This is where it all happened: in the main shopping street of Oostende.
There, in that street, I (Marcel Vanblaere, actor) did even see and hear myself laughing, then.
25 artists had been invited to create viewing boxes, with round openings cut out in them, for the hands and heads of those shoppers who were curious enough to look inside and discover the fantasy world of a species of herring. The boxes resembled incubators.
The biggest sized box, called ‘tagATTAK’, was displayed in the city center shopping mall.
The REALTIME project was initiated by Stefaan Decostere. It was also a tribute to James Ensor, the greatest artist the city of Oostende ever produced. He called his art ‘art Ensor’, which in French sounds like ‘hareng-saur’, meaning: smoked herring.
tagATTAK was the main attraction of the REALTIME project. There, a species of herring, once thought to be extinct, were dropping their little eggs, in realtime.
Herrings, thought to be extinct, were rediscovered in Oostende – alive. They were present, again, in some way, in boxed-in worlds invented by 25 artists, who apparently had received a message-instruction.
The online version of the RFID debate (rfid was the message the herrings brought to Oostende) can be found on
http://www.zeeproducties.be/oostendewerft/video.html/
A dvd documentation of the whole project is available in Flemish and English (duration 26′).
p.s. the other posts and pages of this blog are in Flemish and are left in the stage they showed at the beginning of the project (November 2010).

















