We are now in the grant phase. The deliverables for this phase are:
An AI-Based Analysis of Supporting, Contradictory, and Complementary Resources
An artistic XR rendering of a New New Babylon on top of an existing city or city district
Art Expo (minimum Online, ideally IRL)
Art Book
I am trying to get the first two done, or at least well-developed, by year-end.
AI-based Analysis
I have been experimenting with Google’s NotebookML – now Gemini Notebook. I uploaded some 70 resources about:
Constant’s New Babylon from 1950ies
21st-century criticism of his work
Architectural reflections about urbanism
Urbanism and memory research from the Protocol Institute
Some cybernetics material related to Gordon Pask and his conversational protocol
Gemini Notebook generated the following summary, but it seems to miss the cybernetics material – at least in this summary – but this is probably due to the 50-source limit under the free plan.
“These sources explore the intersection of urban design, digital media, and human identity, primarily focusing on how play and structured environments shape our perception of the world. Kevin Lynch introduces “imageability” to describe how clear physical layouts, such as paths and landmarks, help residents build mental maps and feel emotionally secure. Building on this, Valerie Frissen and others examine “Homo Ludens 2.0,” a concept where digital connectivity and gamification allow users to experiment with their identities within virtual landscapes. Drew Austin bridges these ideas by analysing protocols, like the urban street grid, which act as invisible “software” managing the tension between rigid infrastructure and fluid human behaviour. Together, the texts suggest that whether through physical architecture or digital platforms, the rules and forms governing our surroundings profoundly influence how we navigate, create, and relate to one another. Overcoming protocol failure or urban chaos requires a deeper understanding of these interactive systems and their impact on the human experience.”
Gemini Notebook generated some very interesting reports, slides, visuals, and blog posts that I will share on this blog in the coming weeks. Below are some teasers.
The idea here is to virtually create a layer – the city of play – above the city of Ghent (could be any city in the world). I am experimenting with the Cesium open platform for creating powerful 3D geospatial applications. Testing in both the Unity and Unreal Engines. The plan is for the layered city of play to be composed of self-sculpted shapes, created in Blender or Nomad Sculpt. Ideally with 3D audio on top, but that is a nice-to-have. An alternative would be to leverage the material of Spectracities.
If you think this is interesting and want to contribute to the project – in money or in kind – drop me a note. Feel free to comment. To stay updated, subscribe to the blog.
Continuation of the “Something Has Dissipated” project. Using Metahuman Creator in Unreal Engine 5.8 and the audio-driven lip-sync feature of Metahuman Animator.
I am delighted to announce the opening of my second virtual exhibition, featuring a selection of physical and digital works created between 2023 and 2026. The exhibition will be on view from 1 June to 30 August 2026.
+++ UPDATE: The exhibition is now closed +++
Click on the image below to enter the exhibition on the Kunstmatrix platform. The 3D gallery can be explored on PC, Mac, tablet, or mobile device. Upon entering, you will find a brief introduction with navigation instructions to help you get started.
The exhibition includes several interactive features, such as the ability to generate an online or PDF catalogue and an augmented reality tool that allows visitors to preview artworks on a wall in their own space.
Digital and acrylic paintings are available as high-quality prints in a variety of formats, with paper finishes, mounting options, and custom framing. Original canvas works can be shipped internationally. Video installations are also available and can be adapted to suit specific exhibition or presentation environments.
If a particular artwork interests you, you can contact me directly via the email icon in the artwork’s detailed view.
And one final suggestion: turn the sound on for the full experience.
My sincere thanks to the Kunstmatrix team for their outstanding support in making this exhibition possible.
On 9 Dec 2025, Andreea and I gave a “talk” about our journey and lessons learned in creating The Forbidden Question. Rather than a talk, it was a performance about the performance. The talk also includes a speaking lamb from Van Eyck’s famous 1432 Ghent Altarpiece. See the lamb in the video of our talk below. At the end, you will also see a strange character running away with the stolen 12th panel of the Altarpiece.
With this piece, we are proposing a choreographed yet spontaneous play between multiple dreams and dreamers. All the actors on stage come from the audience except one: Paul. An Eastern European architect who moved to Brussels in hopes of one day building the city of the future, he has fallen asleep with his shoes on after a long day of waiting tables. This is the moment our universe is born. As participants are encouraged to chase connection and fulfillment, our cosmology cycles their souls and dreams through several layers of reality. The more assiduous the search, the more wondrous and intense the connections they make, the more oblivious and unrelenting the fleeting and cyclical nature of the game becomes. The “forbidden question” in the title is the question no one will ever find an answer to: Whose dream is this? Are my desires really mine? Am I even able to stop wanting?
The room is set up with nine physical beds (8 for the audience encircling the one bed for Paul). The performance is designed for a full 360° experience (visuals, audio, tracking), and we work with award-winning 3D artist Ozark Henry, award-winning cinematographer and DoP Arthur Moelants, and award-winning maker Thomas Mc Leish.
I would like to give some background on this project, a sort of making-of. The project started as the New New Babylon performance, at that time designed for a speaker on stage wearing a VR headset, and the audience seeing the VR rendering on a big screen behind the speaker. Here is a very, very early version of the tower of the New New Babylon:
Then, we pivoted to a version called “Dream my Dream”
This time, the audience would witness a sleeping performer with a VR headset, and follow the dream through some sort of transparent screen:
Mock-up of the viewing room – created in Space Elevator
After submitting our project to both the Venice Biennale College Cinema and the Cannes Immersive 2025 competition, without being selected, we took the opportunity to critically reevaluate the core premises of the performance.
