a media researcher, Gon Zifroni is a spatial designer. Both Tsila and Gon are at this moment connected to the Jan van Eyck Academie as researchers in the UbiScribe and Logo Parc projects.
Research into Quaero will work from (amongst others) the following points of departure:
- Search engines as instruments of expressing political power through means other than politics.
- The bias of search engines (whatever direction, i.e. a more ‘free’ web, a more ‘European’ web or a more ‘profitable’ web).
- The relative unimportance of all bias weighed against the overarching dominance of US (and allies)-based governance of the web.
- A ‘secret search engine’?
- Aside from the Quaero issue – is Google playing a monopoly and what is the horizon of ‘wiretapping’ into its engine, doing other things with its results?
- What is the importance and significance of search engines vis-a-vis ‘older’, or locally fixed, forms of cultural memory and representation like the library, for example?
- Search engines and their representation; the Google logo as a semi-definitive paradigm for ‘friendly dominance’, ‘ironic transparancy’, etc.
- The formulation of alternatives, and the formulation of both technological, political, and visual question marks.

The Quaero research project will be hosted by Jan van Eyck Academie and will be carried out in collaboration with Maison Descartes, Amsterdam.

January, 2007
Sealand for sale

At the end of 2003, when the Sealand Identity Project kicked off, we were self-consciously toying with the idea that even the 'facts' about the Principality of Sealand do not represent any form of verifiable or historical truth. One could ask 'What is truth?', but in the case of Sealand, it is precisely the unverified myths, stories and rumors that constitute the national identity. In that sense, Sealand is its own 'founding myth'.
There is hardly a more suitable carrier to be found than Sealand, when embarking on an investigation into a contemporary symbolic of the nation state.
After being founded, having flourished and having been on fire (June '06), Sealand now adapts also to the final stage of the nation state and puts itself on sale.

January 11, 2007
Regimes of Representation:
Art & Politics Beyond the House of People
Symposium, MNAC, Bucharest

The complete conference report will follow soon.

January 11, 2007
Regimes of Representation:
Art & Politics Beyond the House of People
Symposium, MNAC, Bucharest

On January 11, 2007, a conference was organized in the former House of People in Bucharest – more precisely, in Romania’s national museum of contemporay art: MNAC. The title of the conference is Regimes of Representation: Art & Politics Beyond the House of People. The subject of the conference is the very location where the event is being held. The Palatul Parlamentului and its current co-function as a museum, will be the point of departure for a discussion of the relation between post-communist politics, imagination and representation. MNAC is one of various attempts to use contemporary art to transform a former ‘totalitarian’ symbol into one for democracy, but it is unique in simultaneously being the seat of government. The central question for the conference is: can art ever ‘take over the central point of power, being a symbol of openness and democracy’? Can, consequently, imagination influence or take over the meaning of a building that is an essential logo of totalitarian rule? How does Romania’s first national contemporary art institution employ the symbolic to express a constructed national identity, by using (totalitarian) foundation? Can we speak of a reverse ‘Bilbao Effect?’ And how does the institutionalization of contemporary art reflect the imperative to democratize since the fall of communism? With Chantal Mouffe, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Marcus Steinweg, 4space, Ruxandra Balaci and Meta Haven.

Organized by the Jan van Eyck Academie and Meta Haven: Design Research. Generously supported by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Bucharest.

10.15
Registration
11.15
Welcome – Ruxandra Balaci, artistic director MNAC
11.30
Introduction – Vinca Kruk
11.45
Keynote – Chantal Mouffe
12.45
Lecture – Nicolas Bourriaud
13.30
lunch
14.00
Lecture – Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
14.45
Lecture – Marcus Steinweg
15.30
Lecture – 4Space (Augustin Ioan & Ciprian Mihali)
16.15
break
16.30
Round table discussion with all speakers – moderated by Daniel van der Velden
17.30
Drinks

