DARK at Festival Trouble #13
14.04.2025 - 16.02.2025 Studio Thor
Brussels (B)
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.
14/4 - 20:30 - 15/4 - 20:30 - 16/4 - 15:00 & 19:30
Organism + Excitable Chaos in Proximity Music: Echoes of Entropy
04.04.2025 - 06.04.2025 Rewire 2025
The Hague (NL)
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.
Fantasie (New Composition)
26.03.2025 - 23.04.2025 multiple locations
Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, Gent (B) - La Seine Musicale, Parijs (F) - Concertgebouw Brugge (B)
Symfonie Orkest Vlaanderen, Kristiina Poska, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Soloist Lore Binon with Ensemble Revue Blanche
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.
Tipping point at Biennale EXPERIMENTA
08.02.2025 - 01.03.2025 La Bastille – Salle Dutrievoz,
Grenoble (F)
The installation Tipping Point by Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff is a sensitive and poetic tribute to those dying glaciers. It stages the (re)birth of an artificial glacier protected by a dome; a drip is feeding the glacier that will grow during the exhibition. The device invites the viewer to attend the birth of this artificial glacier. It is inspired by the “ice stupas” invented by the engineer Sonam Wangchuk and used to fight against water shortages during the summer in Ladakh.
Between a laboratory experiment, an attempt to repair the climate or an ironic collector’s item, the installation confronts us with time and scales; 10.000 years ago, the stabilisation of our cryosphere coincided with the first human traces we found in Mesopotamia, while the fist glaciers are disappearing in 70 years under the pressure of the human activity.
Luminous Ether - Prototype in Symbiosis: Art in the Age of AI
23.01.2025 - 29.03.2025 SWPK Gallery
New York (USA)
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.
Lecture par Nature - Disqualifier l'univers
15.01.2025 Organised by Chroniques
Bibliothèque de Berre l'’Étang (F)
Disqualifier l'univers by Barthélémy Antoine-Loeff & Vanessa Bell is an immersive performance combining light, ice and magma, exploring the states of matter in the universe. Inspired by the demotion of Pluto into a dwarf planet, it questions the way we categorise and limit the world. Through ice volcanoes and floating mountains discovered on Pluto, Barthélémy Antoine Loeff and Vanessa Bell weave a narrative about New Worlds and exoplanets, echoing our own environmental disqualification.
Lecture par Nature - Nous entrons dans l’heure bleue comme en nous-mêmes
14.01.2025 - 01.02.2025 Organised by Chroniques
Médiathèque Berre-L'Étang (F)
This exhibition takes a unique look at water, highlighting its fragility: the birth of an artificial glacier to symbolise the fight against its disappearance, and an interactive experience based on the geopolitical issues surrounding Antarctica... A sensitive experience to help you grasp contemporary environmental issues. Three installations to see and experience: Tipping Point, La Manufacture poétique d'icebergs artificiels and Unités d'iceberg.
Exhibition by Barthélemy Antoine-Loeff in collaboration with Vanessa Bell.
Aquaphoneia at 798 Art, Science Technology Biennale 2025: SYMPTOMATICA | HORIZON
11.01.2025 - 30.04.2025 798 CUBE
Beijing (ROC)
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.
The Physical Mind at Chroniques Biennale
07.11.2024 - 19.01.2025 Friche la Belle de Mai
Marseille (F)
During a residency in Shanghai, Teun Vonk discovered by chance that it eased his stressed body and mind to apply physical pressure to his body. Contrary to what one may expect, the registration of sensory input does not improve in a heightened state of sensitivity, such as stress. Such a state serves the evolutionary purpose by filtering out irrelevant information, only focusing on the accurate response: fight or flight. When experiencing such a state, applying pressure to the body has a strong stress-relieving effect. Participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states
With The Physical Mind, Vonk seeks to let participants experience the relation between their physical and mental states by applying physical pressure to the body. The installation consists of two inflatable objects. The participant lays down in between, is lifted up and gently squeezed between the two inflatable objects. The lifting creates an unstable feeling, a slightly stressful sensation that is directly contrasted with a secure feeling of being gently squeezed between two soft objects
Paradoxically, this forced physical stimulus reduces feelings anxiety and paradoxically stress and the flight- or fight-response disappear. The participant experiences and increased sensitivity to stimuli, normalized alertness and a calm state of mind. The positive effects of this increased receptivity can continue for a few hours after the experience. The installation evokes empathy in bystanders who witness a participant undergo the experience.
1 Drop 1000 Years at Chroniques Biennale
07.11.2024 Friche la Belle de Mai
Marseille (F)
Homeostasis is a fundamental process for the balance of life. By allowing an organism to maintain an appropriate temperature according to the conditions in which it evolves, it is both a symbol of adaptation and durability.
The Global Conveyor Belt is a huge ocean stream called the thermohaline loop, it stirs up the waters of the five oceans and conveys heat on a global scale. Carried by the currents of this deep circulation loop, a drop of water crosses the globe in less than a thousand years and, in so doing, sculpts the world: with it travels nutrients, heat and animals, thus regulating the entire climate and ecosystems of our planet. We know for sure that this current has been slowing down abnormally for more than 200 years because of human activity, and if this deregulation keeps on going it could lead to a worldwide collapse of life through climate change. Water is the matter of life.
Seeking to highlight the finesse of our homeostatic system and the fragility of its balance, the artist proposes an artistic interpretation of these intimate and global currents that happens to be essential to the survival of our species and its environment.