Stefan Kolgen is speaking. He means: “The internet allows us to create new connections. A websites offers more than only information. Through the dialogue on a site you enter a new community.”  Stefan Kolgen, together with Ann Laenen, is the driving force of the CHIPS vzw group. C.H.I.P.S. stand for Communication, Community, Human, Interaction, Innovation, Participation and Society. It was founded to stimulate cultural initiatives by new media activities.

The first impression of Stefan is of a quiet person. He makes contact without much ceremony, direct and informal. At first sight Stefan looks a little bit surly and short. But that changes immediately when we talk about city poems, virtual connection, podcasts and city chromosomes. Stefan and Ann hardly are to stop talking about their ideas, ambitions but also about the lack of understanding they met while trying to convince people in accepting new revolutionary media ideas.

“I exist because I’m connected”
CityChromosomes of LeedsCityChromosomes of Antwerp

The Chromosomes of Antwerp and Leeds

Story of a city.  Antwerp is a city with many poets and writers. Many of them write about Antwerp and show their affinity. But what about the ‘average’ residents? What do they think about their city? Are their opinions not the real story of the city?
 
Stefan Kolgen and Ann Laenen: “We started a project called ‘StadsChromosomen’ (CityChromosomes) in which we had the audacity to make the citizens of Antwerp write poetry themselves. We thought for a long time how we can acchieve this. In the end, we did not invite people literally to write a poem. We were afraid that something too artificial and ‘rhymy’ would come out.”

“So instead, we put up posters at 25 important spots in the city, inviting people how this area made them feel, and to send a text message about it. The provider would register for us where the text was sent from, and it was put on the website automatically. The restriction of the 160 characters of the text’s length took care of the rest. What came out was pure poetry.”

“It was also possible for people to receive: texts from other people sent in on the same location. Or texts from the sister project CityChromosomes in Leeds, that went on parallel to this one. We made people of all sorts participate in this cultural project. We see using SMS texts as one of the important means that we can use.”

There were personal impressions, critical responses, poetical and lyrical well-tuned sentences, exclamations, outburst and love-letters. “We collected the best texts and made a small booklet of them, which in total could now be called the City Poem of Antwerp.” In the booklet, we read texts like:

De stad ademt.
Ademt stress.
Ademt feest. Ademt
Liefde.
Ademt vrees.
De stad ademt
Want ze leeft.
The city breathes.
Breathes stress.
Breathes party. Breathes
Love.
Breathes fear.
The city breathes
For she lives.
   
De metro stinkt, hij drinkt de geuren van de stad, als een bodemloos rottend vat.
The Underground stinks, it drinks the smells of the city, like a bottomless rotting keg.
   
Al die mooie,
Kleurrijke mensen,
Op het tramperron
In de morgenzon…
Het doet mijn hart pijn
Dat zoveel
Stadsgenoten tégen
Hen hebben gestemd.
All these beautiful,
Colourful people,
On the tram platform
In the morning sun…
My heart aches
That so many
Fellow residents voted
AGAINST them.
   
Stad van blok aan been... geweldige ongeweldige stad... ik ben een stuk van jou, jij bent een stuk van mij.
 City of a millstone around my neck… marvellous unmarvellous city… I am a piece of you, you are a piece of me.

And in the mean time, in Leeds...

CITY MORNING
They say nights R best in
cities but I disagree. Early mornings R
unwritten poems waiting to happen, with the
milk’s clink, the first bus’s cough.

GHETTO
Some say Chapeltown is a ghetto.
But them talk what them don’t know. Because
Chapeltown is the right place to go.
Please look to your left. Whatever
you saw makes up 20% of this poem.
The movement of your head is 65% and
these words are whatever’s left
over.

Struggle for Support 

The innovative project did not come about lightly. “The settled institutions lacked trust that using this new medium would work. Maybe it is also lack of knowlegde of the current the digital possibilities, but we also miss a certain more openness in Antwerp to new technology. We did not get much support and had to put in a lot of our own time and energy. Luckily, we did get places like the library and the cultural centre to allow us to put up the posters behind their windows.”

 

“We got 1500 text messages, of which we selected 600. At the end of the project, we brought everyone together, sending them a one time text message back, inviting them for the final event. When we presented the booklet there, when everyone saw what came out, and what effect it had in the city - then, but only then, the politicians were enthusiastic.”

“We put in 47 requests for subsidy. We needed € 75.000. We got € 15.000. The rest, we have payed for ourselves. Besides our Foundation activities of C.H.I.P.S. vzw, we do commercial projects in our K and L company. We used a lot of money from our own company to enable the CityChromosomes project.”

“What really struck us is that we tried the service provider to sponsor their part of the project, but they would not do it. 90% of our total budget had to be spent on the operators of the SMS texts. We had to ask people to pay the full price of € 0,50 per text message. Much to our surprise, we later heard they had stolen our ideas and set up their own similar project in Ghent. They carried out that project under their names and presented it as their idea. They never let us know. So we never wanted to get into a situation like this, but now we work with a non-disclosure clause for our new ideas.”