Abstracts / Biographies

Agonistic politics and artistic practices
Chantal Mouffe – Keynote lecture
In my presentation I will discuss the different ways to envisage the public space and scrutinize the implications of this discussion for artistic practices. My argument will be that public art is not art located in a place that is public – as opposed to private space. Public art is art that institutes a public space, in the sense of a common action by people. I will for instance address the question of what kind of public progressive art institutions should try to institute: a public space that aims at establishing consensus or a public space of agonistic confrontation?
Taking my bearings from my previous work, I will first show that the task of democratic politics is not to aggregate interests or to attempt at reaching a rational consensus, but to transform antagonism into agonism. Then I will draw the consequences of this approach to understand the relation between art and politics and to grasp the nature of critical artistic practices. What is at stake, I will argue, is the questioning of the dominant hegemony by bringing to the fore all the aspects that the dominant consensus is trying to repress. I will insist on the multiplicity of ways in which this consensus can be undermined and show that artistic practices can contribute in a variety of ways to the fostering of new forms of subjectivities.

Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London. She has taught and researched at a number of universities in Europe, North America and South America. She is member of the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She was editor of Gramsci and Marxist Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979), Dimensions of Radical Democracy. Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (Verso, London, 1992), Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Routledge, London, 1996) and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, (Verso, London, 1999). She co-authored with Ernesto Laclau Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso, London, 1985) and was the author of The Return of the Political (Verso, London, 1993), The Democratic Paradox (Verso, London, 2000) and On the Political (Routledge, London, 2005).

Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic who coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’, which he outlined in 1995. From 2002 to 2006 he was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (with Jérôme Sans). Bourriaud founded the magazine Documents (1992-2000), and served as the Paris correspondent for Flash Art.
Bourriaud published Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Postproduction (2001). He defines as ‘relational’ art which takes as its theoretical horizon ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’.
Nicolas Bourriaud is a consultative board member for MNAC – Muzeul National de Arta Contemporana, Bucharest.

Art and democracy at the founding of foundation
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield
The building in which MNAC is housed was constructed to found – according to dictator Nicolae Ceausescu who ordered its construction – a ‘new man’. As such it occurs as foundation, not just the foundation of a national identity, but the foundation of foundation itself. It is this essential feature that mnac has to negotiate. But how exactly can art ‘take over’ such a building ‘as a symbol of openness and democracy’, as is claimed for MNAC by Nicolas Bourriaud in his capacity as a founding member of its advisory board?
What is presupposed by such a claim? Might it not repeat something troubling about the building’s original founding? This paper will draw from what is troubling about Bourriaud’s presuppositions about art, and contrary to his notion of relational aesthetics, the sense in which art’s resistance to politics is necessary for the institution of democracy.

Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield is Reader in Theory & Philosophy of Art at the University of Reading and sits on the executive of the Forum for European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, and on the board of AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art).
He has published various papers in the area of continental philosophy, on art and on ethics especially. Currently he is writing two books: Art’s Resistance to Ethics and Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. He was a researcher at the theory department of Jan van Eyck Academie from 2004 until 2006.

The obscurantism of facts
Marcus Steinweg
Neither philosophy nor art are matters of proof or opinion. Philosophy and art posit things, they assert. Assertion is distinguished from proof and opinion since it has to make do without certainty. A philosophy of assertion is a philosophy in uncertainty. It surpasses and transgresses the modalities of conventional thinking such as reflection, argument, grounding, and criticism. It is a matter of the subject touching a truth in uncertainty and giving this instance of contact a form, a language. Truth refers to the limits of the world of facts. Philosophy exists only in that it touches these limits. It is an assertion that denies the validity of the imperatives of the factual. Touching upon truth, philosophy has to resist the certainty of opinion and the obscurantism of facts in equal measure. It is a touching of the untouchable and it makes this touching into a life-form.
My aim is to defend the political relevance of art and philosophy against conventional political art and political philosophy. I intend to show that political art and political philosophy establish their own de-politicization. They are not concerned with a politics of freedom, of the impossible and what is most necessary. The politics I am referring to differ from what is usually called politics. This type of politics does not assert or defend interests. It would be about a resistance against the order of socio-political and ideo-cultural reality. It would articulate itself by absolutely refusing the universe of facts and the opinions circulating in this universe. It would be a politics of truth insofar as it considers proof as what comes into conflict with established certainties. It causes the voice of official truth to stutter and be brought to silence.
I want to show that art only has meaning as art. Philosophy only has meaning as philosophy. It does not serve to reduce art and philosophy to the socio-political field in which they articulate themselves. It does not make sense to define the mission of art and philosophy as political. ‘That is the left-wing illusion of the past few decades,’ Heiner Müller argues ‘of European intellectuals and particularly the literati, that there could be and should be a community of interests between art and politics. Ultimately, art cannot be controlled. Or it can always evade control. And for this reason it has been… almost automatically subversive.’

