About memory, and more specifically memory by space. Imagine how we could improve memory in interactive virtual spaces. By Kei Kreutler.
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 in REVUE with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
Some years ago, I discovered the magical art world of Flemish artist Nick Ervinck.
I subscribed to his newsletter and was inspired by his ongoing progress.
If you want to get a good sense of what drives Nick and what his artwork is all about, here is a great video:
Nick has a church (The Dutch word for church is “kerk”).
Nick’s church is branded “K.E.R.K.” standing for Kunsthalle ERvickK” and is located in the tiny village of Sint-Pieters-Kapelle, a township part of Middelkerke, a mall town at the Belgian North Sea coast. Last summer, I combined a bike ride with a visit to K.E.R.K. on a very hot 10 July 2022. The exhibition “SKIN WORKS” displayed recent work by Nick Ervinck.
I was impressed and inspired. I wanted to meet Nick one day, and if possible visit his studio. At the reception, there was a young student, and I asked whether the artist was present in the church. He was not, but she gave me a business card with his email address and phone number, suggesting that I would ask for a studio visit.
Here is the mail that I wrote to Nick:
Hello Nick,
I’ve been following you for a while and I’m a fan. Yesterday I visited K.E.R.K. (GNI-RI JUL2022 SKIN WORKS) and the friendly young woman at the entrance said it was possible to visit your studio.
I do a number of artistic experiments myself, and I recently hired Kurt Vanbelleghem to help me professionalize my practice. Besides the art, I work on a project “The Scaffold”, where I bring artists, entrepreneurs, and engineers together in residencies for corporate clients.
I would love to have a conversation with you, preferably in your studio, or else in K.E.R.K. or any other location of your choice.
Interested?
Here is Nick’s answer:
Hey peter,
Nice to hear from you.
It is not possible to receive each person individually.
I normally only open the studio for group visits.
But your email has caught my interest. What you are doing is of course not clear to me.
Bringing artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and companies together sounds like music to my ears.
I am someone who likes to work goal and result oriented. And many of these initiatives do not succeed in this.
I will be happy to receive you in my studio/atelier to exchange thoughts.
Fits for you possibly Tuesday evening August 9 or Wednesday evening August 10.
Or feel free to make some suggestions and I’ll check my agenda.
Artistic greetings
Nick
We settled for 9 August, also a very hot summer day.
There I stood in front of his studio, with no agenda, but with a quite detailed concept of what The Scaffold had to become.
I did not know what to expect. Maybe he would kick me out after ½ hour? No worries: I got a really warm welcome. Nick was very approachable, and as would show quickly, a real professional in all senses. There was a click: we spent 4 hours together.
Above the working desk was a huge library of more than a thousand artbooks.
Nick is also a big fan of Henry Moore, a British artist mainly known for his sculptures. Moore can be said to have caused a British sculptural renaissance. Nick’s Henry Moore book collection encompasses more than 300 books! The biggest private collection in the world: the only place in the world where you can find more is in the Henry Moore Foundation itself!
Nick also built his own virtual museum “MOUSEION” and his own “NIKIPEDIA” landing page:
The visit and the conversation were super inspiring for me. His work and attitude influence me in many ways:
His Focus
He is an artist entrepreneur and focuses exclusively on that
His Professionalism
Both as an artist and as an entrepreneur.
Everything exudes attention to detail and perfectionism in everything:
Archiving and documenting
High-quality printing, framing, book printing
Business cards
Website
Respect for own work
Cleanness and order in the studio
His Sharing
Links to books, his own manuals for art photography, bookbinding, framing, transport boxes, software, high-quality art print shops, etc, etc
His Erudition
He is very well-read, has a pluralistic view of things, and is able to express himself very well orally and in writing
I invited Nick to be part of the non-conformist tribes I am curating for The Scaffold learning experiences.
When leaving the studio, he left me with some of his own art books as a present, a poster of his Henry Moore cabinet show (see the above picture, where Nick Ervinck and Henry Moore are interwoven), and a recommendation for the book “On Being An Artist” by Michael Craig-Martin.
He must have read my mind, as the book proved to be another big inspiration for my practice (and the subject of my next blog post).
When I walked towards my car in the warm evening sun, I felt like coming out of a movie.
This is the thank you letter I sent:
Dear Nick
Do you recognize the feeling when you’ve been to a good movie, and you come out, and the world feels different? That’s the feeling I had yesterday when I came out of your studio and on my ride back home.
Thank you very much for the generosity of time (more than three hours!) and the quality of your input and feedback. Thanks also for the MOUSEION book, the poster, the flyers, and the book suggestions. The poster is now right in front of me.
Thank you also for the confidence in showing your management software, the guided tour in your studio, and sharing successful projects, but also projects that just didn’t make it.
Petervan’s Music Ride October 2022 > almost 70 songs this time, most new releases, but also some classics > EOL, ENO, Charlotte de Witte, and even some country > play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
As many of you know, I am a big fan of Cobra, the avant-garde art movement established in 1948. The movement only existed for three years, but forever changed the landscape of postwar European art.
