Last Saturday, the third edition of Mastermundo took place. It was a hectic day, ‘a really fun, amorphous sort of day’ as one of the visitors called it. And that was also how it was planned, so that’s nice. And we even broke a record at the end of the day, so what more can you possible want?

This edition as a project started with an email by Itay Talgam, to thank me for the Mastermundo 2008 I sent him. And in that email he also said that he would be at Picnic this year. Itay is by far one of the most special people I ever met — ever. So I thought: Hey! Then we can do something. So this is what I instantly replied to him:

Something completely different…
I have a daft plan. For a edition of Mastermundo for this year, yes, Mastermusic as you already read in the subject field. Mastermundo is above all a place to experiment to try out new stuff, be constantly uncomfortable (never the same thing the same way again) and have fun with a limited bunch of people. And, it would be nice if we can add meaning along the way and make this world a better place a bit by bit.

So, the daft plan. What is it? Today I had a chat with Olof van Winden of TodaysArt, who also partnered last 2 years. Offering hosting. Since you will be at Picnic again, this was my idea.

Would in be exiting to have you as a conductor of a digital orchestra? Musicians with only electronical stuff of a mix of traditional and digital, different genres, with visual artists and even dancers?

Picnic takes place 23-25 sept and TodaysArt always overlaps, is held 25-26 sept. So idea can be to have the Saturday for rehearsals and the performance at night. To take place in a theatre or, even more surprising and depending on the weather outside on the Spuiplein, which has a stairway that we can use.

Idea or simply stupid?

He instantly replied:
Not stupid at all! I like it, and alredy thinking about what to do. Are you familiar with John Zorn’s Cobra? As a concept, I see how it could be just the right approach, telling in a completely new way a musical story.

Let’s keep talking!

So I thought: we need imagery and sent an email to Aaron Koblin. He also liked the idea. Joy! At that moment Itay was in San Francisco, where he gave a talk at Google Zeitgeist. Aaron works at Google Labs. So they tried to meet. That week I also had contact again with Olof, the director of the TodaysArt festival, resulting in this status update:

Hi Itay and Aaron, where yesterday things looked impossible, things today changed for the good.
The Spuiplein, the place last year those glass houses were situated, will be made as dark as possible, with searchlights, that can be controlled. The Mercure Hotel, which is the backdrop of the stairs and the stairs are not in use and can be used. And, additionally, electricity, PA, etc. are available. And, we also have a nice place to work during daytime to create and prepare for The Moment, within the TodaysArt festival — also allowing audience to co-create, in a workshop-lab-setting-rehearse.

So, most ingredients for World’s First Flashmob Open Air Rock Orchestra Spectacle are there, all of a sudden.

So, idea can be something like this:
using the day to create with a load of people.
the buildup
on prime time, let’s say 9pm, a kickass leader starts to play on the Mercure, annoucing the show.
performance 30 minutes or so.
….

Some additional thoughts I shared with Aaron and Itay:

Some mumblings:
What I’m intrigiued by (first have to come clean: I’m starting to enjoy classical music now, has been a large gap in my upbringing — so trying to catch up now) is that orchestra’s for collaborately create one sound/experience. A mass of people, in unison making something so delicate, as one body. On the other hand, we have all the tech musicians/vj’s/… now. Most of them spend a lot of time on their atticks, and perform solitary and there is a lot of ego involved. They perform, and are willing to share that with an audience, but construct their music like in a lab. The vj does his thing on top of the music, ego+ego. Does a dj need those visuals to compensate for the not really engaging visual performance? While an orchestra is beautiful to look at by itself. Is there a way to merge this? Like e.g. putting a bunch of those solitary tech actors together to create one musical/visual voice? Can we mix, mashup, etc? Add some more layers? Dance, a movie trailer to get you into the story, etc.

By that time, we were in the programme booklet of TodaysArt already, programmed at 22.30 at the Spuiplein as Mastermundo 2009: World’s First Flashmob Open Air Rock Orchestra Spectacle. Haha. Ehm. So we passed the point of no return…

A week later we met with Itay. I became we because of a mail by my former …,staat collegue René ten Brink, who just became a father of a beautiful daughter and felt like doing something again. So I told about this plan. He directly joined in. Itay was in the Netherlands to do preparations for Picnic. We met him at Schiphol airport to discuss what we were actually going to do. It was a great meeting with loads of ideas. John Zorn, John Cage, dancers, everything. Beautiful. That same week I also visited my friends at 178 aardige ontwerpers. And asked them if they would be willing to make the posters. Or even a movie. They liked the plan and created 4 different posters and a great movie. They couldn’t embody any better what the day was going to be like. And thank you Zwaan for printing them.

Again a week later we met again with Itay. He had a conference on a boat in Germany and was able to fly back to Tel Aviv via Amsterdam. We met him, together with the first year students of I/M/D at Vertigo (Filmmuseum), Vondelpark in Amsterdam. We developed some great new ideas together while enjoying the beautiful day. All ideas on music and musicians…

That week René and I tried to knit everything into one thing, but most importantly, not the day itself. Only making sure the right circumstances would be there to let everybody participating make it a great day. We contacted truckloads of musicians and invited people to join in. But we found out that musicians are deadly serious people. Where at the end 120 people registered for the day, we didn’t have a clear view on how many of them were musicians. Hm. Plan B.

Or better: track B. Speakers. So, if no musicians, there won’t be a performance. And since we had an audience, speakers would help. After a load of email, twitter and calls we had Gerd Leonhard, Itay Talgam, Dagan Cohen, Ritzo ten Cate, Marc Prüst, David Wieland (I/M/D student live from Hong Kong), Devon Reid, Rory Parks, Jasper Schelling, Luis Mendo, 178 aardige ontwerpers, and two workshops: a 6 minute workshop by target=”_blank”Marc Boumeester and a TASK workshop by Shayna Schnapp. Not bad at all.

