Unexpected Media

Digital Knight

Marleen Stikker, Director of the Waag Society in Amsterdam was knighted yesterday!

As far as I can work out being invested as a ‘ridder’ is the equivalent of being awarded the MBE but the Dutch translate it as being made a ‘lady-knight’. I’ve known Marleen since 1991, I think, when she was the Mayor of the Digital City which was the first major experiment in Europe to establish an internet community. She then worked at Die Balie before persuading the city council to let her take over the oldest secular building in Asterdam and convert it into a digital castle.

The Waag was one of the key organisations attempting to establish a ‘cultural backbone’ in Europe in the late nineties and a partner in the original series of Multimedia Labs. I’m working with them again to help establish the Media Guild by setting up an Innovation Lab with funding from the Dutch government’s strategic agency for digital technology, the ICT Regie.