What would an avant-garde business movement look like?
Today, I would like to share some more details about The Scaffold
The Scaffold is a brand-new transdisciplinary learning studio for the never-normal.
A Scaffold: a temporary structure to let emerge something new
Transdisciplinary: for each client project, we curate a transdisciplinary tribe of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, artists, and philosophers to reflect and speculate about your better futures
Learning: this is not learning by teaching, but learning through conversations, acting, and doing
Studio: the keyword here is critique: individual, group, and formal critique
The Never Normal: the ever faster changing environment we operate in. The best metaphor is that of the kayaker in wild water.
Older metaphors like the speedboat (brute force), tacking the sails to the wind (adapting with the destination in focus), and surfing the waves of change (staying before the tsunami of disruption) don’t serve us anymore.
Today you are in the water.
You have to sense faster and better what is, sense faster and better what can become, and take action – right there – in the middle of a system in full motion.
I often hear that we need more data, data is the new oil, and we need powerful AI and Machine Learning to discover patterns in the data, so we can make better and faster decisions.
But data will bring us only so far.
Data tell us something about correlation.
Correlation is not the same as causation.
And also rational cause-and-effect thinking and planning are only part of the story.
The Scaffold is imagination in full play: not knowing all the dots, and having to keep multiple lines of inquiry open at the same time, without coming to a conclusion, ànd feeling comfortable with that.
Orchestrating and activating collective intelligence (both human and non-human intelligence)
WHAT DO WE HAVE?
WHERE ARE WE GOING?
WHY ARE WE GOING THERE?
HOW DO WE GET THERE?
WHAT RULES DO WE FOLLOW?
WHAT IS FORBIDDEN?
HOW DO WE SPEAK TO EACH OTHER?
WHAT WORLD ARE WE PLAYING IN?
WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT?
The Scaffold asks questions related to the narratives that motivate individuals and organizations from the inside. These motivations have nothing to do with marketing from the outside. These motivations share the desire for societal, moral, and aesthetic advancement.
The experiences that we design can be in-person, and others are 100% online or virtual, or a combination thereof. Our experiences are high-touch and highly facilitated. We use world-class facilitators. We apply live scribing, live video editing, and live note-taking. We use technology in support of the content, not to impress nor to create a spectacle. We challenge each other through individual and group critique. We experiment, explore, tinker, and dare to change in flight. We use physical and virtual channels/containers of experimentation & distribution
We believe in the long format. Transdisciplinary impact groups learn by working, doing, and acting together during an extended period of time. This approach increases trust, bonding, candor, the release of real or perceived vulnerabilities, and the discovery of unintended opportunities.
The Scaffold is your PEPA
Play – Experimentation – Participation – Activation
The Scaffold is about dreaming & imagining big with your eyes wide open for reality.
Powered by a coalition of exceptional individuals as advisors for The Scaffold. A unique mix of strategists, futurists, engineers, entrepreneurs, experts in classic and contemporary arts, masters in narrative environments, philosophers, and a licensed architect and VR developer.
We are very curious about how this resonates with you.
From time to time, I discover an interview, an artist, a dreamer, or another non-conformist take on reality that I find worthwhile transcribing.
I prefer to make such transcripts manually, by listening, pausing, and reflecting. Like drawing by hand.
And also in the resulting text, it is possible to give some sense to that rhythm of reflection.
In this post, a transcript of the conversation with artist/architect Peter Cook on the benefits of drawing by hand, on buildable or non-buildable ideas, on utopia or reality. I started transcribing around 11:15 in this video which also contains beautiful artwork.
Somehow, I would like to grow old like Peter Cook…
In drawing
You can decide upon almost anything
How to make a building that can go from solid to transparent without a window?
From solid
to slightly permeable
and then translucent
More translucent
Completely transparent
And then back again
I don’t think any of the work is utopian
The notion of utopia, the notion of the ideal perfect objective is not in my mind
I think that a lot of these drawings are buildable
A lot of Peter Cooke’s work and insights throw me back to my own architecture studies in the 70ies when we were allowed to design buildings that did not have to be buildable.
In the same way, his utopian/reality paradox is central to the ideas I developed as part of The Scaffold, a transdisciplinary learning studio for the Never Normal. The studio gives permission to play with ideas that are not necessarily buildable but that unlock some other kind of less cognitive insight.
As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. Enjoy!
About Antikythera, a new program by Benjamin Bratton to examine the implications of an unfolding radical philosophical event: the emergence of planetary-scale computation.
About malleable mindsets: syncing and sharing the cognitive load within a team. By Mickey McManus
About a hypothetical new form of computing device, a “liquid crystal computer” by Geoff Manaugh
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 in REVUE with loads of videos. Subscribe here: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/petervan
Petervan’s Music Ride September 2022 > almost 90 songs, most new releases, but also some classics > from Ozzy Osbourne to Tamino and everything in between > play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
As I was very focused on professionalizing my art practice, I did not produce much artwork during that time. On the website, you can discover some of my existing work by selecting a method, dynamic, and outcome. You can of course also sort per container: canvas, video, audio, etc.
