Category: Petervan Studios

Petervan’s Ride – April 2024

Petervan’s Musical Ride April 2024 – 90+ songs. Most recent releases, including Fabiana Palladino (what a great sound production, headphones on!), Shabaka, Sheila E. > Oldies from TC Matic, Roisin Murphy, Angelo Bandalamenti > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!

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’s Delicacies #169 and #170

Whereas in the early days, Delicacies were more about listing links per category, more recent editions seem to evolve into some form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. 

Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. 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’s Ride – February 2024

Petervan’s Musical Ride February 2024 – 80+ songs. Mostly recent releases, including Brittany Howard, Kim Gordon, The Smile > Oldies from Plastikman, The Beatles, Lee “Scratch” Perry > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy! 

Petervan’s Delicacies #168 – 8 Feb 2024

My incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks that I came across on the internet. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. 

Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. 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 #167 – 17 Jan 2024

My incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks that I came across on the internet. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. 

Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. 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 #166 – 4 Jan 2024

My incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks that I came across on the internet. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI.

  • Here, on my blog, I only share a couple of links. 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.

The Scaffold is a Wormhole

As we are turning the pages from old to new, I thought of writing one of those old-school blog posts, more for the fun of writing it – and hopefully you reading it – rather than trying to make a point or breakthrough. Although pages, pointed pencils, and breaking through are definitely topics in these reflections about The Scaffold being a wormhole. Hope you enjoy this rabbit hole.

A brain worm in my head is obsessing about wormholes being an excellent metaphor or not for bending cognitive spaces to our own particular navigational needs. 

An ear worm or brain worm is usually defined as a “catchy or memorable piece of music or saying that continuously occupies a person’s mind even after it is no longer being played or spoken about.”. 

Unfortunately, in slang, it means “a persistent delusion or obsession; a deeply-ingrained or unquestioned idea”. 

I leave it to my readers to assess whether my thoughts belong to the former or the latter.

The wormhole metaphor popped up during one of my catch-up calls with partners in crime about The Scaffold, our transdisciplinary learning studio for the never-normal. 

The Scaffold is a wormhole, an unorthodox way of going faster from A to B. 

Here is where Dr Romilly explains about the wormhole to Cooper in the film Interstellar:

I love the paper sheet and pencil metaphor to suggest this alternative route towards your imaginable futures. 

Easier said than done: if The Scaffold is indeed a wormhole, what do we need in place to create the wormhole? What is the nature of the plane being folded? 

The plane could be looked at as the social fabric for thinking together, thinking in synch. It is another tool or system to facilitate coordinated behaviour.  The plane becomes a graph-mind, as explained in Venkat Rao’s Graph-Mind-Notebook series. 

Punching the right line through the plane is difficult, and comes with great responsibility, and only few people can do this. These punchers are usually born like this, and often not welcome or seen as inappropriate in corporate environments. 

It takes a huge effort to instigate experiences that break away from the normal. Humans are hardwired to believe what they hear/already know. Their brains are wired to look for mirror neurons, and this not only at the cognitive cortex, but also at the motor cortex, visual cortex, other cortexes…

How do you break away into the territory of experimental imagination, as described by Ann Pendleton in Pragmatic Imagination? You could use LSD trips to create experiences that are  as strong as giving birth to a baby. Seriously, how to make the hole is a very serious proposition.

You have to first identify the consistency of assumptions of the plane, then have different strategies for drilling the hole, and a list of tools to drill the hole.

I always thought – and still do – that using artists is a natural human way to resonate beyond the cognitive, textual level. Artists – not as entertainment, but as prime contributors to the content and the narrative – can bring us in a state of different reality.

It is about human presence in multiple realities, in form ànd feeling, in space ànd time. It resembles to dance, or rather choreography.

“Dance/choreography is dancing of the second order, meta-dancing, or better, it is an investigation of dancing.” 

Alva Noe in his book The Entanglement

“We will soon live life across multiple realities. Each with its own physical laws, bodies & affordances. The only common denominators? Space, time and human presence.”

Andreea Ion Cojocaru

How to make holes is also a matter of nuance, of deciding how much dissonance you want, you can have, what’s beyond your comfort zone, although we know from Niels Pflaeging that there is no such thing as a comfort zone.  

Imagine a dial/slider of dissonance

Who turns the dial? Who is the orchestrator/composer/juggler of place, space, and time? Who is the mapper/weaver of ideas? Who curates the team of transdisciplinarians in a coherent impactful learning experience?

This is about going through walls. 

It remembers me of Geoff Manaugh’s blog about Nakatomi Space where he described Bruce Willis’ Die Hard experience to literally going through walls

What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. 

This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building’s narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation’s electromagnetically sealed vault. 

Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?

Geoff Manaugh

The Scaffold as a wormhole is about going through previously unexposed back-corridors where all is malleable. 

This will scare the hell out of many. The disclaimer deserves a warning to be prepared to be discomforted, even to expect existential angst. Such disclaimer also imposes a duty of extreme care to the designer of such experience. 

Interestingly, and to stay in the world of film and imagination, the quote “Innovate or die” is sometimes attributed to Robert Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. 

In that sense, the title of this blog post could as well have been

“Die Hard and Innovate”

With thanks to Andreea, Marti, JMS, Josie, and Venkat for planting these brainworms in my head.

Warmest,