Enfolding Space

18.05.2019

aqb Project Space // Trafó House
Budapest (HU)

Enfolding Space - We spend most of our everyday life in static interiors. In rooms that are angular shaped, with levelled, even floors and confined by straight walls. Imagine an architectural space that is dynamic instead. A flexible space that shapes itself according to your body and your movements. With his newest project Enfolding Space, Dutch artist Teun Vonk experiments with creating architectural space of truly human proportions, that engages the sensibility of the entire body. He is developing a material that is fluid, intuïtive and playful, and has the potency to change the way you think about architecture forever.

During Wonderlands // smART! XTRA 4.0 X AQB OPEN HOUSE you become part of Teun Vonk’s extensive research project as you can play and experiment with the material. Vonk will use your feedback and experiences to develop the  prototype for Enfolding Space.

Enfolding Space is being developed by Studio Tony Spark with support of V2_lab for the unstable media, Rotterdam. 

Trafó House

Polygon

16.05.2019 - 25.05.2019

SPRING Performing Arts Festival
Hoog Catharijne, Stadskamer, Utrecht (NL)

POLYGON 02016 - Imagine a large technical construction suspended above your head. Although it is a kinetic structure composed of lightweight articu lating tubes hanging from thin wires, it seems at times almost animal-like or even human. Polygon is a geometric landscape that moves organically and adjusts its shape and balance unpredictably. Visitors can observe the slowly contracting and expanding structure in the busy shopping mall Hoog Catharijne.

Lawrence Malstaf’s installations are situated between art and new technology, between the visual and the theatrical. In a complex play with unstable order, chance and change his machines display emotion, doubt and other human qualities. 

SPRING Utrecht
Lawrence Malstaf

BOGUS I-II-III

10.05.2019 - 23.05.2019

Kunstenfestivaldesarts
Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels (B)

Is what we see really what it seems? The series BOGUS I-II-III consists of three variation on the same principle: they are each time enormous inflatable sculptures, made out of the black fabric characteristic of the theatre. These automated inflatable sculptures appear and disappear again into their respective boxes. Together, the three installations form a landscape of performative objects. They suggest a post-apocalyptic environment, after the end of humanity, when machines have continued without us and have taken proportions we couldn’t have imagined up until now. At the same time, they are sculptures an image of the alienation, the violence and the spectrality of a society in which everything has been turned into a commodified disposable. The size and ambiguous material of these sculptures turn the BOGUS series into a series of uncanny entities. Or as the Viennese philosopher Günther Anders would formulate it: we are so clueless and breathless when confronted with our own products, as if they were objects delivered to our homes, unsolicited, by inhabitants of a strange planet. 

Parallel to BOGUS I-II-III Kris Verdonck presents the performance SOMETHING (out of nothing) at Kaaitheater on 22 and 23 May 2019.

Kunstenfestivaldesarts
Kris Verdonck

Shrink 01995, Nemo Observatorium 02002 & Archaeologies at IOMA

08.05.2019 - 28.07.2019

IOMA
Beijing (ROC)

Nemo Observatorium 02002 - Styrofoam particles are blown around in a big transparent PVC cylinder by 5 strong fans. Visitors can take place one by one on the armchair in the middle of the whirlpool or observe from the outside. On the chair, in the eye of the storm it is calm and safe.Spectacular at first sight, this installation turns out to mesmerise as a kind of meditation machine. One can follow the seemingly cyclic patterns, focus on the different layers of 3D pixels or listen to its waterfall sound. One could call it a training device, 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.

Shrink 01995 - Two large, transparent plastic sheets and a device that gradually sucks the air out from between them leave the body vacuum-packed and vertically suspended. The transparent tube inserted between the two surfaces allows the person inside the installation to regulate the flow of air. As a result of the increasing pressure between the plastic sheets, the surface of the packed body gradually freezes into multiple micro-folds. For the duration of the performance the person inside moves slowly and changes positions, which vary from an almost embryonic position to one resembling a crucified body.
At IOMA Beijing there will be 5 Shrinks and the bodies of 5 performers.

The Archaeologies are remains of the creation process of various projects. Lawrence Malstaf constructs nearly all projects from A to Z his own studio. This requires a lot of technical research often through a challenging process of trial and error. Yet it is precisely in these errors he finds inspiration and ideas for new projects. 
With the care of an archaeologist he presents artefacts and traces of these errors, objects found on the floor and in the corners of his studio and he exhibits these artefacts as a pseudo-archaeological documentation. Each cabinet documents a different installation presented in a video. 
Next to exhibitions, several installations have been integrated in stage-performances. The text fragments on the drawings are quotes from these theatre- and dance performances. 

Curated by Chen Yunbing

Speculative Futures Salon

26.04.2019

BOZAR - Council Room
Brussels (B)

The future is post-human and noisy. What do performances on the limits of the human body teach us? What are the insights generated by exploring earth systems? Or from exploring the digital world? What do observations from the intersection of law and computer science add to the ongoing discourse?

