Category Archives: Petervan’s Artwork

Petervan Studios – New Website – Launch The Scaffold

Posted on by
5

© 2022 Petervan Artworks – The Scaffold – created with Stable Diffusion

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:

Methods: Collisions – Layering – Activations – Speculations

Dynamics: Translating – Unsnapping – Reframing

Outcomes: Provocations – Experimentations – Collaborations

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.

The Scaffold is made possible through strategic partnerships with nexxworks and Collective Next

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.

Please let me know what resonates.

Warmest, 

Traveling without moving – Genres

Posted on by
Reply

This post is the last post of a series of essays bundled under “Traveling without moving”.

The intro of that series can be found here. In hindsight, this whole series was a slow reflection, maturation, and catalyst for something that will emerge in September as “The Scaffold”

The idea of a new “genre” has been hanging around since 2018, actually. But the COVID-related lockdowns have only amplified this dissatisfaction with replicating old analog formats into their digital copy-cats, without considering that the craving for something better has a deeper foundation.

In my Nov 2020 update, I already suggested:

“People are exhausted. Tired of online meetings. Tired of being locked up in their houses. Tired of all the negative news. People crave oxygen. People crave for small safe groups where they can share, critique, ideate, play.”

As John Hagel wrote some time ago: “We all are hungry for hope and excitement”

During and post-COVID, we have seen an acceleration in the use of online meetings and other forms of remote participation. We also witnessed the rise and hype of the metaverse, web3, AI-based image and text generators, and more. 

But we have not catered to the craving for oxygen. On the contrary, we seem to flee and lose ourselves in virtual realities, suffocating ourselves in the coolness of the latest technological gadgets and hypes. 

I feel we have hardly touched the surface of what is possible and more importantly what is desirable. What is our/my ambition in this space? I have written before about this in the “Ambition Cube”

I believe we need to start working on a new “genre” for collective learning and collaboration. 

Photography in Scaffold by Milo-Profi, Begijnhof, Mechelen, BE

Over the last couple of months, I have watched, suggested, and experimented with a number of concepts that go beyond a pimped-up Zoom meeting. The spectrum included proposals like Pirate TV (gracefully hijacked – and well executed – by Mykel Dixon and Co after I mentioned it during a catalyst meeting with Josie Gibson), Beyond TV, or Beyond Netflix.

I started reflecting: is “pirate” or “rebel” really what I want to be? That may sound like heroic and sympathetic, but is that behavior leading to the desired outcome of imagining and orchestrating new narratives? And why would I even use the word “TV” in what I do? TV as a format that leaves little room for imagination?

Maybe it should be something more Newsroom style like Ian Bremmers’ GZERO channel, Ray Wang’s “DisruptTV”, or Gerd Leonhard’s KeynoteTV. Gerd probably nailed it when it comes to repurposing keynotes for the virtual world (and also very well executed).

Somewhere in 2020, I got the wonderful opportunity to collaborate on nexxworks’ “Missions”, and more specifically on the curation of Mission NXT, with Peter Hinssen as the host.

Mission NXT episode with Peter Hinssen and John Hagel

That worked quite well, and the concept was integrated into nexxworks’s Memberships Program.

In all formats above I have witnessed discussions live or pre-recorded, with or without Q&As, edited or unedited, etc.

 But these are delivery-related questions only.  

In the end, these formats are still about passive consumption of knowledge, not about working-out-loud together, or better “learning-out-loud together”, and at best they reach the level of high-quality “teaching” of simple topics.

What we seem to be craving for are formats that are mentoring and/or inquiry-based, tackling complicated and complex subjects and projects. These use in-person and virtual facilitation and immersion technologies, helping us discover new unintended opportunities and new unintended behaviors and skills.

Courtesy Ann Pendleton-Jullian from FOUR (+1) Studios

What does that genre-ambition look like? What do we really want?

 We do NOT want yet another set of virtual equivalents of “meetings”, or “events”, “workshops”, TED Talks, TV shows, etc.

We want a genre with high participation and high connectedness; with a slow tempo, we take the time to digest existing knowledge and create new knowledge. Failing and learning together through “collisions”, provocations, and collaborative and highly participatory engagements. 