So finally, the day itself.

To be honest, while we were last-minute in everything, you hope for the world. 120 people registered to come so that was promising. Were were at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) at 9am. But nobody there to open the building. No good. A bit later somebody arrived, saying that he was told to be there at 09.30am. Not a good start. While building things up, a phone call from Itay. He was lost, left the train station the wrong side, so I went out to find him and pick him up. He was just around the corner, pfiew. The reality at 10am was that there were only about 20 people there. Hm. It made the theme of ‘chance/improvisation’ for the day instantly relevant. Just like any other unconference, we wrote our program on a whiteboard, so we could easily change it on the fly. We needed to. For the people already there I killed some time by showing some of the inspirations we had for this day. The Black Eyed Peas performance for Oprah:



the great flashmob opera at London Stansted:



the Michael Jackson tribute flashmob in Stockholm:



the Eternal Moonwalk:



Cobra by John Zorn:



to finally start the day at 11am.

‘Today is about building an airplane while flying’ I hear myself say and it couldn’t be more true than that. A day about change and improvisation. With three ingredients: music, talks and workshops. With Itay Talgam. With talks in person by Dagan Cohen, Ritzo ten Cate, not by Luis Mendo because he had to cancel but by 178 aardige ontwerpers, Devon Reid (but in the proces of the day we decided to skip this year after two years of enlightening Mastermundo with love and poetry), Rory Parks and Jasper Schelling. With talks via Skype by Gerd Leonhard live from Basel, David Wieland live from Hong Kong and Marc Prüst live from Paris. And with Zachary Jean Paradis live from Chicago. Zach was also getting married that same day, so this was still kind of unsure. And, additionally the ‘Task’ workshop by Shayna Schapp and teh ‘6 minute workshop’ by Marc Boumeester. A lot of stuff for the day. With free drinks, kindly sponsored by Sourcy vitaminwater.

After Itay did an introduction, we called Marc Prüst for his talk. Creating a conference via Skype is a great idea. It simply just all worked perfectly. By using the screen sharing feature Marc was able to show the six photo stories he collected, while telling the underlying stories. Really, really impressive selections of powerful work that showed us how fortunate we are with the lives we live.

Fast forwarding through the day: workshop with Itay, lunch, Gerd Leonhard at 1pm (he just finished shaving), more jams with Itay, talks by Rory, a great physical presentation by 178, a mind-bubbling presentation by Jasper, a for me flattering presentation by David, a great made up story by Dagan and of course no Zachary. And Ritzo decided not to do his talk. Thank god he didn’t. He decided he wanted to do things with lots of people. Because he likes things with lots of people.

After a long day, everybody was kind of wasted. And we decided collectively not to do the performance at the Spuiplein. It missed out on a lot. We decided to do a final session with Itay and then call it a day and together enjoy the TodaysArt festival instead. The majority of people joined in for the closure session. To see if we could get something to work. We ended up standing in a big circle, with Itay in the center, challenging the group to do things. Almost nobody felt like doing much. All ideas ended up in more collective ideas. And not in music but in ‘noise’ as Itay calls it. Screaming and shouting, but nothing structural, nothing really creative. So at a certain point we were doing a wave by voice instead of hands. At that point, Ritzo came in. With a phone in his hand. That he had ANP on the phone, the general Dutch press service. He told me that I had to explain Mastermundo. So I did. The lady on the otherside ended the call with: ‘Can you ask Ritzo to call me back, to share if the record attempt succeeded?’ ‘Okay.’ Then we hung up. ‘What record attempt, Ritzo?’ So he explained.

Vocal Domino. A record attempt Vocal Domino. Which was similar to the voice wave we were already doing. So, we tried to find a way to do that as a group, define the rules, the how, etc. Then Ritzo received a sms message: we made it to the AD. It was national news now:

Den Haag doet recordpoging ‘vocal domino’
DEN HAAG (ANP) – Op het Spuiplein in Den Haag vindt zaterdagavond een recordpoging ‘vocal domino’ plaats. De Israëlische dirigent Itay Talgam hoopt zoveel mogelijk mensen op de been te krijgen die achter elkaar een toon uitstoten. De recordpoging maakt deel uit van een chaosconcert, waar ook een improvisatieorkest deel van uitmaakt.

De actie vocal domino vindt plaats in het kader van Mastermundo, een jaarlijks terugkerend samenzijn van kunstenaars. Zij proberen in de Hofstad in één dag iets moois te creëren. De organisatie roept via blogs en twitter zoveel mogelijk mensen op zich tegen half elf ’s avonds op het Spui in Den Haag te melden. ,,Je hoeft niet per se te kunnen zingen”, beklemtoont dirigent Itay Talgam.

Hij rekent op tussen de duizend en vijfduizend deelnemers aan de recordpoging.

It was exactly what the group needed. Apparently need to have an incentive to participate. A lot of laughs and a bundle of energy. It became a group instantly. After agreeing to go for it at 10.30pm we rounded up, packed our stuff and finished the day at the auditorium of the KABK.

When I brought Itay to his hotel, I bumped into Olof van Winden, the director of TodaysArt and explained him what the situation was. We arranged a guerilla beamer set-up, contacted the social web godfather Roeland P. Landegent who was in control of everything social web at TodaysArt and we spread the word. In the restaurant the rules were made up. What is Vocal Domino? How does it work? Who is presenting it? What should be visible on the screens? Mark Ridder joined to make the screens and then left to make all the arrangements. So cool. The rest is history:



And such a great ending for the day. When we started the day, we had no clue where we would end up with. It was truly building an airplane while flying. And we had a great flight.