Programme
17:00  Welcome by Marleen Wynants (Crosstalks)
17:05  Stelarc (Performance arts)
17:25  Mireille Hildebrandt (Law & Philosophy, VUB) 
17:45  Break
18:00  Raphaël Stevens (writer, curator Tendencies ‘19)
18:10  Kris Verdonck (Visual arts, theatre, architecture)
18:20  Jerry Galle (Digital arts)
18:30  Open discussion 

The Speculative Futures Salon kicks off the expo Tendencies '19.The Overview Effect at BOZAR, organised in the frame of the I Love Science Festival 2019. At 19:30, participants of the salon are invited to the opening of this expo in BOZAR, Rotonde Bertouille & BOZAR LAB.

Free entrance
Registration

DETAIL

26.04.2019 - 09.06.2019

Tendencies '19 - The Overview Effect
BOZAR, Brussels (B)

The TENDENCIES exhibition focuses on works that question scientific and technological innovations as much as they incorporate them. For this fourth edition, it looks at our relationship with possible futures, be they dystopian or utopian. 

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
(Samuel Beckett, Murphy)
In the installation DETAIL, a large and massive boulder hangs on the ceiling. It is hanging on a steel cable, on a ball bearing, allowing it to fully turn around its axis. The ball bearing is put in motion by a steel wheel rotated by a motor which takes its energy from solar panels. The whole chain leads to a relatively simple situation: whenever the sun shines, the boulder turns around its axis. Once the sun shines, and therefore the stone starts to revolve, the mechanism is simultaneously unrelenting: the fatalism of a world that has to and will turn. A mobile with sunlight. A surreal image with an undertone of danger and yet fascinating at the same time. 

The whole (complicated) technical construction has no other goal than to have the “poetry” of a heavy colossus float and turn around. DETAIL is in this sense a pointless use of knowledge and material which makes it even all the more alienating. The question can also be put forward as to whether many other developments that we call ‘technical progress’ really do help the world. The destructive potential of ever greater, faster, more efficient and automatic algorithms, processors, motors and fire power assert their influence on a daily basis in wars and in the depletion of our planet. Where is technological knowledge taking us and does it make us able to handle the problems of our age for the most part caused by ‘technological progress’? DETAIL is then also a stationary situation: frozen, hanging in the air, turning in circles in a vacuum.

The TENDENCIES exhibition focuses on works that question scientific and technological innovations as much as they incorporate them. For this fourth edition, it looks at our relationship with possible futures, be they dystopian or utopian. Curated by Raphaël Stevens.

TENDENCIES '19
Kris Verdonck

SPECTRAL MUSIC - LECTURE-PERFORMANCE BY ANNELIES VAN PARYS & GOEYVAERTS TRIO

03.04.2019

Concertgebouw Brugge
Brugge (B)

For centuries, composers searched the sonorous world for unknown and untouched territory. 'Spectral' composers explored sound itself, examining every possible gradation of pitch and timbre: not just high and low, and long and short, but also deep, into and beyond the core... Annelies Van Parys is such a spectral composer. In this lecture-performance – together with musicologist Klaas Coulembier and the Goeyvaerts Trio– she reveals the secrets of her compositions.

Concertgebouw Brugge

A Sense of Gravity at STRP Festival

30.03.2019 - 07.04.2019

STRP Biennale
Eindhoven (NL)

A Sense of Gravity premieres at STRP Festival on 30 March 2019. This immersive installation offers you the sensational bodily experience of defying gravity.

The project A Sense of Gravity started with Teun Vonk questioning: How can I challenge the logic of gravity, of the bodily perception of gravity, with a machine or installation? Can I expand the boundaries of our everyday perception of gravity? 

A Sense of Gravity is based on artistic research and interdisciplinary collaborations, blending the boundaries between science, technology, design and visual art

While being immersed in the installation, the viewer experiences a bodily sensation of weightlessness. This experience causes a new perspective and perception of gravity on an individual level. With a Sense of Gravity, Teun Vonk creates awareness of our human sensibility and new perspectives on the relevance of our physical being in the digital culture of the future.

https://strp.nl/program/a-sense-of-gravity
https://www.teunvonk.nl/a-sense-of-gravity/

Cloud Piano in CYBERNETIC CONSCIOUSNESS [?] QUANTUM HORIZON

27.03.2019 - 19.05.2019

Itau Cultural
São Paulo (BR)

cloud piano (2014) plays the keys of a piano based on the movements and shapes of the clouds. A camera pointed at the sky captures video of the clouds. Custom software uses the video of the clouds in real-time to articulate a robotic device that presses the corresponding keys on the piano. The system is set in motion to function as if the clouds are pressing the keys on the piano as they move across the sky and change shape. The resulting sound is generated from the unique key patterns created by ethereal forms that build, sweep, fluctuate and dissipate in the sky.

http://www.itaucultural.org.br
http://www.dwbowen.com/cloud-piano

ANNELIES VAN PARYS RECIEVES THE KLARA FOR BEST COMPOSER AND FOR MUSIC PERSONALITY OF 2018

22.03.2019

Klarafestival
Flagey, Brussels (B)

On Friday, March 22, 2019, The Klara’s - Classical Music Awards were awarded for the 9th time. 
Annelies Van Parys receives The Klara for Best Composer ánd Music Personality of 2018 from Klara manager Chantal Pattyn.

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