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.

Proximity Music
iii Instrument Inventors
Rewire 2025
Excitable Chaos + Organism

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 of 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.

- 14 April 2025 - 20:30
- 15 April 2025 - 20:30  + Extra performance at 22:15
- 16 April 2025 - 15:00 & 19:30

Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company
Festival TROUBLE #13

"Unstable systems are at the heart of contemporary physics, but they were already present as a blind spot in classical physics with the “three-body problem,” that Newton formulated when he realised he was unable to determine the trajectories of more than two celestial bodies undergoing mutual attraction according the laws of gravity. Later Poincaré proved the impossibility of finding a general mathematical solution to this problem. Furthermore, any local solution would require immense computing power, as the system’s behaviour is devoid of any recurring pattern. However, according to Prigogine, this uncertainty is not due to an inherent limit of mathematics, but rather is a fundamental property of nature.

The three-armed pendulum entitled Excitable Chaos, added to Organism, is based on this very principle. It acts as a purely analogue, material and hardware-based generative algorithm, enabling the artist to create a kinetic sculpture with infinitely renewed behaviours. By placing acceleration sensors on each moving pendulum arm, Navab can then derive continuously varied streams of data from these movements. These data variations are endowed with both coherence and constant novelty, due to their sensitivity to the slightest differences in the moving system’s initial conditions. Such complex behaviours would be impossible to produce with existing computer techniques.

This stream of chaotic variations derived from the pendulum then is transduced and mapped to the various robotics of Organism: to its motors and valves that modulate the flow of air to its organ pipes. In turn, the artwork produces all manners of sonic variation from its turbulent airflow. It is striking to see how, from the same apparatus, the artist manages to create such different aesthetic experiences […] in a kind of hybrid sound-sight-scape where the audience can step back and immerse themselves in the rhythmic correlations between the pendulum’s movements and the musical quasi-patterns that flow from them. Navab plunges us into the experience of sonic and material processes in which the boundaries of mechanical movements, generative algorithms and acoustic materials become blurred and intertwined, to the delight of our ears, eyes and imagination."
Espace Art Actuel, Pia Baltazar, 2024.07

Navid Navab
Kontejner

Manufacture poétique d’icebergs artificiels - Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff
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 - Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff en collaboration avec 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

Colombian-born Laura Colmenares Guerra works at the crossroads of digital media, ecological research, and installation, probing the entangled futures of human and non-human life.

In Aaron in Lo, Laura Colmenares Guerra conjures a haunting vision of life after ecological collapse, drawing inspiration from Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Through looping 3D animation, the piece depicts Aaron’s metamorphosis within Lo, an alien organic substance - an intimate meditation on post-human evolution in an alien yet familiar world.

Aaron in Lo is part of the show ON THE EDGE OF THE HORIZON released on objkt.com and on view until April 27 on Common.Garden.

Co-curated by Diane Drubay (Blueshift) & Tina Sauerlaender (Radiance.VR)

Laura Colmenares Guerra
Common.Garden

The Installation Art Podcast is the number one podcast dedicated to exploring the diverse medium of installation art through in-depth conversations with artists and practitioners.

Hosted by Anastasia Parmson, an accomplished installation artist, the show provides a refreshing behind-the-scenes look into the world of installation art. Delve into the intricate processes, creative challenges, and profound lessons of internationally renowned artists, practitioners and arts professionals.

In this episode, we sit down with Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf, whose innovative work exists at the fascinating intersection of visual art, performance, and theatrical experience. Based in Tromsø, Norway, Malstaf has earned international acclaim for his immersive installations that transform viewers into active participants.

Episode Highlights:
• Lawrence shares his journey from studying industrial design (rather than fine art at his parents' suggestion) to discovering how this technical background gave him invaluable skills in working with contemporary materials.
• We discuss Malstaf’s famous vacuum piece SHRINK 01995, where participants are sealed between plastic sheets while air is slowly removed, creating both a striking visual image and physical experience that differs dramatically for viewers versus participants.
• His recent focus on sustainable art practices and an innovative project creating "hotels" for endangered kittiwake seagulls in Tromsø, transforming an urban nuisance into an interspecies art project. Seagull Fountain / Kittiwake Hotel 02022

LISTEN HERE:
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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