Marcus Steinweg is a philosopher and writer who lives in Berlin. His publications include Krieg der différance and Autofahren mit Lacan (Koblenz, 2001), Der Ozeanomat. Ereignis und Immanenz (Cologne, 2002), Subjektsingularitäten (Berlin, 2004) and Behauptungsphilosophie (Berlin, 2006).
Steinweg regularly collaborates with the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in the latter’s publications and large-scale politically inspired art installations, for which Steinweg often writes texts.

Singular object: the house of the republic resisting interpretations
4Space (Augustin Ioan & Ciprian Mihali)
The significance of the Ultimate Edifice and, setting out from it, the Boulevard of Victorious Socialism – or rather the anti-urban phenomenon that is officially called ‘the new civic center’ – has been interpreted lately: their conception and construction and their use from the communist period before 1989 up to the present. Any attempt to set them in order should start from two premises. Firstly, the respective edifice resists any unique, ‘holistic’ interpretation that could exhaust meanings in matters of production and destination. Secondly, there are important distinctions between the modalities of explaining the building from the threefold vantage of its spaces. These spaces are first of all the exterior space, i.e. the city. Next there’s the exterior space of the building, i.e. its close vicinity, in the crooked language of post-Soviet politics or the huge halo of influence that the monstrous structure exuded. Finally, there’s the outer space. Since verifiable data are lacking, oral studies only account for having established the nearly ‘occult’ nature of the biggest urban operation in the history of Romania. These oral sources include unfinished and unpublished studies such as the one by Gérard Althabe from the ehess in Paris and legends recounted by eye-witnesses or just by former ‘initiated persons’ such as Professor Cornel Dumitrescu, the one-time rector of iaim Bucharest. As said, this colossal project owes its imaginary, mythical dimension to the wave of petites histoires it generated.
The most valuable interpretations, even if partial, are to be found not exactly in the discourse on architecture and urbanism but rather in that of the socio-human sciences, political science, history of mentalities, anthropology of the peri-urban (slum), and, not lastly, in psychoanalysis. The various sensible projects submitted in connection with the Republic House after 1989 vacillate between two extremes: the least extreme proposes to ‘recuperate’ the House in a strictly professional jargon of architectural ‘expertise’.
This has been used not only by architects but also by diverse interpreters of the house and by guides who show mesmerized foreigners around. At the bottom line of the bottom-line commentary on the Republic House (as poet Nichita Stanescu would have put it), we are dealing with quantity, size, forms of design, special structures and so on. At the upper line of the bottom line we can approach ‘the postmodernism’ of the House and of the Boulevard of Victorious Socialism, its ‘Bigness’ (Rem Koolhaas) and other concepts that could prove useful. In discussions about the House, the ‘higher’ aspect (in the strict sense of ab/use, of excessive investment with meaning) is taken as an epiphany. The House is like a heavenly Jerusalemite temple elevated in Bucharest in view of a second coming to take place on the spot.
One interpretation renders the numerous social, economic, political folds of the edifice occult – often deliberately because guiltily so. Others go into an interpretative frenzy before it. Between these extremes flutters a practically endless concatenation of ‘grays’. For instance, the nationalist rhetoric is boosted by the apparently neutral data regarding construction technologies and materials that are, apparently, all exclusively Romanian and, of course, superlative. (At times, the Peles Castle comes into the picture as a corollary. Here, even the wood was imported). There are also the much more decent, professionally speaking, but no less phantasmagoric ideas concerning a pre-established plan of Bucharest setting out from utopian, ideal schemes of the Sforzinda type (Dana Harhoiu). The structuring origin of this would be a sacred geometry made up of a monastic ‘Triangle of the Bermudas’, with parish churches laid concentrically in relation to the St. George Old Church that is considered the navel of the city.

