Category: Art

Petervan Studios – April 2024 update

Here is the latest update on Petervan Studios. The previous update was in December 2023. A lot has happened since then. A lot did not happen. Here is an overview.

Winter and Spring

Open skies at sea – Middelkerke – 19 Jan 2024 – Frame from Petervan video

Early blossoms in the garden – 20 Mar 2024 – Picture by Petervan

Family

Joy: Astrid now has a driver’s license: on the one hand, this means I don’t have a car anymore, on the other hand no more taxi service and that is a great luxury. And she took up again her dream of becoming a doctor or a veterinarian. For that, she studies daily to pass the entry exam at Ghent University beginning July 2024. And of course, horses forever 😉 Happy times.

Grief: my mother in law is not well. Mieke and I are trying to help where possible. Difficult times.

The Art Studio

Only a little happens in the Art Studio. Some paintings and sketches. And some soundscape experiments, playing around with the latest Ableton Live and Apple Logic Pro versions.

Also found a good AI service for song generation, called Suno AI. Below is a song generated by prompting Suno AI, based on a rap poem by Dr. Paul Pangaro in a cybernetic manuscript for a 1989 book proposal that never got published. Mind you, the title of the book was “New Order From Old: The Rise of Second-Order Cybernetics and Its Implications for Machine Intelligence”

Magritte Synaptic Gap – Image prompted by Petervan in DALL-E


You can find most of them via the “Artworks” tab on my website.

Petervan Artworks ©2024 – Lollipops – Acryl on canvas – 100×80 cm

I participated in The Stability.AI residency at the HUG Innovation Laboratory between 8 Jan and 18 Feb 2024. Did not get out of it what I expected. And Stability AI is getting quite “unstable” since the fall down of its CEO.

Petervan Artworks ©2024 – Prompt Woman in Arena – Stability AI

I am also playing around in Numena’s Space Elevator VR App, and start imagining what sort of VR performances would be possible. Here is an example that is in the VR elevator wall of the project that feels like a Magritte VR experience. For transport, I used the fly mode of the application.

There is also some progress in the “Claim Your Word” project, A collaborative art project to curate words that never make it into a McKinsey presentation. In essence, all words that make us human. In March 2024, I added a whole set of additional words, resulting in the following updated word cloud:

If you want to suggest additional non-McKinsey words, go to the form on the project webpage above. 

Still in the planning is a personal solo art exhibition in VR and maybe IRL. Some installation concepts will be tried first in VR, and maybe later in IRL.

The performance lecture “City of Play”, about the New New Babylon (and the power of imagination) is on hold. 

However, a new one is in the making “Cybernetic Magritte”, where I share the story of my novice Cybernetic discoveries and learnings, and only use my artwork as visuals, my compositions as soundscapes, and my poetry. Target date: June 2024 and subject to closing the last funding gap.

Cybernetic Virgin

Somewhere in January 2024, I got infected by the cybernetic virus. Here is the video that got me down the rabbit hole

Here is Dr. Paul Pangaro (President of the American Society for Cybernetics), who talks about the remake of Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, an installation illustrating his Conversation Theory based on cybernetic principles.

For somebody active in many innovation initiatives during my career, it is remarkable that I never got exposed to cybernetics. In that sense, I am a “Cybernetic Virgin”, looking with open eyes at the great cybernetic minds of the 50ies and 60ies. 

Since January, I have devoured massive amounts of cybernetic originals and absorbed as much as I can. This has an impact on my previous plans, whether art-related or intervention-related.

In the meantime, I had a couple of conversations with Dr. Paul Pangoro, and I would not be surprised if one or more projects will follow.

Summer of Protocols

The Summer of Protocols (SoP) is an ongoing research and evangelism effort that aims to catalyze broad interest in the study of protocols as a first-class concept for thinking about the world. It is led by Venkatesh Rao and funded by the Ethereum Foundation.

The results of the first (2023) SoP are now published on their brand-new site. The research and delivery format are all very well done.

This is about protocols in the widest sense: from communication protocols to protocols for washing hands, or protocols for artificial memory or addressable spaces.

Have a look at one of Venkat’s great talks about this project

Together with some friends, we submitted a SoP24 Protocol Improvement Grant proposal for Conversation Protocols for Humans and Machines. Let’s cross our fingers!

Delicacies

Delicacies are back! Check out the Jan, Feb, and March 2024 editions

Writings

Loads of notes, draft blogs, reflections, etc in the pipeline. When I look at some of the material, it feels like I am in a different reality.

