After the devastating national art funding cuts in 2011 the Dutch media art institute NiMK had to close. It was a terrible blow to the media art community. The NiMk had been an important place to meet during exhibition openings, performances, talks and more. In order to bring the community back together and at least revive media art discourse artist Karen Lancel and me initiated Third Nature dinner parties at the new art initiative Zone2Source. Every dinner party had a different theme and the first one, of which you see a photo of the table setting below, revolved around the body in Third Nature. The gatherings took place in 2014 and 2015.

The project was inspired by the work of McKenzie Wark's Hacker Manifesto, in which she speaks of the emergence of a new economy and society through the influence of digital technologies as Third Nature. "Third nature is a world of networking, which makes possible new forms of commodity economy, but also new forms of what Geert Lovink calls ‘notworking’, new modes of association."

Dutch media art institute the NiMK gave me the most wonderful birthday present in 2011 when they agreed to let me invite and present Olia Lialina to talk about her book Digital Folklore. The book, edited by Lialina and her partner Dragan Espenschied, is an homage to early DIY internet culture, paying particular attention to its folk, pop, and kitsch elements.

Both of us inspired by science fiction author Bruce Sterling's Dead Media project I collaborated with Brazilian artist and activist Claudia Borges to organize a Dead Media Party, in which we focused on the re-use and subversion of digital technologies. After refusing odd demands to implement a popular rockband from our initial collaborator de Melkweg in Amsterdam Claudia Borges managed to find us a perfect partner in WORM in Rotterdam. We had performances from JODI, Gijs Gieskes, Love Action Machine, and more. A dead media quiz informed the audience on e-waste. Artist Sasker Scheerder made a beautiful edible installation of cakes with portraits of important inventors. Promo blurb from then: "Media technologies die almost faster than they are invented. A technique that was new, innovative and promising yesterday may be a thing of the past tomorrow. Competitive techniques, market forces and image are ever more clearly crucial to the survival of a technique or product. In the world of media competing for survival, new, old, dead, dying, comatose and even zombie media techniques and products tumble over each other, and their interaction is underestimated. With the Dead Media Party we want to show a glimpse of the richness of our entire media spectrum, of the interaction between new media and 'media that are not dead but just smell funny'." The photo shows SaskerScheerder and his amazing display of edible dead media hero cakes.

In order to spread more knowledge about art in and around the internet I collaborated with Eric Kluitenberg again to organize an evening about net art criticism in Amsterdam debate center De Balie. Keynote speaker was my friend and colleague Tilman Baumgärtel, a Berlin based critic and media theorist. Other speakers were curator Sarah Cook, artist Frederic Madre, and artist Graham Harwood.

During N5M3 my role as an organizer was extended from managing the radio room to organizing the opening night in the famous squat De Kalenderpanden (with online art pioneers Station Rose as performing act), curating online performances by Fakeshop and Debra Solomon, and co-curating (with Eric Kluitenberg) the 'How Low Can You Go' evening in Paradiso, Amsterdam. I invited microradio pioneer Tetsuo Kogawa to give a wonderful performance. He gave a radio workshop as well, which you can see in the picture below.

In August '97 I organized an Amsterdam free radio gathering at the second hacker camp in the Netherlands: Hacking in Progress. Among the participants were media theorist Geert Lovink and DFM radionaut Toek, who managed to ward off many hacking attemps on our livestream. In the end, after sleepless nights from Toek, our radiostation was the only one still netcasting/streaming from the campsite.

The Mr. net.art competition was a playful subversion of the machismo developing among some artists of the net.art group. It was organized on the 7-11 mailing list, which was in turn a project set up by jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans), heath bunting, and Vuk Cosic. The mailing list 7-11 served as the playground and online community space for anyone interested in net.art and for the artists themselves, and was created mid 1997 after the mailing list nettime became moderated because some of its members saw art email as a form of noise or spam. For the mr. net.art competition I put together an all female jury of artists, critics, and curators, with the intention to make all competition press releases revolve around the jury. In the end the winner of the competition was an experimental software, the first art browser, Webstalker.

Between 1996 and 1999 one of my focuses was internetradio: what it could be and what possibilities it offered for art and activism. In 1997 V2_ curator Andreas Broeckmann asked me to co-curate a weeklong workshop about net.radio. Because of the precarious situation of the Serbian radiostation B92 many radiomakers from eastern Europe were invited. We made excursions to both pirate and legal radio stations and to very interesting sound art spaces. You can read a full report by Andreas Broeckmann here, and my report for the nettime community is here.

 Picture by Jan Sprij. I am in the center right, holding a microphone.