Manufacture poétique d’icebergs artificiels
A frozen safe, Antarctica constitutes the largest reserve of fresh water on the planet, accounting for approximately 90%. Its ground is rich, and about 20% of the world's reserves of oil, gas, and minerals are believed to be buried there.
Officially, a neutral and demilitarised territory, reserved for scientific study, Antarctica is a terra nullius, belonging to no one. The Antarctic Treaty rules out any possibility of exploiting natural resources until 2048. Unofficially, some scientific bases serve as flags for states to claim a part of the continent.
In 2012, under the guise of scientific research, the Russians drilled up to 3,768 meters to test hydrocarbon extraction technologies in polar environments. The Chinese mapped the continent's resources.
The installation Manufacture Poétique d’Icebergs Artificiels represents the map of the Antarctic continent, divided into 350 iceberg units. Audiences are invited to rearrange these units into a new, artificial topography of the territory. This staging becomes the play-support to explore future challenges related to the white continent, blending geopolitical fiction and geostrategic projection.

Les Unités Icebergs in collaboration with Vanessa Bell
The iceberg unit is a fictional unit that fits in a child's hand and measures the cryosphere and its disappearance. These units - which could be described as pixels or satellite tiles - evoke the division of resources into geo-strategic parcels. And they raise questions about geo-political borders and fractures.
By ironically reusing the codes of projections used in industrial drawings, these prints weave several narrative threads that echo our immediate present and future.

Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff 
Biennale En Commun(s) - HABITER

NEMO OBSERVATORIUM 02002 - Styrofoam particles are blown around in a big transparent cylinder by five strong fans. Visitors can take place one by one on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool, in the eye of the storm, where it is calm and safe. Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerise as a kind of meditation machine, challenging the visitor to stay centred and find peace in a fast changing environment. After a while the space seems to expand and one's sense of time deludes.

Lawrence Malstaf
BLIK x BLIK

Alex Verhaest’s work is focused on story, she is influenced by cinema expanded and a youth of video games. With each new story, Verhaest dives into what it means to make films in a multi-screen post-Nintendo society. Her narrative work speaks to the beautifully perverse paradox of the human incapability of connection in the age of communication. The basis of each project is a highly narrative script, existing or newly written, that she unfolds into a body of work. Verhaest’s highly pictorial style operates on the juxtaposition of film, animation and video art, threaded into a poetically uncanny world.

Ad Hominem, is an interactive philosophical choose-your-own-adventure film, based on Leon Verraest’s doctoral thesis Eutopia Unbound, in which the player is cast in the role of Change. The player is invited to pick an answer to questions proposed by four different characters representing four distinct utopic ideas. Through a maze of historical quotes on collectivism, individualism, progressive thinking and conservatism, the player is guided towards an event, organized in honor of Change's arrival.

Alex Verhaest
iMAL

Luminous Ether by Aernoudt Jacobs is a work that renders the inaudible electromagnetic fields around and beyond Earth perceptible through voices generated by AI algorithms. It combines ancient methods and novel techniques to visualize electromagnetic waves through an installation of luminous foil speakers enhanced with robotics and AI. A prototype will be showcased at the SWPK Art Foundation in New York during the expo Symbiosis: Art in the Age of AI.

The exhibition Symbiosis: Art in the Age of AI is a platform for dialogue and exploration. Through this show, we aim to develop a deeper understanding of the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines, and demonstrate the wide range of possibilities for using AI in art. As opposed to only focusing on the currently popular type of AI technology (i.e., “generative AI”), we want to present a more broad conceptual and aesthetic landscape of AI arts.
The exhibition features works by Alexandra Dementieva, Anna Frants, Petermfriess, Aernoudt Jacobs, Eunsu Kang, William Latham, Lev Manovich, and Koen Theys. 

Aernoudt Jacobs
SWPK Gallery

Beethoven 9
Symfonie Orkest Vlaanderen, Kristiina Poska, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Soloist Lore Binon with Ensemble Revue Blanche

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir joins chief conductor Kristiina Poska and Symfonie Orkest Vlaanderen again for Beethoven’s masterpiece: his 9th Symphony. Music that unleashes creativity, hope and celebrates universal brotherhood. Composer Annelies Van Parys will kick off the concert with a new piece for the orchestra and the Revue Blanche ensemble.

Annelies Van Parys tells a story about the relationship between the individual and the masses. How does that group dynamic of brotherhood that Beethoven so longed for work? The libretto of the work is by Gaea Schoeters.

Video: Annelies Van Parys over haar creatie 'Fantasie'
Interview: "Waar zijn die dromen naartoe?"

Annelies Van Parys
Dates & Tickets

Aquaphoneia (2016) by Navid Navab

This alchemical installation features a floating horn that echoes the ghost of Edison’s machine. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. 

Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released. The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound. 

