Sacred Machines: Drew McDowall

Industrial veteran Drew McDowall has spent the last 40 years exhuming awe and wonder from the mundane, creating ritual music from serendipitous moments, and finding magic in the most ordinary of spaces. A crucial member of British occult electronics group Coil throughout the 1990s, until the untimely death of founder John Balance in 2004, McDowall has been living in New York since 2000 and continuing his spiritual practice as a solo artist since 2012, creating mesmeric soundscapes from field recordings and modular processing, released as a series of albums for Dais Records.

Performing on Thursday 15 June as part of the Conflux Festival opening concert at Plein 1940, McDowall will debut his latest album written through the horror, beauty and enduring mystery of the Pandemic on the multichannel Kinetic Sounds system.

Interview by Holly Dicker.

Can you tell us about the album you’ll be presenting at Conflux Festival?

The album is coming out next Spring. It’s pretty much finished but I wanted to take a pause, which I’ve really come to value since the Pandemic. At Conflux you’re going to hear it in its present state, like a little window into where I’m at in this process. It ties into consistent themes in my work: the idea of the sacred and the ineffable. When we talk about the human experience, it’s like trying to hold water in our hands. With this album I’m leaning heavily into the idea of things that just can’t be expressed with words, and the paradox of describing to yourself what you are doing.

How does this translate in the studio and your working – or “living” – relationship with machines?

It’s based on generative processes: not necessarily computational, they’re based on modular systems of pseudo random or stochastic processes, which then I try and figure out what works. I might have a session generating ideas in my studio for one hour, and then it will be days, weeks or even months taking that, finessing it and making choices. It’s like using generative processes as a spark to kickstart the work. When I talk about generative processes, it’s something that I’ve created. These machines wouldn’t do it on their own, each module in that chain has the potential to do something, and often I’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how I’m going to put that together, connect all of those different modules to create some type of generative process that is going to give me surprising but meaningful results. So it’s not just a random mechanical process.

What other influences have informed this album, beyond the studio and your artistic human-machine processing?

I live on one of the busiest streets in Brooklyn. There’s always traffic and construction noise, and during the Pandemic the loudest sound was the sound of birds. One of the most inspiring things was riding my bicycle down Delancey Street in Manhattan, which is notoriously inhospitable, and there was no sound other than the sound of human activity and birds. I’ve been exploring that, how the sound of human activity and the fabric of our cities is as much nature as these kinds of rural, idyllic spaces. That was a thread, not an explicit thread, but now it’s woven into the album in a way that I can’t really unpick it. It’s become part of the fabric of the album: those feelings of awe around the Pandemic. The world was brought to its knees by this tiny virus, this nonhuman actor, this nonhuman entity that pretty much destroyed everything we thought we knew. There was much horror but also incredible beauty as well. It still is a hard thing to unravel. I think it’s better to not even try, but to just sit with the true actual mystery of it. I feel like our brains are all over cooked just with that word, but it’s there in the fabric of everything, and specifically in this piece of music.

You’ll be presenting this album on elements of the Kinetic Sounds system, what excites you about presenting multichannel works?

When I do multichannel pieces, it feels like this is the way it’s supposed to sound. I like to take things spectrally and move them around the space and have the feeling of spatial movement. It allows me to really go in heavily on those areas that I love to explore: psychoactive, hallucinatory spaces, which are much more easily achieved when the sound isn’t coming from left and right. When you’re fully immersed in a space I find it’s much easier to tap into and create those unstable moments.

How much does audience participation or reaction factor into your work?

I don’t see the piece that I’m creating in a vacuum. I’m not approaching it from some precious artist’s thing, like I’m doing this for myself and then if it accidentally gets out into the world, great. No, I’m creating it with the idea that it will be listened to, and it will be performed. It will be performed in public because, for me, that’s absolutely integral. The shared space is absolutely vital, and I love that there is no one type of space that feels magical. You can tap into that sense of awe and that sense of the sacred in any space. But it’s not guaranteed, either. That’s what I love and dread about performing. There are so many different factors converging on that moment and space, which can make it work or not.

You’re basically orchestrating chaos, right?

I’m leaving room for that as well, for chance and possibility. That’s super important. I like to prepare well for a concert, but I always leave space for chance. So there’s always room for improvisation. It’s not this methodically prepared linear experience. There’s always space for serendipitous or chaotic things to happen.

This year’s festival theme is about challenging the human-machine dichotomy, exploring concepts like “Machine Hallucinations” and nonhuman forms of consciousness, and finding alternatives to the conventional narrative of man versus machine. How do you personally or creatively respond to this notion of Living Machines?

