Kunsthal Rotterdam

During Art & Technology, the vidual and sound artists of CELL will take over the Kunsthal Auditorium. Together with students from TU Delft and the Willem de Koning Academy, they will spend three days working on CELL_00, an interactive installation at the interface of digital media, electronic music, audiovisual performance, video art, technology and design, using old and new audio recording media – from Bakelite gramophone records to the latest synthesizers –, algorithms, artificial intelligence and more.

PLUG IN AND JOIN IN

During the construction period they will give experiment and improvisation pride of place as they investigate the possibilities of a synthesis between installation and projection. The sound and visual artists will link their technologies together to create an audiovisual landscape that grows and looks for ways of interacting with the surroundings. The public will also be invited to plug in and join in making the performance.

LECTURE PROGRAMME

(all lectures are dutch spoken)

Thursday 2 May 14:00 – 14:30 hrs
Lecture on gardening in space by ecologist and researcher Wieger Warmelink

If space travellers want to spend longer periods on the moon and Mars in the future, they will have to grow food there. But is that possible? Ecologist and researcher Wieger Warmelink from Wageningen University will talk about the possibilities of gardening in space. Since 2013 he has been investigating ways to cultivate vegetables such as tomatoes, peas and potatoes. The research is aimed at creating a sustainable agrarian ecosystem in which everything, including human excrement, is recycled.

Friday 3 May 13:00 – 13:30 hrs
Herd behaviour and swarm intelligence: artist Jan Adriaans on his work Swarming Chants

Artist Jan Adriaans will give a presentation on his audiowork ‘Swarming Chants’ (2019), which will be shown from 3 May in V2_Lab for Unstable Media as part of the Post-Opera exhibition – a collaboration between TENT and V2_. Swarming Chants is based on recordings of fans of various European football clubs. It explores how chants burst out spontaneously during matches and become a single collective voice. The chants of the fans seem to be the product of swarm intelligence, an unconscious process in which individual action is subordinated to the dynamics of a group. We can see similar movements among a flock of birds or a school of fishes, but the phenomenon is also found in such fields as robot technology and the internet.

Saturday 4 May 13:00 – 13:30 hrs
Presentation by artist Coralie Vogelaar in collaboration with V2_

Coralie Vogelaar graduated from the Sandberg Institute in 2007. She finds inspiration in computer art and works with deep learning, emotion and facial recognition software. Her work explores the place of encounter between people and computers, the communication between them, and the new insights or forms of behaviour to which it can give rise. In her lecture Coralie Vogelaar will show how image recognition methods and eye-tracking research can determine what makes a successful composition for a news photograph. She will also discuss her research on the facial muscles using emotion recognition technology.

Saturday 4 May 15:00 – 15:30 hrs
‘The transparent city’, designer Marcel Schouwenaar on robots, software and democracy

In this lecture designer Marcel Schouwenaar from product design agency The Incredible Machine will discuss how technology will shape our cities of the future. But how can we ensure that that fantastic future is a future for all of us?

Admission to the lectures is free of charge upon presentation of a valid Kunsthal ticket.