Navid Navab
798 CUBE

Phantom Vision uses the latest advances in science and technology to provide insights into brainwave patterns, dreams visualized by artificial intelligence, nature's hidden communication networks, and layers of our reality that go beyond the limits of everyday perception through the works, interactive installations and ever-changing projections of more than 35 international and Hungarian artists.

"If we can capture the rippling of a lake, can we also capture howling wind and billowing fog using digital art? David Bowen’s sculptures capture a fleeting moment in the ever-changing pulse of water waves, freezing it in space and time. Using a CNC router, the artist transforms the dynamic, fluid movement of water into a static, three-dimensional form, paradoxically capturing the constant flux of nature. The works encourage the viewer to reflect on the futility of artistic efforts to capture the essence of ephemeral natural phenomena and transform them into an artistic experience by digitally capturing a single moment of infinite wave motion. The intricate, minute details and undulating surface of the sculpture serve as a tangible imprint of the power of water and the complexity of wave motion, juxtaposing the ephemeral with the permanent. The precise geographical coordinates in the title refer to Lake Superior in North America and associate these frozen waves with a specific location, further emphasizing the tension between the universal nature of water movement and the singularity of a single moment in time and space. The sculptures exemplify the artist’s broader artistic practice, which offers unique perspectives on the relationship between nature, technology and human perception." Barnabás Bencsik

46°41'58.365" lat. -91°59'49.0128" long. @ 30m refers to the source location where the water surface data was collected for this series. An autonomous aerial vehicle hovering 30 meters above Lake Superior captured still images of the water’s surface. 
For this series of five, the vehicle was deployed to the same location on different days and in different weather conditions. The collected images were converted into three-dimensional models using open source software.
The models were then carved with a CNC router into a series of clear acrylic cylinders. This process captured the dynamic movements of the waves and ripples from a specific time and location and suspended this ever-changing water pattern into a static transparent form. 

David Bowen
Light Art Museum Budapest

Proximity Music is a joint exhibition program initiated by iii and Rewire. It seeks to connect music, architecture, technology, ritual, and play through sensory experiences.

Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy explores how chaos and entropy act as both forces of creation and catalysts for change. Drawing inspiration from the second law of thermodynamics, where entropy signifies the inevitable drift towards disorder, the exhibition delves into the consequences of these forces on our environment, socio-political systems, and human interactions.

The chaotic motion of Excitable Chaos, a robotically-steered triple pendulum, drives the aerodynamic thresholds of Organism, a robotically prepared century-old pipe organ. Organism dismantles the conventional clean tones of the organ to sonify its turbulent materiality. Through the rapid exchange of potential and kinetic energy between its three moving arms, Excitable Chaos conducts Organism to create sound. This highlights how, in nature, even minor changes are key contributors to the pendulum’s unpredictable behaviour. This work reflects on how a sense of more-than-oneness may spontaneously develop in life and nature, and shows how a wild yet steerable relationality can help people to co-express unknown worlds.

Navid Navab is an antidisciplinary composer with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab's recent creations meticulously stage uncanny forms of order by imbuing machines with a sense of liveliness through fusion with the excitable dynamics of matter. These investigative works orchestrate sensory attunement to forms of life, at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing, while cybernetically enfolding these excitable dynamics.

Garnet Willis is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, and instrument builder. Willis’s research investigates the crossroads between sensation, form over time, sentient matter, and material agency.

Navid Navab
iii Instrument Inventors
Rewire 2025

DARK is a new performance by Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company about artificial intelligence and artificial presence.  In this production Verdonck continues his exploration of the tension between presence and absence, real and fake, human and technology, and all this in times of AI. 

Mustaf Ahmeti and Jeroen Van der Ven are the performers for this piece that consists of three parts: DARK, ACT #2 and BRASS #2. Live and digital bodies and voices alternate, to the point where they are difficult to distinguish. In the theatre space, DARK examines that other black box: the space behind the computer or smartphone screen and the algorithms and artificial intelligence behind all kinds of social media and chatbots. A performer surrounded by glass panels manipulates the screens, disappears, reappears and seems to want to draw the audience into their space.

By means of artificial intelligence, ACT #2 continues the work Verdonck and actor Johan Leysen (1950-2023) did on Samuel Beckett. A voice speaks the thirteenth and final part Beckett’s Texts for nothing, alone in the darkness as blankets rise and fall like ghosts moving across the stage. In BRASS #2, music resounds from three sousaphones, but the source of the sounds is indeterminate in this experiment with artificial presence.

What bodies and forms of life are to be found “behind” our screens and apps? And what impact do those screens and digital entities have on our bodies, our senses, our sense of reality? Like the human performers, the objects in this performance have an ambiguous status. Are they controlled by the performers or vice versa, or do they move autonomously? Everything seems interconnected and the spectator too will have to reconsider their point of view in this haunting world in which the concept of reality is called into question.

- Avant-première: 14 April 2025  - 20:15
- Première: 15 April 2025 - 20:15
- Performance: 16 April 2025 -  20:15

Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company
Festival TROUBLE #13