… this is the blog of Arie Altena. I work as editor/researcher for V2_ in Rotterdam: http://www.v2.nl, and I am part of the team that organizes the Sonic Acts festival: http://www.sonicacts.com. I occasionally write about the intersections of literature, new media, art, music, and technology &c. and do text editing jobs. Sometimes I give guest lectures at an arts academy – in recent years only a the Royal Conservatoire. I was a member of the advisory board of the Dutch Foundation for Literature until 2020. I was also member of the jury for the Witteveen+Bos-Prijs voor Kunst+Techniek. I was a member of the committee for the Fonds BKVB: http://www.fondsbkvb.nl. I served as chairman of the board of Foundation 2, that does the concert series DNK-Amsterdam: http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com. I occasionally translate (English-Dutch, German-Dutch). I work and live at Marci Panis.

Since about 1997 an archive of my published (and some unpublished) texts can be found at https://ariealt.home.xs4all.nl/. I did a massive update in September 2020. Please note that the PDFs that I offer are for private use only!

There is a mirror of my text archive here: http://ariealt.net/ariealt_txt/, because, as far as I know, the KB archives my site.

I studied Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam and spent 4 years as a PhD-student working on American postmodernist literature. I never finished my PhD because at the time (1994) the WWW and HTML were far more exciting, and at the time I became heavily involved with new media and the internet. In 2023 I published the unfinished texts of my PhD on my website. Someone might be interested – for historical reasons.

I worked for Mediamatic: http://www.mediamatic.net for a long time. I also worked for Metropolis M, the Dutch magazine for contemporary art, http://www.metropolism.org. And I was a tutor at the Frank Mohr Institute (MA) in Groningen.

I co-organized Sonic Acts X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV and XV: http://www.sonicacts.com, and the Kontraste festivals 2011, 2012 and 2013. I co-curated the Dark Ecology project 2014–2016. I also edited a number of books for Sonic Acts, as well as for Kontraste.

In 2006 I was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, http://www.janvaneyck.nl, where my research on the transformation of writing online (amongst serious bloggers) was part of the Ubiscribe-project.

I live in Amsterdam. I play guitar & banjo (and no-input mixer) in Oorbeek: http://www.oorbeek.net.

On this blog I used to write about anything that catched my attention. I might do that again, but since a couple of years I mainly use it as an archive of my bike rides, which, yes, can also be found at Strava.

(In 2006 I decided to write in (international) English; before that I used my native language, Dutch. Although I feel more at home in Dutch, I continued blogging in English; being under the impression (delusion?) I had a small international audience… In 2011 I decided to use Dutch as the main language, for the simple reason that I enjoy writing in Dutch better than writing in English, and also because in my professional & private life I’m using English so much already.)

Please note that although I have accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and the like, I hardly never use those services. Trying to reach me through them is useless.

E-mails to ariealt[at]xs4all.nl please. I do read e-mail.