As part of the inventory work, I stumbled upon some older works and played around with DALL-E
Since the last update, I visited the following art exhibitions:
Dhondt Dhaenens, Deurle, April 2022
Berlinde De Bruyckere, Studio visit, Ghent, April 2022
Castle of Laarne, Laarne, May 2022
Storycon, BOZAR Brussels, May 2022
Nick Ervinck, Skins, K.E.R.K., Middelkerke, July 2022
8th Biennial of Painting, Dhondt Dhaenens, Deurle, July 2022
8th Biennial of Painting, Mudel, Deinze, July 2022
8th Biennial of Painting, Raveem Museum, Zulte, July 2022
Jonas Gekhiere, MUSEE, Oostende, July 2022
Christian Dotremont, KMSKB, Brussels, August 2022
Tanya Goelen, KMSKB, Brussels, August 2022
(Un)Common Values, National Bank Belgium, Brussels, August 2022
Nick Ervinck, Studio Visit, Lichtervelde, August 2022
Wim Opbrouck Open Hart, Dr. Ghislain Museum, Ghent, August 2022
Splendid Isolation, S.M.A.K., Ghent, August 2022
Outdoors
We had a fantastic spring and summer. We basically had sunny weather from March till August. At least that is how I recall it.
Spent quite some time outdoors: some gardening, some walking, some bicycling, some doing nothing. Got a nice tan, and people asked me where I spent my holidays. At home, but many don’t seem to believe me 😉
I have not traveled abroad since October 2019. Cannot say I miss it.
Since July 2019, I have published every month a Spotify List with new releases combined with some oldies from the 60ies, 70ies, and beyond. Search for “Petervan Ride” and select “playlists”. Selection is driven only by my personal taste (or lack thereof).
In July 2022, we entered the fourth year of this experiment. Here is the latest Ride from September 2022
I suggest you play it in shuffle mode, it enhances the surprise experience.
Family
The most important news is that Astrid passed and is now starting her last year in high school! Where has the time gone?
What else?
Horses
Astrid is still enjoying horse riding very much. And so do I!
I have three roles in the horse riding adventure: being her All Bundy, her taxi driver, and her photographer
Astrid with Cienta
So, in summary, what’s next?
The plan for the next mile is to work/play on:
Support Astrid in her last year at high school
Professionalizing my art practice
Pitch and realize my project “The Scaffold”
So, that’s it for this edition.
If there is something worth reporting, the next update is for Feb 2023.
Since March 2022, I have focused on the professionalization of my art practice. As part of a grant for the innovation of cultural business models, I invited Kurt Vanbelleghem from Amy-Art and Present Future to be my coach in that endeavor.
Kurt is a curator, critic, and publisher specializing in the field of contemporary artistic practices. He received a MA in Psychological Sciences and a MA in Art History from the University of Ghent, Belgium, and a Master in Visual Arts Administration from The Royal College of Art, London, UK.
Whereas we initially started looking at my artwork only, Kurt was great at pointing out that the output of my artwork was less important than the methods and dynamics applied. And that these methods were also underpinning my other work in the area of interventions, provocations, and interruptions. In other words, all my work was about similar forms of artistic and aesthetic expression and experience. Kurt set me on a path of better articulation of my ambitions and offerings. It 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 have now consolidated my creative undertakings into Petervan StudioS (plural).
Petervan Studios is the melting pot of three studios: The Art Studio, The Interventions Studio, and The Scaffold Studio. The Studios have the following methods, dynamics, and outcomes in common:
The three studios share the motivation and desire for societal, moral, and aesthetic advancement.
I just launched a brand new website with all details about the three studios: www.petervanstudios.com .
The Website is designed by WebIt. Thanks, Ruben, Joke, and team for your patience. Thanks also to Peter, Kurt, Janne, and Tijana from Amy-Art for help with the archiving and API integration.
Below is a quick summary of the three studios
Studio-1 Artworks
This studio is the home of Petervan’s art experiments: a mix of analog and digital artwork and productions, writings, poems, installations, video scapes, soundscapes, recordings, documentaries, and time capsules.
Studio-2 Interventions
These interventions build upon my experience and capability as a translator/interpreter of your specific challenges and designer/architect of intellectual collisions. Most of the interventions involve private or semi-private tailor-made provocations and include: Conversations, keynotes, performances, and curations
Studio-3 The Scaffold
The Scaffold is a brand-new transdisciplinary learning studio for the never normal. This unusual learning studio invites participants into a fresh break from the day-to-day. It allows participants to think, sense, learn, ànd act together with a brilliant, curated non-conformist tribe about a specific collective challenge. Not to solve the challenge, but to identify pivotal insights and a new way to position it.
We also brought together a coalition of exceptional individuals as advisors for The Scaffold. A unique mix of strategists, futurists, engineers, entrepreneurs, experts in classic and contemporary arts, masters in narrative environments, philosophers, licensed architects, and VR developers.
Petervan Studios 