Humans are machine-creating entities. It’s kind of what makes us human as we know it. I think the most pressing thing – since the Industrial Revolution – is ownership. The Industrial Revolution was a huge extractive process. It affected humanity profoundly but most people didn’t get a say in how it affected them. And it’s the same thing with these Large language models (LLMs). They don’t exist in a vacuum. Someone owns these LLMs, and the vast computational power that they’re running on. And regular people are not going to get a say in how that affects them. I can definitely tap into the awe and wonder of the possibility of it, but I think the reality that is shaping up just now is that it’s gonna create massive displacement. It’s going to make everything more mundane. I’m not even going to use the word AI because I don’t think that we’re there yet. It’s very sophisticated algorithms, but it’s not “intelligence” in any way that we can relate to. That science fiction idea of Intelligent Machine is very compelling and it’s very seductive, and that’s what is being sold to us. But it’s just a way of sucking up everything that we own – all of human experience, art and culture – and then selling it back to us in a mundane or diminished form. And this is happening on a vast scale with huge resources. It’s just part of the ongoing process of Capitalism, making everything shittier and shittier, and selling it back to us. This is the more interesting question for me. It’s not even interesting, just vital: that nothing exists in a vacuum, we’re all absolutely inside of capitalism and it will extract the maximum from us, and give us the least back. So until we look at that, it’s hard to talk about the possibilities of AI without acknowledging that this will absolutely happen.

Does this then create a greater sense of urgency to be human, to be creative?

That’s the contradiction, that we all live inside this. It’s important that we’re not crushed by our own atomized bubbles, that we create art, or do our human thing, whatever that is and that we fulfil it through relationships with other human beings, and hopefully we can create something from that context, rather than just being passive recipients.

What personally motivates you to make music?

It’s still that sense of awe and wonder. The idea of the serendipities or the chance, or out of nothing or my shared experience, I created something that I think is worthwhile, and that I want to share with other people. Plus it’s a compulsion, I feel like I don’t even have a choice.

Read the article about Drew McDowall’s new album “Lamina”
https://mailchi.mp/leftfieldpr/drewmcdowall1

Listen to Drew McDowall’s music:
https://drewmcdowall.bandcamp.com

Drew McDowall performs on Thursday 15 June 21:45h at Plein 1940. The Conflux Festival opening performances at V11 and Plein 1940, and the exhibitions at V2_, Roodkapje and UBIK are free of charge. For the rest of the program you’ll need tickets.

Program 2023

Conference

Curiosity abounds when dealing with nonhuman forms of consciousness in relation to the very human forms of emotional and intellectual expression inherent to the art and music presented at Conflux Festival. Do abstraction and beauty translate? Do intention and meaning change? Can one compose for another type of consciousness? What dreams do machines and bees share?

The one day Conflux Festival conference happening at Worm explores machine hallucinations for waking humans through talks and presentations by theorists, artists and performers from the festival program in response to the festival theme of Living Machines. With special focus on the nonhuman experience of consciousness, the conference presents alternate ways of understanding our rapidly integrated human-machine world.

Artists

Click on names for more info

Sat 17 | 16:30 at WORM Central Station

What are the political and ontological implications of blurring the boundary between technological and biological organisms? From cybernetics to nanotechnology, contemporary technologies are breaking down the rigid divide between natural and artificial bodies, dismantling any naturalistic understanding of "life". The convergence of body and machine is a double-edged sword, revealing both emancipatory potential and an increasing tendency towards political surveillance and control. In this intricate landscape, can a recognition of the agency of nonhuman technologies help us navigate this complexity?

Laura Tripaldi (1993) is a writer and independent researcher working at the intersection of science, technology, new materialisms, and contemporary feminist theory. She holds a PhD in Materials Science and Nanotechnology and has taught courses, seminars, and workshops in several cultural and academic institutions across Europe and beyond. She is the curator of the magazine Not (NERO editions) and of the newsletter Soft Futures. She is the author of the book Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022).

Sat 17 | 14:30 at WORM Central Station

The immaterial and intangible character of light, colour and motion forms the starting point of Nicky Assmann's [NL] spatial installations, in which she endeavours to heighten our perception. With a background in Film and ArtScience, she combines artistic, scientific and cinematographic knowledge in experiments that use physical and chemical processes, such as turbulence and fluid dynamics. Topics that serve as a metaphor for the turbulent and fluid times in which we live. The changing climate and its turbulent consequences are a recurring theme in her work. By implementing natural and optical phenomena she creates visual compositions for a sensorial experience. The resulting visual, kinetic, and spatial compositions evoke sensory interference in self-created and often ephemeral macro universes.

In the lineage of expanded cinema, Assmann experiments in her work with the different components of the cinematic apparatus. She creates her own screens with materials that range from iridescent soap films, heat-stained and chemically-treated copper sheets, to metal grids, flexible led panels and kinetic transparent plates with moiré patterns. Her work takes shape in the form of kinetic light installations, video-installations and performances. Besides expanded cinema, her work is embedded in a context of visual music, synaesthesia and what Assmann calls hypercolour. The sun inspires her in a perpetual quest for these very intense colours – which are brought out by its light and occur both in nature and the digital colour spectrum. These hypercolours are characteristic for her work.

