IN COLLABORATION WITH SASKIA VAN KAMPEN
Breda welcomes new inhabitant De Kauw. Enrich your outlook on daily city life by writing poetry together.
CITY INTERVENTION & BEAMS
The goal of the open call set up by Breda City Marketing was to create an intervention to be displayed at the Explore Creative Breda route, using Beams: bright red building blocks created by Dave Hakkens and Precious Plastics, made possible by Plastiek Breda.
Creative sessions led to the concept of inviting absurdity into daily city life through writing in a playful interaction. The process was inspired by the jackdaw: who, omnipresent yet silent, looks out on city life. There’s more than meets the human eye. What do these birds see?
In an attempt to experience city life like de Kauw, Saskia monitored the streets, translating all she heard into poetry.
Once inside, observations from meetings as well as generated words by participants from the interim exposition were transformed into poems. As concepts for the installation gained form, we landed on making an intimate space people could enter, allowing them to let their creativity flow, settling them down for a minute. All words created were used for retraining a natural language processor by OpenAI, forming the basis for the interaction with de Kauw. Using a keyboard and a receipt printer, participants are invited to sit down and write something down. The result is a collective poem based on prompts generated by the AI about the city of Breda.