This new genre adheres to a different style: away from the spectacle, and breathing a mood of silence and introspection. Not trying to impress but to take care. Away from the quick bites, quick-wins, and snackable fast-food content, but surfing on the slow waves of the long quality content format. 

Witnessing, questioning, interrogating, inquiring, iterating, all beyond the cognitive knowledge consumption.

With tools like scaffolds, collages, visual and multi-sensory collisions, assemblages, narrative environments, multiple narratives, and plurality in points of view and participants. 

It should feel like a cesarean, assisting birth to something completely new. 

It is about scaffolding narrative immersive spaces for collective learning.

Detail “Mechanisms I” by © Tanya Goel – 2019 – Picture by Petervan

For a couple of months now, I have been working in stealth mode on a new project called “The Scaffold”, which is exactly doing that. 

The Scaffold will come out of stealth next month, together with a brand new website and offering for Petervan Studios

Hope you stay on board

With warm regards,

Parallel Grooves

Posted on by
4

Picture generated by DALL-E

It all started with Vankatesh Rao’s “Future Tables” post last week, with the subtitle “We don’t want future visions, we want future tables”. Venkat introduced the concept of “temporal potential groove”.

I added the following comment to his post:

“I enjoyed this one very much. You have written so much about time that my feedback may sound trivial. Anyway. I felt attracted to “temporal potential groove”. It made me think about grooves in vinyl records. About remastering to improve the dynamics of output. Music in general as a scheme of bars, tempo, etc. About the grid and snapping to the grid in music and other software. Also about furrows on land, and riverbeds. And how we could learn to unsnap from the grid, groove, riverbed, etc to find new paths that are not defined by the “table”.”

I wrote about unsnapping from grids before. 

Image credits: Microscopic Things/Youtube

Just a couple of days later, I had my monthly catch-up call with Josie Gibson, and we started a lovely conversation about vinyl records. 

Yes, for those who remember, vinyl records “sound” different. It is an analog sound. It has a warmer, more human touch to it. We are so used to listening to compressed, streamed, digital music that listening to really high quality sound/music is an experience that many of us don’t have any real experience with. Neil Young wrote a whole book about it and the lack of HD sound was the reason for him starting the Neil Young Archives. 

But besides the sound quality, there is also quite a difference in the experience of consuming music.

Sometimes, the pickup stylus jumped out of the groove, jumping to an unexpected part of the song or even the album. There was some sort of enjoyable unpredictability. 

You were also supposed to listen to the whole album (or at least one “side” of the vinyl disc) in one non-interrupted session. 

Also, we lost the patience to wait, to be comfortable with the in-betweens, the no-groove areas between the songs.

There was at some time the notion of a “concept album”, where all the songs of the album belong to a coherent concept/narrative, instead of a compilation or sequence of greatest hits or unrelated “singles” 

As we discussed, we made parallels to the way I curate learning experiences, where the value is in the coherence of the narrative and associated speakers, and not just a list of individuals taking the stage for their standard pre-canned talk. My ambition is to take people out of the groove, to discover parallel worlds and options. 

Josie coined the term “Parallel Grooves”, obviously T-shirt material! I should seriously consider hiring Josie as my copywriter 😉

Mock-up T-Shirt with image from DALL-E

The vinyl groove is one metaphor. 

We could also consider the riverbed: by putting obstacles in the riverbed, we can change the flow of the water, we can divert the flow.

Or waterfalls. Josie spoke about “the language of waterfalls” and what happens when you put a big rock at the top of the waterfall and how the language of the waterfall changes.

Image generated by DALL-E

Serendipity is my companion these days, and as I was writing this post, I bumped into this image of Cameron Falls in Alberta, Canada:

Cameron Falls in Alberta, Canada has crystal clear water on normal days, but when abnormally heavy rainfall hits the region, a phenomenon happens. Sediments called agrolites are released into the water and make the river look pink or red when light hits it. Seen on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/auckee 

Or the metaphor of furrows in a field. 

Here is my uncle Hubert plowing a fresh field with his tractor. Ask him how difficult it is to steer the tractor out of the furrow.

