Amsterdam based Visual artist and archivist Tjebbe van Tijen (1944) works since 1988 under the name Imaginary Museum Projects consisting of regular lectures, performances and publications on subjects like social memory, psycho-geography, media history, mapping of human violence and visual language. Especially interesting in this project are the “Museums in our Minds Scrolls” that he is making. To view the strips of images, he build a special wooden viewing device with handles that one had to turn to scroll through the strips, a manual scroll-bar really.
link to the Imaginary Museum Homepage, or read the interview that Geert Lovink had with him in 2004
In his celebrated book “Le Musée Imaginaire”, Andre Malraux (1901) developped the idea that the world of reproductions forms a “museum without walls“ a museum in your head. A virtual museum read more:
Continuous Drawing by Tjebbe van Tijen. Photographs with permission of Pieter Boersma. Coll. H. Groenendijk
One of Tjebbe van Tijen first “actions” was “the continuous drawing” organized by him and students of the London ‘Sigma Centre’ in 1967. The “continuous drawing” came out of a Londen sewer and travelled to The Netherlands. Two parallel lines, continuously branching and looping creating organic forms. True streets, onto cabs,in the airplane and thrue Schiphol Airport, over the streets, into the Stedelijkmuseum where it continuous on the stairs, to the terras, covering visitors and statues until it ends as a projection in a smoke filled dome, as if desolving in smoke. This project was initiated by the City of Amsterdam Municipality, Tourist Promotion and various Art Foundations in A’dam and R’dam. Other participants were a.o. Willem Breuker (musician), Theo Botschuijver (industrial designer), Graham Stevens (architect), Pieter Boersma (photographer). His took the initiative for a documentation center on art, technology and society at the Sigma Center and Stedelijk Museum (1967-1969) and was later founder and curator of the Documentation Center of Modern Social Movements at the University Library and International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam
sources: “Actie, werkelijkheid en fictie in de kunst van de jaren ’60 in Nederland” (Action, Reality and Fiction in the art of the sixties)©’79, Mediametic, Gandalf #19 ©’79. imaginary Museum