4Space is an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, architects, writers, sociologists and geographers dedicated to the critique and writing of urban policies in Romanian cities. It started as a focus-group with the New Europe College institute of advanced studies in Bucharest in 2004 and has a same-titled weekly column on the internet at www.liternet.ro. The group is in the process of publishing a book with contributions of its members at Idea Press in Cluj (2007).

Introduction & moderation
Meta Haven
Meta Haven: Design Research, based in Amsterdam, was founded in 2005 by Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden, Adriaan Mellegers and Tina Clausmeyer. The team first started to collaborate in 2003 with a visual research into the Principality of Sealand, a tiny nation state located on a former war platform in the North Sea.
This project – centered around the pro-active engagement with a non-commissioning subject of interest, coming to terms with myth and symbolism, territorial identity and its diffusion into information networks – was carried out at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
Since, Meta Haven is investigating an array of case studies where the linkage between imagination and politics is key. The History Vs. Future project, focusing on the relationship between identity and history, resulted in a research of the House of People in Bucharest. Among the results of this discursive approach are, apart from a series of visual models and scenarios, the conferences The Museum of Conflict and Regimes of Representation.
At the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2007, Van der Velden and Kruk will carry out a research into the French/German internet search engine project Quaero, in collaboration with researchers Tsila Hassine and Gon Zifroni. This research attempts to merge a critical and imaginative understanding of design with a discussion on internet, politics, public domain, and cultural heritage.
Meanwhile, Meta Haven: Design Research is working on a book, Uncorporate Identity, scheduled for publication in Fall, 2007.

Practicalities / Getting there
Admission: free
Language: English
Location: MNAC
The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Izvor St. 2-4, Wing e4
Bucharest

If you would like to travel to Romania from abroad, please check
www.museumofconflict.eu

Advance reservation for this conference is recommended. For bookings please check www.museumofconflict.eu
or contact Carmen Iovitu at MNAC
carmen.iovitu@mnac.ro
Telephone + 40 (0) 21 318 91 37

For information about the conference, please contact Meta Haven
office@metahaven.net
Telephone +31 (0)62 427 67 97
Telephone +31 (0)64 831 65 43

January 8, 2007
Research on Research II: Design Research
Public symposium at Jan van Eyck Academie.
Two lectures and a discussion about the position of, as well as possible methodologies for, design research, with two of its most regarded practitioners: Fiona Raby (Dunne and Raby, London), and David Reinfurt (ORG, New York). Introduction by Daniel van der Velden.

November, 2006
Cc. / Bcc.
Creative city

Thinking about new iconographies for the ‘creative city’, we cannot escape the notion that the creative city as a post-industrial construct could not exist without globalization. It is part and parcel of a socio-geographical development aimed at neo-liberal ‘place branding’, targeting spatial rather than social issues.
Here, the 'creativity' is linked to existing representations and iconographies, starting with Cc. (Carbon copy) and Bcc. (Blind carbon copy), consequently visualized as the logotypes of Chanel and BBC.
Behind this are three alternative images of globalization: the supercontinent Pangaea, a sculpture representing Atlas carrying the world, situated on the rooftop of the Palace at de Dam, in Amsterdam, and thirdly: the image of PacMan (1980), that seems to signify a shift from ‘carrying the world’ to ‘consuming it’.