Then, as part of my end-project for the Howest course XR in Industry, we created a very early version of The Forbidden Question, which began with the story of an Eastern European waiter and the concept of central and surrounding beds. The video below is an early MVP of what we had in mind.
During this period of reassessment, Andreea came across an open call for immersive projects at the Salzburg Mozarteum X-Reality Lab. Salzburg is currently developing a state-of-the-art 360° immersive venue featuring stereoscopic projection, a 60+ channel spatial audio system, and integrated LiDAR and high-definition camera infrastructure. The lab was seeking artistic performances for the venue’s inaugural program, scheduled for March 2026.
High-level sketch of the X-Reality-Lab in Salzburg
For this project, we completely re-wrote the performance into an XR “game of life” unfolding across multiple realities, with both an actor and the audience as performers. From its earliest concept through multiple iterations, the project transformed from a one-person headset performance into an immersive XR experience designed for stereoscopic projection, 3D tracking, and 360° spatial sound. Here is an extract from our submission document. The biggest change was to move the whole New New Babylon narrative from the foreground to the background, and to let the audience experience crossing realities (from dream reality to awake-reality). We made it to the shortlist (out of 150 international candidates), but did not get selected in the end.
Extract from our treatment of the performance for Salzburg
In preparation for our talk at UnitedXR, Andreea and I had many online sessions on the mood and conceptual flow of our presentation (Mural extract below). We wanted to present a coherent journey from New New Babylon to The Forbidden Question to The Third Council.
Mural brainstorm for UnitedXR presentation
An aha moment emerged during these sessions: neither Homo sapiens, ludens, nor faber is capable of evaluating the validity of these new structures of reality. Their meaning cannot be assessed intellectually—they must be experienced.
Hence Homo Experiens. With an “s” to differentiate from the words “Narrative” and “Experience” that have become catch-all words.
The Forbidden Question teamPicture from the crime scene at UnitedXR on 9 Dec 2025
Kent Bye, who runs the Voices of VR Podcast, was in the room, and he invited us for an interview right after (quite an honor, if you ask me). As soon as the interview is published, the link will be added to this post.
Post interview picture. From left to right: Kent Bye, Andreea, Petervan. Picture by Joost.
Use the barcode above to follow the discoveries of Douglas Spar (aka The Holy Lamb). Doug is the one investigating The Third Council. And “The Forbidden Question” is now positioned as a training protocol for crossing realities and the main priority of our team right now.
We are now complementing the team with technology partners to build a pop-up 360 infrastructure for artistic performances. We are contacting immersive spaces to be on their program. We also consider a subsidy for a technology prototype for this immersive performance.
May the lamb be with you in 2026!
With deep gratitude to Andreea, TJ, Arthur, Joost, and Ozark for staying motivated during this whole process. And thanks to UnitedXR for having us.
“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. Enjoy!
Some highlights from this edition:
ARTEFACT — a collaboration between Neal Stephenson, Joe Lubin (Ethereum co-founder), and Rebecca Barcin (LAMANA1).
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.
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.
As most of you know, Petervan Studios is the melting pot of three studios: The Art Studio, The Interventions Studio, and The Scaffold Studio
The Art Studio
My latest artworks are on the artworks section of the Petervan Studios site. Here is my cousin Joost standing in front of one of my recent paintings: 4 panels together measuring 240cm x 200cm.
I am also working on a VR implementation of the New New Babylon (NNB) Project: a network of urban youth city districts that are connected through standard interfaces.
We are working with Spectracities to launch a design challenge by April 2023. I am doing an intro talk on this project during the Spectracities meet-up on 9 March 2023.
And here is the recording: starts at minute 7:32
NNB will also have a number of virtual Art White Rooms that will host my latest artworks.
NNB will also host a New New Babylon TOWER, and I plan to make a physical model of that tower as an example of materializing my metaphors.
A new “Performance Lecture” will consolidate all of the above in a compelling multimedia narrative and performance.
Target date for the performance and the supporting NBB material is 1 Nov 2023
The Interventions Studio
Two interesting experiences with the Zen Bricks Project
One client asked me to run a 30 min online session, where all the participants are drawing little bricks in complete silence. I was very surprised to learn how this zen moment unleashed quite emotional reactions among the participants.
Another client invited me to do something similar in real life, as part of their corporate event that was organized around the theme of mental wellness and the importance of calm moments.
The Scaffold Studio
The Scaffold is a transdisciplinary learning studio for the never-normal.
We are working on two interesting leads.
Lead #1 is a services company that owns a beautiful physical building/campus with meeting rooms, study rooms, a library, auditoria, lush gardens, etc. They run it as a private infrastructure for the public good. We look at it as an imagination infrastructure. The hardware. What The Scaffold offers is the software: the expertise, network, and practice to curate and design a series of learning studios and expeditions. The study topics are non-hierarchical organizations and new democracies.
Lead #2 is a globally operating organization trying to get its head around the topic of corporate governance. Like the first lead, they own world-class real estate, including an auditorium and a museum. We are also looking to design a physical journey between cities leading toward a major event in 2024.
We have a great coalition of advisors. Last month, Lene Rachel Andersen joined our advisor’s group as the twelfth apostle. She specialises in Bildung, Metamodernity, and Libertism. Give Lene a warm welcome.
So, that’s it for this edition. If there is something worth reporting, the next update is for Sep 2023.
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
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).
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:
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.
Petervan Studios 