The next ones are probably about conversation protocols, cybernetic virgins, and VR experience with eyes in your hands.

No idea what I will publish and when. It’s probably going to come in bursts.

Books

Highlights:

The Cybernetic Brain: by Andrew Pickering

Private I: by Jill Fain Lehman, Paul Pangaro, Ashlei E Watson

Other books I am reading: see my GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/goodreadscompetervan

Exhibitions

Since Jan 2024

Mudel Deinze – Antoon De Clerck – 10 Jan 2024

KMSKB – Imagine 100 Years of Surrealism – 15 Mar 2024

BOZAR – Histoire de ne pas rire – 15 Mar 2024

Hyper-realism – Along the E5 Highway – Antoon De Clerck – Picture by Petervan

Detail “Les Grand Voyages” – Rene Magritte – Oil on Canvas – Picture by Petervan

Social Media

Somewhere in the beginning of February 2024, I deleted all my social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, etc – ALL of them. I only kept my Instagram to sporadically share some images. 

I felt there was so much noise, that it was not worth my time anymore to daily scan all the new streams for something interesting. I am now subscribed to only a very limited number of newsletters on Medium and Substack. 

I also found conversations got much more interesting when I scheduled some quality time in catchup calls.

The best way to contact me is now via email or WhatsApp.

What’s next?

I don’t know. Focus areas are:

The Summer of Protocols

The Cybernetic Performance

The New New Babylon project

So, that’s it for this edition. 

If there is something worth reporting, the next update is for July 2024. 

Warmest, 

Petervan Studios – Update Dec 2023

As we close the year, here is the latest update on Petervan Studios.

The previous update was in March 2023. In a sense, this update is an update on the whole year. A lot has happened since then. A lot did not happen. An overview.

Quick catch-up

I studied architecture (art school), never practiced (dropped out), and stumbled into a nice corporate career. In 2017 I took a sabbatical and never went back. I left the corporate world. I am now officially “retired”

Family

On 18 Dec 2023, Astrid became 18 years, officially “of age”, driving our car (good driver, final exam in Feb 2024), and started higher studies (a four years bachelor nursery), and horses, of course. And in May, we celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. Time flies. Happy times.

Cosy Birthday Breakfast for Astrid

The Art Studio

The Art Studio is nicely rippling along. I did not have the feeling that I accomplished much, but with hindsight, it’s not too bad, and there are a lot of good foundations for the year to come.

Some of the new projects include:

Hexagrams

Claim your word

Something has dissipated

New paintings

New digital artworks

New soundscapes

Experimenting with interfaces for IRL and VR installations

You can find most of them via the “Artworks” tab on my website. 

© Petervan Artworks 2023 – Pears – Acryl on Canvas

The “Something has Dissipated” project got some traction. There are now about 20 spoken language versions by real humans, including Mongolian and Chinese. But also some synthetic non-human avatar versions like this one:

I registered for the Stability.AI residency by the HUG Innovation Laboratory, participating online between 8 Jan and 18 Feb 2024.

In the planning is a personal solo art exhibition in VR coming and maybe IRL. Some installation concepts will try-out first in VR, and maybe later IRL.

A new performance lecture “City of Play” is in the making, about the New New Babylon (and the power of imagination). No specific target date. I have time, and it has to be right.

New New Babylon – City of Play

I am kind of obsessed with the New Babylon project of artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who co-founded the avant-garde COBRA art movement in the 1950s. 

For 25 years he worked on New Babylon, an imagined city for the playful and creative human being. The oeuvre consists of hundreds of drawings, sketches, and maquettes. His work was inspired by the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga.

The NEW New Babylon is an artistic research project where we use 2023 technologies.

At the time of writing, we are trying to set up a team/consortium to overlay an existing city (district) with a VR environment for A/B Testing of the urbanistic, economic, and governance aspects of the city.

It probably will involve expertise from worlding experts, interactive fiction, procedural games, autonomous worlds, protocol language patterns, etc

More high-level info here: https://petervanstudios.com/new-new-babylon-city-of-play/ .

I have more details, so if you are really interested in putting skin in this game, DM me.

Performance

The script is more or less done now. Starting to make the first soundscapes for this. 

This trailer of Hilma af Klint’s “The Temple” experience keeps haunting me. 