But what if he could plow not only the land but also a river or a waterfall or all of them? You would get a very nice metaphorical representation of my idea of curation.

Image generated by DALL-E

People think they are in the groove, but they aren’t. Or they don’t know what else exists out of the groove.

“They don’t know what they need, but they know what they yearn for”

(another copy by Josie)

What seems more interesting to me is to surf that yearning and go to a place in a different dimension you don’t even know existed.

“You were looking for “X” and but I let you discover “Y”

(Josie)

Parallel Grooves in other words.

Guess what? 

Parallel Grooves will be part of “Studio Interventions”, one of the three studios I am launching after the summer together with a brand new Petervan Studios website

Stay tuned

Warmest,

Petervan’s Delicacies – 5 June 2022

Posted on by
Reply
delicacies

As usual, an incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks. Handpicked, no robots. Minimalism in curation. Enjoy!

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 Studios – Update Feb 2022 – The Scaffold

Posted on by
3

Here is the latest update on Petervan Studios. The previous update already goes back to June 2021.

The family is good. Somehow, we managed not to get infected by the virus. We all got boostered and respected safety measures to the max. Most of my time, I spent home in my studio and only came out for some grocery shopping, some visits to art exhibitions, and delivering the taxi service to my daughter’s school and horse stables. Zero travel since October 2019, but I cannot say I miss it.

At this moment, it looks like we are getting out of the woods of the 5th Covid wave, and measures in Belgium are getting relaxed. Partying is allowed again as of 18 Feb 2022.

More importantly: my father is still alive and kicking, and he celebrated his 90th birthday in Sep 2022!

What else?

The Bricks Project

For those who remember, this is my “zen” project. Drawing bricks in silence. Many bricks. 8,255 Bricks at the time of writing this post:

Exhibitions

Since the last update, I visited the following art exhibitions:

Luc Deleu, De Singel, Antwerp, Aug 2021

Drawing Art, BOZAR, Brussels, Sep 2021

ING Laughing Art, ING Gallery, Brussels, Sep 2021

David Hockney, BOZAR, Brussels, Oct 2021

Masculinities, FOMU, Antwerp, Nov 2021

Re-Collect, FOMU, Antwerp, Nov 2021

Rinus Van de Velde, Tim Van Laer Gallery, Antwerp, Nov 2021

Train Modernity, KMSK, Brussels, Nov 2021

Fabrice Samyn, KMSK, Brussels, Nov 2021

Pop-Art, SMAK, Ghent, Feb 2022

Chaos, Alex Vervoordt, Wijnegem, Feb 2022

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, Zeno X, Antwerp, Feb 2022

David Claerbout – The Close, Brugge, Feb 2022

Luc Deleu inspired by Buckminster Fuller

Detail of painting by Rinus Van de Velde – 2021

Hippie Elias (Self portret) by Etienne Elias – 1970

Fabrice Samyn – Detail from Eve&Adam – 2018

Still from The Close – David Claerbout – 2022

Outdoors

Weather did not treat us well. My recollection is one of all shades of grey and lots of rain from August 2021 till Feb 2022. Only the beginning of Sep 2021 was decent. But I have some nice winter fog pictures from my strolls and bicycle rides:

Horses

Astrid made a lot of progress in horse-riding. She won the 2nd price at a local dressage competition, and she also enjoys jumping a lot.

Talking about Astrid, in Dec 2021 she celebrated her 16th birthday. Where has the time gone?

Traveling Without Moving project

Travelling without Moving (TWM) is a series of essays documenting my mental and philosophical journey in 2020-2022.

The main outline was published in November 2020, and in the meantime, several episodes have been released. Since the last Petervan Studios update, I published one more essay on “Studios”.

There are a couple more in the pipeline, but I have a hunch that these will morph into The Scaffold project (see later in this post).

Books

Check out my GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3085594-peter-auwera

Some highlights

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine by Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley

Where Is My Flying Car? by J. Storrs Hall

Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action by J.F. Martel

Lichamen by Peter Verhelst

Petervan Rides

Since July 2019, I publish 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”. Subjective selection of course, as driven only by my personal taste (or lack thereof).

