30-07-2007 // Streetlab 2007

The Streetlab Festival in Amsterdam is meant to be a platform for young street artists, musicians, extreme sports athletes and fashion designers, uniting for a beautiful attempt to capture something as elusive as 'street culture'. The Commodore Gaming Team connected with C-kin artist Niels Popkema to exhibit the wild possibilities of the canvas-like Commodore gaming PC chassis at this year's edition of the vibrant event.

The Streetlab Festival spanned three days (27th - 29th of July 2007) and contained fashion shows, live street art sessions, photo and sneaker exhibitions, films, workshops, master classes, performances, music, design contests and parties. Held in the Westergasfabriek, a location in the West part of Amsterdam that encompasses various buildings and hosted more than 70 participants.

So there we were: Niels Popkema and Commodore Gaming. Testing the endurance of passers by and visitors with the crazy colours of his three C-kin case designs and the natural habitat that Niels designed for them in an empty freight container, we invited them in to demonstrate the result of the exclusive C-kin painting process, play a vintage C64 game or two on our monstrously powerful machines (yes, our technology is advanced enough to run California Games) and take a stab at designing their own C-kins.

Once more, it was great to see how people reacted to the looks, quality and build of the Commodore Gaming PCs. This time however, it was a 'not-necessarily-gaming' audience that came eye to metal with them and nobody was hurt in the process. But what became of the Commodore Gaming Team? Being no strangers to street culture and having studied the Urban Slang Dictionary to no end before the event, we surprised quite a few heads with our linguistic skills and unnatural poses. And we weren't even chased off the festival grounds!

• Learn more about Streetlab
• Learn more about Niels Popkema

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