As well as this painting by Léon Spilliaert from 1908 called “De Duizeling” aka “The Dizziness/Vertigo”

At this moment I am exploring a whole slew of tools: videosync, BEAM, BAM, Procreate Dreams, Capture for scene design, and spending lots of time on learning/trying to understand Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine, new Ableton packs, the new version of Apple Logic Pro X, and hopefully soon Apple Vision Pro.

Timing slips. No problem, I have time. And it has to be right. And not sloppy.

Delicacies

Delicacies are back! This time on Substack

Writings

Loads of notes, draft blogs, reflections, etc in the pipeline. When I look at some of the material, it feels like I am in a different reality.

The next one is probably about wormholes.

No idea when and if I will publish what when.

It’s probably going to come in bursts.

Books

Highlights:

Making Meaning with Machines: Somatic Strategies, Choreographic Technologies, and Notational Abstractions through a Laban/Bartenieff Lens

The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are

Other books I am reading: See my GoodReads:

https://www.goodreads.com/goodreadscompetervan

Exhibitions

Since March 2023, I visited many art exhibitions and galleries. If I had to pick one or two highlights, it would be Jan De Vlieger at Mudel and the Inspired By Love expo at Belfius Art Gallery. Picture below is work by Emilie Terlinden.

Detail Jan De Vlieger’s San Marco People – picture by Petervan

Detail of Emilie Verlinden’s The Farm 2023 – Picture by Petervan

Also, the works of David Claerbout and his practice are a continuous inspiration for my own work. Here is a great talk by David at Schaulager Basel as part of the Out of the Box exhibition.

David Claerbout discusses a range of artworks, among them Nightscape Lightboxes (2002-2003), Wildfire (meditation on fire) (2001), and Backwards Growing Tree and Birdcage (both from 2023), the latter two on show at the Gallerie Greta Meert in Brussels till 3 Feb 2024.

What’s next?

I don’t know. Focus areas are:

The New New Babylon project

The upcoming solo exhibition in VR

The Performance

But some promising smoldering sparks deep in the campfire may suddenly light up. Life is full of surprises. Only the fool don’t change their mind.

So, that’s it for this edition. 

Happy New Year to all of you!

If there is something worth reporting, the next update is for April 2024. 

Warmest, 

Petervan’s Delicacies – 14 Dec 2023

Delicacies is back! It is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks that I came across on the internet. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. There is no fixed frequency for Delicacies: when there is enough material, I hit the publish button. That can be after a week, of after 3 months. No pressure, literally. Enjoy!

Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. Sort of a teaser. If you can’t get enough of these and want more, you can hang on to the firehose, the extended version of Petervan’s Delicacies on Substack with loads of videos and visual sparks. Subscribe on the Substack Welcome Page.

Petervan Delicacies started as a Revue publication beging 2015. Revue was shut down end 2022 as part of Twitter’s larger feature overhaul since Elon Musk’s acquisition. By that time the counter was at 164 Delicacies issues. 

Making Content Work

It is rare that I read a book twice. “Making Art Work” by Patrick McCray is one of them. A book that sends you back to the future of the 50ies, a period in some sense similar to today, where we are again in a cold/warm war context, but where interesting collaborations between art, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and technologists make their appearance as well. Fortunately, it was not all doom then, and neither is it today.

The book is also a huge inspiration for The Scaffold, the transdisciplinary learning studio for the never-normal that I am trying to give birth in different constellations.

In the book, the author Patrick McGray looks at artists-engineers collaborations with a very specific lens: where usually art books glorify the artists, Making Art Work looks at the engineers that made the transdisciplinary artworks work. Hence the title “Making Art Work”.

One of the key insights in these transdisciplinary collaborations is the evolution from “What do I want?” to “What do we have?” Usually, the artist comes in with what she/he wants and asks the engineers to make that happen. This approach leads to a lot of misunderstandings and frustrations. A better take is to start with the question to the engineers “What do you have?” and let the artists play and be creative with what is already there.

The book is a treasure of other gems, anecdotes, and more in-depth research of the life and work of folks like Frank Malina (rocket engineer turned artist), Billy Klüver (laser-beam engineer turned curator/impresario), Jean Tingeley (artwork/machined that destroyed itself). These were also crazy times with Andy Warhol, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and many others.

Jean Tingeley – Hommage to New York, 1960 – The New York Times – Photographer unknown

One of the initiatives described is the E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology, driven by curator/experimentalist/impresario Billy Klüver.