Developed for Institute of Network Cultures/Sandberg Institute:
MyCreativity conference, Amsterdam,
16-18 November 2006

October, 2006
Revolt / Never Forget
Schiphol fire protest poster

Meta Haven proposed to the All Media Foundation a poster commemorating the fire disaster at the Schiphol detention centre in October, 2005, where 11 detainees were killed.
The resulting proposal, Revolt / Never Forget, is both a protest against the Dutch government’s immigration policy as well as a memory of the disaster itself.
The date of the disaster has been spelled in containers, whereas on the ‘resistance’ side, a maze of containers is carrying the logos of the political parties involved, the Ministry of Justice, and private security company Group4 Securicor.
‘A privatizing government and its human cargo’ and ‘Asociaal Asielbeleid’ are main headlines. Two stamps are placed in the poster, one commemorating the fire, the other (‘resistance’ side) showing the portrait of Dutch immigration minister Verdonk. In both instances, the word ‘Nederland’ has been crossed out.

One year after the Schiphol fire
Five minutes to midnight, October 26, 2005, a fire broke out in the cells of a detention centre near Schiphol Amsterdam airport. During the inferno that followed, eleven men and women were killed. Neither of the victims had committed a crime; the reason they resided in the container structure was because of their ‘illegal’ existence in The Netherlands. All of them were about to be expelled.
It has turned out, after a thorough investigation by the ‘Onderzoeksraad voor Veiligheid’ – or ‘Research Council for Security’ – that the conditions under which the fire could spread, the problematic and slow response to it, and the bad treatment of the centre’s inhabitants both medically and psychologically, was to blame on the government. See here for the full report on the Schiphol fire (in Dutch).
After their release from the burning prison, the surviving inhabitants were placed in an open-air cage near the burning fire. Immigration minister Verdonk – a former prison director – has attempted to expel the survivors even before much care could be taken of them. The ministers Dekker and Donner resigned from their posts after publication of the report, but they are suspected to have done so mainly for electoral motives.
The camp was constructed from converted sea containers; elsewhere in The Netherlands, containers are used to house students or to re-socialize former delinquents. And there are more reasons why the sea container thus is becoming a metaphor for exclusion.
The Schiphol detainees were guarded by a combination of government forces (Department of Justice) and private security guards (Group4 Securicor).
An anonymous source known to Meta Haven, who was freelance contracted to Group4 Securicor, in charge of guarding ‘Kamp Zeist’, underwent a two day training before he was placed among the prisoners. Some of his experiences:

‘De gevangenen stellen de directie een ultimatum om iets te doen aan de slechte omstandigheden: als deze om drie uur niet met verbeteringen is gekomen, zullen zij iemand gijzelen. De gedetineerden krijgen niet op tijd hun bestelde spullen zoals sigaretten en moeten ook vaak veel te lang wachten op medische verzorging.
De teamleider van onze vleugel is supergestresst. We mogen daar niet meer komen. Dan komt het IBT (Intern Bijstands Team). Tien man door de gang in draf met hun grote kisten. Een indrukwekkend beeld. Stuk voor stuk slopers, beulen. Ze waarschuwen maar één keer, als je geluk hebt. De gedetineerden zijn bang voor hen, zij schijnen erger te zijn dan in andere gevangenissen. Zij zitten de hele dag te wachten in hun hondehok, totdat ze worden opgeroepen om ‘lekker negertje te schoppen’. In dit geval worden twee man meegenomen, een Nederlander en een Amerikaanse kooivechter. De tweede heeft een tatoeage die zijn hele rug bedekt. Het is een afbeelding van een engel, met eronder het woord ‘Think’. De mannen gaan rustig mee en worden in ‘de bunker’ opgesloten, dat zijn de isoleercellen. Daar moet je schijten in een doos en pissen in een fles onder begeleiding van vier man. Om zes uur ‘s ochtends wordt je matras ingenomen en verder is er niets. Later wordt bekend dat de IBT de man met de engel op de rug een arm gebroken heeft en zijn bekken gescheurd. De andere mannen van vleugel H worden overgeplaatst naar verschillende vleugels.’
(...)
Met veel moeite en mazzel kan ik pauze krijgen. Onder de frikandellen probeer ik een goed gesprek op gang te brengen. Een collega vertelt me dat hij geen emoties meer heeft. Hij vertelt het zonder trots en zonder zelfmedelijden. Hij werkt al dertien jaar in gevangenissen, woont de laatste jaren in hotels. Toen hij vlak daarvoor zijn vrouw met een ander in bed betrapte voelde hij niet eens iets. Hij vind het eigenlijk een slechte eigenschap van zichzelf, maar kan er niet mee zitten. Hij is de strengste van mijn collega’s.’

