Tag Archives: Performance

Inspiration: NOOR is creating a new sport

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At a recent family gathering, I learned that the grandchild of one of my nieces is studying at the School of Arts (KASK) in Ghent and is expected to complete her final master’s degree in 2027.

I found out she was working on a project called “How to Create a New Sport”. You can find an intro about it on her portfolio site: https://noorflamey.myportfolio.com/how-to-create-a-new-sport 

But the title could be misleading. NOOR’s work represents a critical intervention at the high-stakes intersection of elite athletic performance and contemporary artistic practice. This inquiry positions the “governed pedagogical space” of high-performance sport—specifically Women’s Artistic Gymnastics (WAG)—against the “rebellious act” of artistic creation. By deconstructing the rigid, judicial structures of elite sport, NOOR seeks to establish a theoretical and methodological framework for a “New Sport.” 

The central research question interrogates how embodiment is shaped by the friction between a pervasive, patriarchal achievement culture and the necessity for female artistic sovereignty. She highlights the “Running Score” methodology—an evolving script that replaces static judgment with a continuous documentation of the developmental process. 

This inquiry calls for a rigorous examination of the “Competition State”: a societal condition in which every action is measured against the ideal of perfection and the constant demand to prove one’s social value.

Especially at a time when AI is enabling humans to become ever more performant, competitive, and efficient, I believe her ambition can—and perhaps should—extend beyond “sport” as such. Her work has the potential to become a foundational critique of the hyper-competitive logic shaping both our personal and professional lives, while also proposing an alternative to it.

In this sense, her work could open up a much broader inquiry: How do we create a new way of becoming?

In addition to presenting an artistic in-situ performance, the deliverables of “Creating a New Sport” include a thesis and an artistic book documentary of her journey.

What NOOR is doing feels a bit like the Social Presencing Theatre of Theory-U of Otto Scharmer:

“an embodied social arts-based change methodology for making visible current reality and exploring emerging future possibilities. It includes a set of practices that synthesize embodied presence, movement theater, stillness, and dialogue. It reveals the wisdom in every social system and supports movement towards healthier futures.”

Or Ann Pendleton-Jullian’s work on “Design Unbound”, “Pragmatic Imagination”, and her FOUR (+1) Studios book (PDF) on “Studios”, where there is a whole section on game design and Homo Ludens (see pages 180 and following of FOUR(+1).

“Gameplay is the action associated with players making choices in the game environment. It is related to the sequential but interactive events of players operating in the rule-based site. It is the process of engagement of the game, while game design is the process of pre-engagement. It is the design of the rules for engagement. But game design can only be accomplished through playing the game as one is designing it.”

Also related is Venkat’s recent post on “The Curiously Playable Universe”. I am highly simplifying the thesis that when everything gets abstracted and possibly constructed (through AI and LLMs), then everything becomes “playable”. 

“But perhaps the stranger discovery concerns the provinces: Wildernesses can be reliably turned into game boards. We domesticate the territory, become skilled at its game, build machinery that plays it better than we can, and move outward to construct another game around the first, domesticating a larger scope.

This happened to fields and livestock long before it happened to chess. It happened to trade before it happened to programming. It happened to mechanics before it happened to mathematical proof.

Artificial intelligence did not invent this strange property of reality. It is merely making it difficult not to notice.

The deepest surprise of the AI era may turn out not to be that intelligence was easier to manufacture than we thought. It may be that the universe is far more playable than we imagined.”

This is very close to his work as director of research for the Protocol Institute. At this week’s Protocol Symposium 2026, there was even a workshop on Protocol Art. 

“Protocol Art is emerging as a practice in which the artwork is not a finite object but a set of rules that others (human or machine) instantiate into an indefinite number of unique works.”

The chairwoman of that workshop (Primavera De Filippi) has a good essay on what Protocol Art is and what it is not.

“Protocolism revolves around the creation of “artistic protocols.” These protocols comprise sets of instructions and constraints meticulously crafted to guide the production of unique artworks. These protocols serve as the bridge between the two pivotal figures: the original artist (i.e. the “protocol artist”) and a diverse array of executors (both human and non-human) who instantiate these protocols into tangible creations that qualify as distinct artistic creations. This symbiotic relationship challenges conventional notions of artistic authorship, as the resulting artworks bear the unmistakable imprint of the protocol artist, along with that of the instantiating actors.”

Protocol Art was (and still is, till November 2026) very present at Venice’s Art Biennale. 

“The artwork is not merely a final product, it is a process governed by instructions, representing the invisible architecture that enables the aesthetic experience. This shift in perspective – moving from the object to the system, and from the singular author to collaboration and ultimately human-machine co-creation – defines one of the most urgent territories in contemporary research.”

And also Rudy Rucker’s reflections on computationalism in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul comes to mind, where he explains that some computations are fully deterministic (aka based on clear, unambiguous rules) ànd unpredictable.

NOOR’s work is, maybe without knowing it, a crossover of all these contemporary disciplines and insights. Her work is a call for a rebellious act of non-conformism. Of humans being a bit “off-grid”. Not too perfect. In Digital Audio Workstations, there is even an option for “humanization” of something that is generated in the grid. If it is too perfect or without variation, it is boring. See my 2021 blog post Unsnap from the Grid https://petervanstudios.com/2021/03/09/unsnap-from-the-grid/ 

Her work is an invitation to the emergence of embodied experience and the liberation of human movement, taking sport as a point of departure while reaching toward possibilities far beyond it.

If you like her work as much as I do, please contact her here. And let me know if magic happens.

In a subsequent post, I will elaborate on what is worth measuring. 

And in the next one, I will introduce you to a 75-year-old artistic, rebellious choreographer who also combines sports and art. 

With warm artistic regards,

The Forbidden Question at UnitedXR Europe – Homo Experiens Explorers

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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.

So we like to call ourselves “Experiens Explorers” and “Designed Conspiracy” would better describe what we have in mind. See also https://petervanstudios.com/2025/12/21/the-orphic-experience-we-are-all-argonauts-again/

The Forbidden Question team
Picture 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.