In using distorted mirroring materials, she challenges preconceived notions of our surroundings to open up space for other possibilities in our perception. Set against the backdrop of a visual culture whose reality is increasingly perceived in the virtual domain, she returns to the physical foundations of seeing in which the embodied experience and the notion of affect are central.

Assmann received the Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Oeuvre Award 2020. Her work Wervel [Turmoil] was nominated for the Spatial Media Award at The Media Architecture Biennale 2020 and longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2023. Her work Solace gained an Honorary Mention in the 2011 StartPoint Prize.

She has exhibited her work in solo and duo shows at TENT Rotterdam, Centre des Arts, Teatro del Canal, Gallery 254Forest and together with Macular collective at the MOCA Yinchuan [China], Wood Street Galleries [Pittsburgh] and Boxes Art Museum [China], and in group exhibitions at ao. the Saatchi Gallery [London], National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Art Rotterdam Week, Quartier 21 [Vienna], V2_Institute for the Unstable Media [Rotterdam], Exit Festival [Paris] and the Biennial of Carrara. She made her first permanent public artwork, the LED video sculpture Wervel [Turmoil] for Forum Groningen in 2019

Assmann holds a Bachelor of Arts in Film Science from the University of Amsterdam and a Master in ArtScience from the Interfaculty of the Royal Conservatoire & the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Next to her own practice she is also part of the Macular collective, which focuses on art, technology, science, and perception.

Sat 17 | 13:00 at WORM Central Station

During this artist talk Paaijmans will focus on his research on drawing machines.

Drawing is often described as an expressive art form that exposes the hand of the artist unmediated. By contrast, Jorrit Paaijmans [NL] is not interested in showing anything personal in his drawings. In his search towards a more objective manner of drawing, he has gradually erased his own artist’s hand from the drawing process entirely.

Paaijmans’ work is best described as an in-depth exploration of the drawing discipline in the broadest sense of the word. His aim for an objective, formally abstract way of drawing urged him to radically move away from traditional drawing materials and techniques. He started to make drawings on paper with makeshift tools such as a syringe [Algorythm#01, 2009], which over time developed into proper instruments like a semi-automatic pendulum installation [Prototype#02, 2009] and also experimented with drawing in a performative setting [Prototype#03, 2010]. In his explorations, Paaijmans’ focus shifted from the result - the drawing itself - to the process of drawing. While investigating the act of making a drawing and dissecting this process, Paaijmans deconstructs drawing itself to its basic elements.

Paaijmans expresses with his series of work Automatic Signum [2013-2015] that a drawing is essentially a registration of movement in time. A dot is created with a single movement in a single moment; the length of a line reflects the duration of the contact between pen and paper; the articulation of the line indicates how much pressure has been applied, or what the thickness or the angle of the pen has been; a pattern reflects the repetition of movement over a certain length of time. Automatic Signum consists of five drawing devices, Linear, Punctatum, Circular, Quattor Punctatum and Curvarum Linearum. With these fully automated mechanical sculptures, Paaijmans radically replaced the movement of his human drawing hand with mechanics. Each device explores a different basic formal aspect of drawing: dot, line or plane. Paaijmans taught himself to engineer and manufacture these intricate mechanical devices, employing technology as a means to understand the essence of the discipline.
With his recent works Rhombi movens [2015] and Linearis Objectum [2016] Paaijmans focusses on the drawing line, deploying it as an autonomous object. These installations both play with the eye of the beholder, using composition, linear perspective and shadow to create abstract patterns of line arrangements. With these works he has further developed the scale of his work from sculpture to installation.

Sat 17 | 15:30 at WORM Central Station

Joost Rekveld will narrate some of the wandering trajectory of his research project "Dialogues With Machines", which among other things resulted in his recently completed film "Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59". Extremely hands-on approaches to media archeology were employed in attempts to illuminate the dark matter that technology constitutes in much of contemporary culture. What kind of agency do machines have and what can humans learn from them ?

One of the starting points for this research was Joosts fascination for the extra-ordinary experiments with chemical and biological computing that were performed by the British cyberneticists Gordon Pask and Stafford Beer around 1960. They attempted to harness the self-organizing properties of complex materials and pond-sized ecologies, and use their adaptive properties as a regulatory influence. Peter Cariani interprets Pask's chemical computer as the first device constructed with what he calls 'epistemical autonomy'. Andrew Pickering has interpreted these devices as examples of an alternative non-modern alternative paradigm based on a non-dominating relation between technology and nature.
Joost will show how these experiments relate to the lineage of electronic analog computing and the use of material analogs in engineering, which are the technologies at the basis of his film. These technologies emerged in very specific political circumstances: what can we make of Beer's and Pask visions of not only self-organizing but also self-situating machines ? Can the political aspects of artefacts also be automated ?