Dream the City

Postoffice of Dreams and streaming books

“We also organised the project ‘Droom de Stad’ (Dream the City). Concerned about what's happening in our city, theatre makers, theatre companies and cultural and social organisations have joined together to create this project.

We organised a public poll. What do the people of Antwerp dream of? How do they see the future for themselves and for the others? What would they like to have changed? We got 2000 reactions on the website, which is now the online Book of Dreams, and 6000 on paper. Forty eight hours before the local elections, we organised the Droompostkantoor (Postoffice of Dreams) in the former palace of justice. We asked people: is your dream a dream, and not a nightmare?”



“Other big projects were started in 2004 for Antwerp Boekenstad (BookCity). We got into contact with Michael Vandebril of the city who had just set up the city poet project. We came up with the idea to not just have the poems in the physical public domain, but also in the virtual. We use the tool of podcasts: every time a new city poem comes out, we make a podcast out of it. We put them on www.stadsdichterpodcast.be, a site which has had 47,000 downloads in a year and a half. This means that the poems reach a much bigger audience. The most popular podcast is the one where City Poet Ramsey Nasr made a song for Wallis in the exact Antwerp dialect.”

People may freely enter as a subscriber on the Stadsdichterpodcast. It is part of a larger project: the Boekencast. This is a non-commercial, cultural intiative of C.H.I.P.S vzw in cooperation with Antwerpen Boekenstad, Boek.be, de Buren (a Flemisch-Dutch cooperation), and NOK VZW (a cultural organization aiming at the younger public).

Time by time new audio files will be published, poems which have been read to on special occasions, for instance during the Thursdays of Poetry. Not only the poems of the Antwerp Citypoets can be found, also those of the Poets of other cities in Belgium, like Erwin Mortier in Gent and even of some Dutch Poets (for instance Joost Zwagerman).

“Recently, we started www.boekencast.be (‘boekenkast’ is Dutch for bookcase) on which you can make a supscription to your own liking. We are now working on a project to get radiobooks of our neighbours from The Netherlands. Dutch writers are asked by the Flemish-Dutch House to write a book just for streaming. The manuscripts are canned and bricked in the walls of the House. We will be working on 69 books that will be translated for streaming into 5 languages. A great way to make culture available to the public.”

stefan kolgenann laenen

Stefan Kolgen and Ann Laenen

Kolgen and Laenen, two cultural and digital entrepreneurs

Kolgen and Laenen, K and L, is the commercial part of their work. It is an office for new media and culture communication. However, doing their commercial projects, Stefan Kolgen and Ann Laenen noticed they had many ideas that could not be sold, because clients want to see it works first. Under Belgian law, companies are not allowed to apply for subsidies, only non-profit organisations can. And that is why Stefan and Ann started their ‘vzw’ (vereniging zonder winst, best translated as a non-profit foundation).
“Why we do all this? I have been in the new media for 14 years now, and I just have a heart for culture. We see a potential need with users of the internet to have more cultural content. At the same time, we see cultural institutions hesitate to pick up the possibilities. We like projects where the virtual and the physical are linked, such as the CityChromosomes.”

“Digital media will change our systems. We now see the struggle for control versus the struggle for freedom. Open source requires a whole new type of trust of the institutions. The city won’t have a blog on their official website, because although it would reach many to discuss the city’s decisions, the mayor would be afraid people would start posting negative remarks. It is a matter of time that we will learn to deal with this.”

“Digital media will never replace the city as a place where you meet in cafes and on the streets. It adds something new to the existing physical possibilities to meet other people. The big advantage of the internet is your anonymity.”


Second Life and Jaiku

“Forget Second Life, it is getting too commercial and this will turn people away. The most interesting internet initiative lately is Jaiku, a social experiment started by Jyri Engström and others. It is a social experiment to stream all digital information that you use and put it online. Being present has become a target in itself. See what young people do: you only count when you’re connected. It is not done to not charge your cell phone. Being connected, that is what new communities like Jaiku are all about.”

“We feel that culture has to be unlocked on the internet. We should start with museums and get their collections online. After all, they were paid by public money. There is no reason I can think of why so many Chinese who do not have the money to come here should be refrained from Rubens’ paintings. We strongly believe in the Creative Commons movement, meant to share creative information. There are so many people who do not have access to culture yet, if only to start here in our own town Antwerp. We still have lots of work to do. Looking for reasons to be proud of living in Antwerp.”


Interview: 8 December 2006

Links and downloads

 

 

Selection of Podcasts on Stadsdichterpodcast (in Dutch):


Video:




This publication is part of the ErasmusPC Antwerp Week, held from 26 March – 2 April 2007.