Here is the latest Ride from Feb 2022, still being populated as we publish this post.

I suggest you play it in shuffle mode, it enhances the surprise experience.

My Art Practice

I did not produce much artwork. I was very focused on a work-project that required all my attention and focus. I shared most of my recent art work via my Facebook page, or on this blog under the heading “Sine Parole”. Some “highlights” if I can say that about my own work:

Petervan Artworks © 2022 – Digital scribble on iPad

Petervan Artworks © 2022 – Digital scribble on iPad

Professionalisation of Petervan Studios Art Practice

As from March 2022, I will focus on the professionalization of my art practice. I have hired a coach to help me with that. We are working with a digital archiving platform with an API that is steering the show & tell of my analogue and digital artworks. There will also be an integration with a shopping environment, and an online VR exhibition environment. There is also a brand-new website for Petervan Studios in the making. This new online environment will also become the home for a new project, working title “The Scaffold”, see below

Freelance Projects

I have been deeply involved and committed as architect and head of design of an 100% on-line learning expedition running from Sep 2021 till Feb 2022. We just landed the closing session. We still want to produce a “scrapbook” that documents the journey by end Feb 2022. The experience came in two chapters. The first chapter was a technology refresh on digital identity, infrastructure, VR, Robotics, Web3, and UX. The second chapter was about developing a practice of innovation for wicked problems, and how to design for emergence in complex adaptive systems.

I had the chance to collaborate with professional facilitation and innovation partners, and a collective of “guides” – some really smart people – that helped us shape and deliver the content.

The Scaffold

The learning expedition mentioned above had a great impact on me and the way I look at “events”. I believe I am onto something that may be the start of a new “genre” of learning studios. And I have started talking and pitching to potential partners and investors. Here is the high-level pitch:

The Scaffold is a 100% online learning studio for creating new knowledge based on the passion of the explorer. 

The Scaffold can be seen as a form of Pop-Up school and/or an experimentation-based learning playground.

The Scaffold is planned as a three-year research cycle, with cohorts joining an online virtual playground for six-month intensive high-impact expeditions where together with the faculty they will create new knowledge in collaboration. 

The curriculum of the expeditions is composed of several interventions, interruptions, and provocations anchored in the reality of a client’s project. The project serves as a vehicle to trigger new and imaginative thinking. 

The Scaffold is a “scaffold” for something much bigger, something that could lead to a movement and foundation for better futures.

More about that later, probably in the second half of 2022. I hope to have a first client cohort signed-up by then.

So, in summary, what’s next?

The plan for the coming months is to work/play on:

Professionalizing my art practice

Pitch and realize my project “The Scaffold”

So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, next update is for Sep 2022.

Warmest,

Inspiration – David Claerbout

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, I went to the Foto Museum (FOMU) in Antwerp to see the expo Masculanities – Liberation through Photography. This expo was already at The Barbican in London in the summer of 2020. I had some time left, and a slipped into the adjacent expo Re-Collect, an overview of a decade of acquisitions of FOMU.

Very similar to my first encounter with the work of Belgian fashion designer Dries Van Noten – see my post “Confused by Beauty” from 2015 – I was touched and moved by the video installation “KING” (2015-2016) by Belgian artist David Claerbout.

“David Claerbout (b. 1969) is a Belgian artist, whose work combines elements of still photography and moving images. Using photography, video, and digital-editing tools, Claerbout creates large-scale video installations that provoke questions of time, memory, and truth. Solo exhibitions include Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and SFMoMA in San Francisco.”

From the FOMU site:

The viewer sees a digital 3D environment based on a private photograph of Elvis Presley. The photograph was taken in 1956, when Presley was on the cusp of world fame. This was a time when the photographer, Alfred Wertheimer, could still get close to the man—before the transition from ordinary human to icon, from normal life to an era of superstardom and spectacle. David Claerbout modelled Elvis’ body using hundreds of photographic fragments of his skin and facial features. He challenges the two-dimensional nature of the photograph by adding virtual time and space. Photography is both the launching pad and the subject of KING. Claerbout confronts the viewer with the transition from looking through a lens to looking by means of a scanner. This radical reversal of normal observation means that you seem to creep into the image. Claerbout uses the artistic, conceptual and technical perspectives to question our way of looking.