There was so much going on at E.A.T. and the best way to get a sense of the depth and breadth of their work is by reading the book, or sitting down, relaxing, and enjoying this +1hour video about the initiative, narrated by Julie Martin, at that time “Director of Experiments” at E.A.T., and in this video really charming and full of humor.

Not only is her title cool, but the title reflects the core E.A.T. ethos which was all about experiments. The outcome was deemed less important than the journey of the experiment.

The becoming is more important that the state of the thing.

In my earlier post “Apple Just Upgraded the Illusion”, I already touched upon process philosophy as “a way out of what is today seen as overly deterministic thinking about technology and time, and clears the road for thinking about digital technologies and digital selves not as objects but as processes and becoming“

“Projects that did not get realized are as interesting as projects that are”

Julie Martin talks about reverberating beyond careers and personal lives, cultivating a sense of play, disciplinary hybrids, “artrapreneurship”, and taking purposeful risks in order to explore new boundaries in both art and science. How cool is that!

The precursor of E.A.T. was an amazing one-time event “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” one of the first large-scale collaborations between artists and engineers and scientists, held in the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, a huge empty space that was transformed into a theatrical performance space in five days.

E.A.T. was also the main contractor/curator for the content at the PepsiCo Pavillion at the World Fair Japan in 1970.

Here is an excellent article in IEEE Spectrum Magazine of Feb 2020 by the author of Making Art Work, Patrick McCray.

I love the subtitle “50 years on, artists and engineers staged one of the most ambitious and expensive multimedia events – and infuriated their corporate backers”

Here are some pictures from that article:

Both “9 Weeks” and the “Pepsi Pavillion” highlight the importance of space in orchestrating new skills and behaviors. Space as a language. Space as in spatial computing. Space as in spatial thinking, spatial creation.

In re-reading the book “Making Art Work” and writing this post, I suddenly realized that most of my work is about “Making Space Work”, or even better “Making Content Work”. A practice where most of the work is an experiment. Where the becoming and the performance in space are more important than the resulting artifacts.

Performance by the performers on-stage, but also by the participants. Their journey becomes an experiment as well, a curious meandering through an endless labyrinth, letting them connect the dots and do the meaning-making, rather than considering the audience as passive consumers of content that need to be hand-held, directed, and manipulated by and in a scripted non-malleable “show”.

As I mentioned several times before, my practice is not in the entertainment business, my practice is in the learning “bildung” process. These methods are underpinning my work in the area of interventions, provocations, and interruptions. In other words, all my work is about similar forms of artistic and aesthetic expression and experience in the co-creation of content. These methods also led to a new vocabulary and a new set of aesthetics to describe and share what I do and why I do it.  

I feel like I am painting with content. Making content work. I am hungry to unleash this creative energy in some big space, together with technologists, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs.

Warmest

That’s it, I am leaving the real world

I always felt restricted by the real world. But now, I’ve found my true calling in the virtual world of New New Babylon.

As I explore this world, I’m constantly amazed by the endless possibilities it offers. The colors are vibrant, the sounds are unique, and the technology is incredible. It’s a place where artists and experimentalists like myself can pursue our passions without any restrictions.

I made the life-changing decision to leave the real world behind and make a living as an artist and experimentalist in New New Babylon. I sold everything I had, bought the necessary equipment, and dived headfirst into this new world.

At first, it wasn’t easy. I struggled to make ends meet and had to work long hours to create my art and experiment with new techniques. But I’m determined to make it work, and I collaborate with other artists to create some of the most stunning works of art that New New Babylon has ever seen.

As my reputation grows, so does my income. I’m able to live a comfortable life in the virtual world, and I feel more fulfilled than I ever have in the real world. I know that this is where I truly belong.

But even with my success, I never forget my roots. I miss my family and friends, but I know that I could never go back to the real world. New New Babylon is my home now, and I’m content creating and experimenting in this vibrant world.

Years will pass, and I hope that my art will become more and more famous. I want to become a household name in New New Babylon and inspire a new generation of artists and experimentalists. I’m happy and content, knowing that I’ve made the right decision.

In the end, I realize that sometimes, the things we need the most are not in the world around us, but within us. I’ve found my true calling in the virtual world, and I know that I’ll spend the rest of my life creating and experimenting, surrounded by the vibrant colors and unique sounds of New New Babylon.

Warmest

Created by ChatGPT on 1 April 2023