More info:
office@metahaven.net

The Museum of Conflict - Art as Political Strategy in Post-Communist Europe
September 12, 2006, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht

For more information see www.museumofconflict.eu

Calin Dan, BAVO, Wouter Davidts, Maria Hlavajova, Mihnea Mircan, Meta Haven, Edi Muka and Florian Waldvogel presented short lectures, followed by a debate. This research conference is organized to investigate the use of the art event and the contemporary art museum as a political strategy in Eastern Europe. A second conference will take place January, 2007, in the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) inside the former Casa Poporului (the palace of Nicolae Ceausescu) in Bucharest, where among others Nicolas Bourriaud and Jonathan Dronsfield will present lectures.

Both conferences aim to address similar questions:
How does the institutional museum reflect ways in which contemporary art is used as a representation of political change?
Can art take over the location of power, being 'a symbol of openness and democracy?'

A striking example is Casa Poporului. Since the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu's regime in 1989, this building has become the seat of the Romanian government and since 2004, part of it is in use as a national contemporary art museum. The visual rhetoric of Casa Poporului was originally designed to impose a national identity, constructed by Ceausescu in the 1980s. Its size certainly contributes to getting this message across the 'house' is the second largest building in the world. The building is not the only post-communist iconic remainder in what we now call 'New Europe'. This, and other structures, worked as strong symbols for communist/socialist statehood, while often their completion is associated with the regime's decay. While being abandoned or re-appropriated since, these buildings still carry political connotations. Being part of a 'national heritage', their still-intact energy as icons demands a variety of responses, including the use of contemporary art.
From here, questions can be asked both in specific address to the MNAC museum, and in reference to other or related efforts of mobilizing (visual) culture to, apparently, alter the perceived meaning of a former totalitarian architectural symbol. All these questions could lead, however, to a more general inquiry into the capabilities of art to change a political status quo.

Where and how does the museum step in, and does implementing art as a political strategy work in a process of European integration?
Can a National Museum of Contemporary Art still be called a (national) museum when it does not facilitate public visits, is not able to create a collection, and has no independent position with regard to government politics?

The main examples under examination will be the Casa Popurului/MNAC, Bucharest, and the Enver Hoxha Mausoleum in Tirana, until 2002 co-locating the International Cultural Centre (ICC). The more general issue of art as an agent of political change will be discussed in relation to the events leading to the cancellation of Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus. The 2006 edition of this Biennial was prevented from realization, allegedly because its geographical concept crossed the country's political agenda.

The Museum of Conflict is organized by Meta Haven: Design Research, Jonathan Dronsfield and the Jan van Eyck Academie.

Searching for Searching
– Quaero, Google, Europe
Pro-active representation for a new search engine

Summer 2006

©2006 Meta Haven, logo for Quaero.

In the course of 2005 and 2006, French president Jacques Chirac has repeatedly announced the launch of a European – but predominantly French / German – effort to challenge the world dominance of Google. The heavily subsidized European search engine would be named Quaero – Latin for ‘I seek’.
On a political level, the introduction of a government-funded consortium similar to Airbus, intended to contest Silicon Valley-based search market leader Google, is a very concrete example of European ‘values’ trying to ‘stand up’ against the United States of America’s technological and ideological dominance.

