Petervan’s Musical Ride October 2024 – 50 songs. Most recent releases include Seun Kuti, Jaune Toujours, The Blessed Madonna > Oldies from Zaho de Sagazan, James Brown, and Caribou > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
I am super-excited to announce the general availability of my brand new performance “The New New Babylon”. Here is the trailer:
The New New Babylon performance is an immersive experience, divided into six chapters—Awakening, Stepping, Flying, Gliding, Folding, and Vertigo. Each chapter explores different facets of the New New Babylon concept, blending art and interaction. Audience members are invited to actively participate, engaging with interactive elements that promote a sense of community and shared creativity. To create a multisensory journey, the performance integrates rich soundscapes, video projections, visual art, poetry, masks, VR, and stage props. It’s a brand new format to deliver content, quite different from more traditional keynotes and talks.
This artistic performance has a poetic, gentle, and profoundly human touch, evoking a dreamy, Magritte-like surrealism. The atmosphere is calm and harmonious, steering away from Sci-Fi or dystopian themes toward a vision that is non-aggressive, understated, and subtly utopian.
Designed for corporate and institutional clients, art galleries, and museums, the performance’s content, materials, and timing can be adapted to suit specific needs. The performance can also be organized as an online or in-situ workshop format.
VR-Frame from ACT3 – Flying
The performance is now available for both online and on-stage presentations, with options for bespoke adaptations or commissions. If you’re interested, feel free to reach out!
The next step is to create a fully immersive VR headset performance with live interactions with AI voices. Already available are six Unity VR packages, each designed for distinct VR spaces in the performance, including specific controller actions that control both on-stage and in-VR lighting, and different camera angles. These packages are tailored to support the various acts of the performance. These Unity packages are developed by NUMENA, a renowned interdisciplinary creative studio from Germany, specializing in award-winning spatial design and programming.
We are also developing an API-supported LLM infrastructure to enable live interactions with AI Agents. Our goal is to facilitate real-time exploration of historical New Babylon research resources during on-stage and online sessions. This infrastructure is currently being developed by Thomas McLeish, Adjunct Lecturer – Berkeley Master of Design, and master creator of the 2018 replica of the Colloquy of Mobiles.
VR-Frame from ACT4 – Gliding
And here is an extract from ACT4 of Petervan’s New New Babylon Performance.
VR-Scene from ACT4 – Gliding
And as the cherry on top: alongside a talented young cinematographer from Flanders, I’ll be applying for one of just twelve coveted spots in the 9th edition of the Venice Biennale College Cinema – Immersive program (BCC-I).
The performance is one of the deliverables of my more ambitious transdisciplinary Artistic Research Project, where I am imagining and scaffolding a City of Play through different formats. These formats can be analog and digital artwork and productions, digital overlays, sketches, performance lectures, writings, poems, blogs, installations, soundscapes, recordings, documentaries, spaces, time capsules, curations, events, group experiences, immersions, expeditions, and exhibitions.
Petervan’s Musical Ride September 2024 – 52 songs. Most recent releases include Rahim C Redcar, Tijs Vanneste, Kate Pierson > Oldies from James Brown, Azealia Banks, and Holly Herndon > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally. Just click the image below. Enjoy!
Petervan’s Musical Ride August 2024 – 44 songs. Most recent releases include Jack White, Fontaines D.C., Krononaut > Oldies from DIKKE, Pet Shop Boys, and Rubio > and some very long ambients > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
Petervan’s Musical Ride July 2024 – 28 songs. Most recent releases, including De Sluwe Vos, KessonCoda, Cassandra Jenkins > Oldies from Brutus, Deep Purple (from their new album) > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
Petervan’s Musical Ride June 2024 – 50 songs. Most recent releases, including King Hannah, Beth Gibbons, Imagine Dragons > Oldies from Françoise Hardy, The Zombies, Barry White > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week, or after 3 months. No pressure, literally. Just click the image below. Enjoy!
Petervan’s Musical Ride May 2024 – 70+ songs. Most recent releases, including Arooj Aftab, Lenny Kravitz, T Bone Burnett > Oldies from ELO, Prefab Sprout > Play in shuffle mode to increase the surprise factor. Enjoy!
A new Petervan performance lecture “Claim Your Cybernetic Word” is in the making, to be delivered 100% remotely during the 60th anniversary of the American Society for Cybernetics in mid-June 2024.
Below is the official abstract of that session:
An engaging conversational workshop crafted to elicit compelling language that embodies the human elements within cybernetics. Attendees will be encouraged to participate actively by offering cybernetic terminology, which will be visually depicted in an immersive cloud-like interactive video installation accompanied by a bespoke soundscape. The session opens with an artistic cinematic cybernetic dream sequence. Through facilitated brainstorming sessions with the audience, participants will have the ability to fine-tune word generation. They will discuss the Paskian Knobs required to steer randomness and the style of the outcome. The session closes with a cinematic cybernetic song outro. The total duration is between 45-60 minutes. This session will be delivered remotely with remote interactions with the audience. An experience room is available for on-site participants, allowing them to engage collectively in this conversational setting. Please access the session 10 minutes before the starting hour, as the performance already starts during the virtual walk-in of the audience when visual and auditory segments set the stage for the experience.
Some friends who have seen an early dry-run version describe it as an “immersion” or “a trip”.
Petervan Studios 