⋗ microcosm N°3 plenumophileia

16.05.2025 - 15.05.2025

PHOS
Matane (cA)

In search for the hidden mysteries of matter from the borders of table-top astrophysics and natural fiction, three microcosms orchestrate states of sensory access to the phenomenological emergence of order out of chaos. tangibleFlux φ plenumorphic ∴ chaosmosis is an installation that invites participants to intimately encounter the ontogenesis of vital patterns through the spontaneous formation of temporal textures that emerge from material-energy fields. 

Physically investigated through collaboration with forces of complex harmonic motion, patterns-of-interaction between magnetism, gravity, and light spiral out of theories of complexity and into an improvisatory dance of hallucinatory forms. Eventually, the kinetic event unveils messy realness chaosing into balance: things doing…  stuff seeking a minimum-energy-state under magnetic flux. Sensually binding, spatially confusing, and temporally unsettling, tangibleFlux pulls everything into immediate vibrational relation with its vertiginous ritual.

N°3 plenumophileia holds a sensuous swamp of voids, curves, and viscous waves, where gestures prevail shapes: where pixel is lube, architecture is pollen, and objects are but excited clumps in a puddle of time.

Navid Navab
PHOS Festival

Organism: in turbulence

14.05.2025

Kontejner
Zagreb (HR)

Organism destabilises the socio-historical tonality of a century-old pipe organ to liberate and sound its turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. During concerts, shifting metastable states allow for Organism’s energetic thresholds to rapidly fall into and out of compatibility with one another. With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.

Performance: solo acoustic concert for robotically prepared historic organ, 2024

Navid Navab
Organism: In Turbulence
Kontejner

The Desert of the Real - A multi-sensory live performance by Studio Radiaal

14.05.2025 - 15.05.2025

Concertgebouw Brugge
Brugge (B)

The Desert of the Real - A multi-sensory live performance by Studio Radiaal

Technology increasingly reshapes our perceptions, blurring the boundaries between the tangible and the virtual. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality, The Desert of the Real explores how we experience, perceive, and remember reality within a shifting ecological and technological landscape.

Through a staged journey across four scenes, the performance opens with virtual reality as a portal. This individual immersion in a simulated environment gradually shifts toward the exploration of the installations and shifting landscapes on stage. Objects appear fossilized, remnants of a fading world, while original compositions for cello, piano, and live electronics draw audiences into an active role within a fluid reality. Digital seeds and strange organisms start to grow, as glitches and sonic distortions increasingly disturb the fragile balance between the organic and the artificial. Between fading echoes and fractured images, the desert of the real unravels.

STUDIO RADIAAL is an Audiovisual Collective / Pushing the Boundaries of Traditional Art Forms / Creating Multi-Sensory Performances & Stand-alone Installations / Blending Original Compositions for Cello, Piano & Electronics with Visual Art, Video Art, and Scenography.

Portfolio Studio Radiaal
Concertgebouw Brugge

SHRINK 01995 at 16. Internationalen Tanztage Oldenburgisches Theater

10.05.2025

Oldenburgisches Theater
Oldenburg (D)

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 16. Internationalen Tanztage there will be 3 Shrinks and the bodies of 3 performers.

Lawrence Malstaf

SEWING MACHINE ORCHESTRA

08.05.2025 - 08.06.2025

Centre Bang
Espace Virtuel - 37 rue Rhainds, Chicoutimi-Nord

Sewing Machine Orchestra - Singer sewing machines, objects charged with collective memory and family histories, evoke a transfigured past brought back to the present and decontextualized. In Sewing Machine Orchestra, twelve domestic machines, collected and diverted from their utilitarian function, become the protagonists of a choreography orchestrated by computer and amplified by contact microphones.

Directly inspired by the performance of the same name, this installation reveals the sound and light potential of this familiar object. Unsettling in the agitation it generates, the work evolves in a crescendo of sound: like a polycephalic mechanical monster, the machines come to life with increasing intensity, filling the space with a low tone.

The omnipresent light accentuates the spectral effect of the installation. It transcends the overall choreography and casts the shadows of these ghostly objects, symbolically reanimating an industrial and domestic past. This hybrid work invites us to take part in an unsettling experiment on our links to collective memory and its materiality.

Martin Messier
Centre Bang

Ríos Trilogy

02.05.2025 - 09.05.2025

Festival Internacional de la Imagen
Bogota & Manizales, Colombia

RÍOS TRILOGY // CHAPTER N.2: HYBRID CARTOGRAPHIES
The second chapter of the Ríos Trilogy presents twenty-one clay 3D-printed sculptures shaped through digital hybridisation using Amazon-related data. Each piece corresponds to one of the main tributary territories of the Amazon Basin. These speculative cartographic artefacts draw on topographic and social media data to reflect the socio-environmental tensions tensions pressing on the region.

2 - 8 May 2025
CEFE - Centro Felicidad Chapinero, Bogotá, Colombia

RÍOS TRILOGY // CHAPTER N.3: HYBRID R€¥€R$€
R€¥€R$€ is a 30' Virtual Reality piece that deepens into the complex situation of Amazonia. More than half of the Amazon region, 66 per cent of it, is subject to permanent pressure due to human extractive practices such as oil and mineral exploitation, road infrastructure development, ranching, agricultural activity and hydroelectric plants. Deforestation, burning, and loss of carbon stocks are proof of the large-scale transformations taking place in Amazonia.

The ancestral Indigenous Peoples' and the biome of the Rainforest are endangered by the rapid deforestation and exploitation of natural resources. The extractivist practices operating in the region have caused irreparable damage to these vital ecosystems, threatening the survival of countless species of plants and animals. The loss of these valuable resources impacts the local communities who rely on them for their livelihoods and has far-reaching global consequences. It is imperative that we take action to protect and preserve the Rainforest and its inhabitants before it's too late.

R€¥€R$€ underlines the tensions present in the territory, where human, cultural and environmental aspects rub with power, economics and multinational interests in a context of climate stress in which importance of preserving this unique ecosystem is vital for the survival of the current life on Earth.

5 - 9 May 2025
Centro Fundadores, Manizales, Colombia

Laura Colmenares Guerra
Festival Internacional de la Imagen

Humming the Ubique at Hear Here

24.04.2025 - 09.06.2025

Hear Here STUK Leuven
BAC ART LAB, Vital Decosterstraat 102, Leuven (B)

Humming the Ubique is a new installation and part of the Hear Here exhibition.

A mosaic of luminescent foils with artificial voices responds to the imperceptible radiation of the city.

The universe is permeated with radiation that cannot be perceived by our human senses. What is visible and audible to humans is only a very limited part of the electromagnetic and sound spectrum. Think of infrasound, ultraviolet light, or cosmic radiation. In this new work, I create a mosaic of wafer-thin foils that transform such radiation into luminous fields of color and voices. The vocal sounds are generated by artificial intelligence, while the color of the foils intensifies with voltage. The input to the work comes from sensors placed along the Hear Here Walk, directly translating the city's present but imperceptible radiations into this audiovisual artwork.

Aernoudt Jacobs
Hear Here
STUK Leuven

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 

Kris Verdonck / A Two Dogs Company
Festival TROUBLE #13

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.

Annelies Van Parys
Dates & Tickets