Meta Haven is preparing a series of proposals for the Quaero identity. For more information, see the 'Projects' section on this site.

©2006 Meta Haven, logo for Quaero.

September, 2005
Ryugyong: Forbidden Icon
Proposal for Domus magazine
Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang, North Korea

Ryugyong: analysis of the brief
The staggering image of the Ryugyong Hotel in its unfinished stage cannot easily be ‘improved’ by architectural additions, functions, or scenarios. And it shouldn’t. The Ryugyong Hotel is simultaneously prototype and ruin. Intended by its architects to be covered by glass, the hotel’s current deadlock effectively symbolizes a crisis in the political system that created it – while meant to celebrate its victory.
This building, referred to by Domus as an ‘antenna for ideas’, defies any functional response. Museum, shopping mall, airport, leisure centre or library, no architectural ‘good’ can undo or redo what has been created here.
The unfinished stage of Ryugyong – ‘city of willows’, an ancient name for Pyongyang – is therefore elementary. Forbidden to be photographed, officially erased from the city’s map, the Ryugyong Hotel (mentioned in Kim Il Sung’s autobiography) is no longer North Korea’s prime construction project, but an unwanted alien. It has become a gigantic monument to something that, in the mind of the North Korean government, is not at all ready for commemoration; the country’s political rule is looking at its future tomb.
Using this unfinished building as an instrument to address political and cultural change, the call for ideas brings to mind the failure of the Ryugyong Hotel to become a functioning power symbol. Yet, the pyramid has the fascinating ability to mobilize primordial, fearful reactions to architecture itself. An Internet source reports that the building urges one to get away from it.
At this day, the image of the hotel can be used as a proposed source of new – potential and hypothetical – relations of North Korea with the outside world. Both conceived, and unfinished, from isolation, this architectural icon can now be used to relate North Korea to other countries and inform other discourses. Whether such relations are ‘valid’ or not is not the most important factor at this stage of the research. More important is that they are proposed.

Representation
The choice is made to not make any physical changes to the hotel, but instead to focus completely on altering its representation.
Ryugyong is the negative Guggenheim Bilbao of Pyongyang. By presenting a series of alternate images of the hotel in a media and information context, Meta Haven intends to create a possible dialogue between (imagined) meanings of the Ryugyong Hotel, and its physical reality.

For this extra large hotel, microscopic representations are proposed. Through stamps, flags, logos, hotel key cards, and other proposals, the Ryugyong Hotel is linked to a world from which it is now, and perhaps perpetually, disconnected.

Web site released Mid-August, 2005
Meta Haven design team with Maurits de Bruijn

Test model for web site, Spring 2005

The Meta Haven design team has designed a project web presence at www.metahaven.net, helped by friend and cutting-edge web designer / programmer Maurits de Bruijn (responsible for such sites as the ecstatic if overloaded online portal of Hollywood-based jewellery designers Lee Riot).
Meta Haven’s web site is conceived as an ‘arch’ of three web windows, surrounding an empty centre through which the user looks at his own desk top. Whereas the arch, uploaded with a ‘rainfall’ of visual projects, functions as a developing visual narrative, the web site’s information and text windows are in plain, grey HTML.

Since its formation in 2003, Meta Haven is developing a practice where design, research and strategy converge. Though its methodology first developed from the political, identity and branding issues surrounding the Principality of Sealand - a former war platform in the North Sea claiming to be a sovereign nation - it can be applied to different contexts. Operating in both reflexive and practical disciplines, Meta Haven’s design research is informed by an abundance of cultural, historical and political references.
The Meta Haven team consists of Tina Clausmeyer, Vinca Kruk, Adriaan Mellegers and Daniel van der Velden (initiator).

To contact Meta Haven, email to office@metahaven.net

© Metahaven 2005-2007