FOMU has a short 5 min artist video on their site, with Dutch and English subtitles.

That was enough to get me really interested, and I found another great 30 min interview video with David Claerbout at Louisiana Channel. He explains how the whole project was made: they even used a stand-in model and stitched together thousands of pictures of Elvis’ skin on the 3D scan of the model. Amazing!

Showing us around in his “studio” – actually many different rooms in an old Flemisch house in Antwerp – Claerbout is very articulate about his work and practice and I found this super inspiring, as I am preparing next year 2022 as my year to professionalize my own art practice.

He opens with:

“I am an artist, and I do not know exactly what it is what I am doing, it seems I am changing my ways all of the time, but I am a self-taught very hungry autodidact in the domain of the moving image animation film video and what we could call virtual image making.”

As we walk through his studio, we see his drawing-room, how he started building an archive of images, how his team is usually working on one project at the time, having all equipment inhouse, two recording studios, including a small server farm in the basement to render image/video in the most optimal way.

Throughout the whole interview, there transpires a mood of silence, integrity, dedication, focus, discipline, professionalism. His origins are in painting, and drawing, and lithography.

The interview/walkthrough is full of inspiring insights, provocations,

WHAT IS IT THAT I CAN CONTRIBUTE?

MY WORK DOES NOT HAVE ANYTHING SHOCKING

I WANT TO DEVELOP A LANGUAGE

SPEAKING/WORKING WITH PEOPLE THAT YOU ARE CONFIDENT WITH, THAT YOU CAN TRUST

WHAT IS IT THAT BINDS EVERYTHING TOGETHER?

CHRONOS – KAIROS – HETEROCHRONY – THE PLURALITY OF DURATION

PRIVILEGED MOMENTS

BEING NOT AT THE CENTER OF THE COMPOSITION

THE CAMERA AS A VAMPIRE

THE RELATION BETWEEN OUR THINKING AND OUR PERCEPTION

YOU DON’T WAIT FOR BUDGETS, YOU DON’T WAIT FOR PEOPLE, YOU JUST DO IT

THE DELICATE CENTER

HOW DO WE LIVE WITH VIRTUAL MATTER?

WE HUMAN BEINGS ARE PROGRAMMED TO TRUST

WE ARE NOT PROGRAMMED TO PUT OUR SENSES INTO QUESTION

WE FIRST WILL BE SPONTANEOUS BELIEVERS AND THEN WE WILL BE ANALYTICAL

I WRITE A LOT, I DON’T PUBLISH A LOT BECAUSE IT IS SO TIME-CONSUMING

LIFE IS NOT LONGER A TAPE THAT RUNS FROM BEGINNING TO END

THE TRINITY OF PAST-PRESENT-FUTURE IN THE VIRTUAL REALM

EVERYTHING IS BUILT OUT OF TWO

A BUILT-IN REDUNDANCY

LAZINESS AND ENERGY

SHARING DIRECTLY BY SITTING TOGETHER

WE PERFORM AND AT THE END OF THE EXHIBITION THE PERFORMANCE IS OVER

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THIS INCREDIBLY EXPENSIVE VALUABLE SINGULAR ARTWORK SITUATED SOMEWHERE IN TIME NOT IN PARTICULAR MATTER

SOMEWHERE IN THE SMALL FOLDS OF TIME, THERE ARE ENCOUNTERS

WHAT IS THE LIMIT? WHERE IS IT?

THE PRIVILEGE OF THE ARTIST OF HAVING TIME TO WASTE

THE ARTIST DOES NOT HAVE TO BE EFFICIENT

IT IS QUITE LOUD WHEN THERE IS NO SOUND

It is clear that Claerbout is full of poetry. As Norman Foster used to say “I can write you a letter, but a poem?”

No wonder the “KING” and some others I discovered in the meantime are so well resonating with where I am now and where I would like to be the next years. I may post some other inspiring stories in the weeks and months ahead as part of my transition to and professionalization of my art practice.

Warmest,