Joost Rekveld is an artist and researcher who wonders what humans can learn from a dialogue with the machines they have constructed. In a form of media archeology he investigates modes of material engagement with devices from forgotten corners in the history of science and technology. The outcomes of these investigations often take the shape of abstract films that function like alien phenomenologies. In their sensuality they are an attempt to reach an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world.

Sat 17 | 17:30 at WORM Central Station

The artworks of Claire Williams take the form of woven antennas, glass sculptures filled with plasma or devices that sense the invisible.

Data of radio telescopes and scanners materialise themselves in knitted stitches, sound vibrations or through luminous plasma. She sculpts her electronic components to make visible the electromagnetic movements from the cosmos, through our magnetosphere, to radio waves that cross our terrestrial environment or the ones emanating from our bodies.

She is currently working on the exploration of ether, at the cross roads of experimental and occult science practices. In this way she explores our relationship to the world of the invisible and their instruments by reviving abandoned leads of certain scientific and researches of the mid 19th century.

Claire Williams (1986) lives in Brussels. after a master degree in textile design (La Cambre) she followed a post master at Le Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains. She exhibits and gives workshops in international venues and regularly teaches in an art and design schools.

Her work has been exhibited in digital, sound art festivals and group shows such as Bozar (Be), Le Fresnoy (FR), Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (Paris), La friche de belle de mai (FR), Biennal Chroniques (FR), Ososphère (FR), Festival Scopitone (FR) Red Room (TWN), Moulins Paillards(FR), Tamat (BE), Transnumériques (BE) Digital Encounters (UK), Festival voix de femmes (BE), Hangar (ES), Halles Saint Géry (BE), Le Signe (FR), Site St Sauveur (FR) etc. As well as solo shows at Le Vecteur(BE), la Manufacture(FR), Constant(BE) and the Centro Cultural Puerta de Castilla(ES).

Claire Williams (1986) lives in Brussels. after a master degree in textile design (La Cambre) she followed a post master at Le Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains. She exhibits and gives workshops in international venues and regularly teaches in an art and design schools.

Her work has been exhibited in digital, sound art festivals and group shows such as Bozar (Be), Le Fresnoy (FR), Centre Wallonie Bruxelles (Paris), La friche de belle de mai (FR), Biennal Chroniques (FR), Ososphère (FR), Festival Scopitone (FR) Red Room (TWN), Moulins Paillards(FR), Tamat (BE), Transnumériques (BE) Digital Encounters (UK), Festival voix de femmes (BE), Hangar (ES), Halles Saint Géry (BE), Le Signe (FR), Site St Sauveur (FR) etc. As well as solo shows at Le Vecteur(BE), la Manufacture(FR), Constant(BE) and the Centro Cultural Puerta de Castilla(ES).

Club Nights

After the neurological demands and multisensory stimulation of the Conflux's Festival day program, by night you're invited to viscerally engage in the techno-driven sounds of the club nights happening at POING and WORM across two dancefloors. Plunged into darkness and sensorially deprived by strobe and smoke, surrounded by other bodies ensnared in the ritualistic human-machine interactions of the dancefloor, here the unconscious processing can begin.

At POING on Friday experience an afterhours program of bass-driven techno with daring producer and Fever AM label co-founder Rhyw playing with Amsterdam experimental bass artist Zohar and rising Rotterdam dubstep DJ Nala Brown from the female-focused AMPFEMININE collective. Plus local support from Ruwedata, Nikos and Mark Rutta (AKA Mark & Ruta Genyten).

At WORM on Saturday, the playful leftfield house sounds of rRoxymore meets electro, industrial and seering "Mensch-Maschine" techno with Oliver Ho DJing as Broken English Club alongside Rotterdam techno veteran and Mord Records chief Bas Mooy, with a special collaboration from Perron resident Rita Maomenos and visual artist Cem Altınöz. Plus local support from Afra, dirtydms and Vox supreme.

Artists

Click on names for more info

Fri 16 | 01:30 at POING upstairs

Like liquid mercury in a petri dish—slick, supple, and playfully disobedient—Rhyw’s music dazzles as it defies expectation. The Welsh-Greek artist cut his teeth as one half of Cassegrain and has been finding new paths for his mutant sound ever since, releasing on Fever AM, the imprint he set up with Mor Elian in 2017, as well as labels like Avian and Modeselektor’s SSPB. In the studio or behind the decks, he brilliantly fuses different strains of ultra-modern techno and broken beat: eyes-down minimal lights up with modular sass, choppy kicks flirt with rolling grooves, and sharp sound design slices through earthy subs. It’s the kind of amphibious sound that can slip into otherworldly spaces while never truly leaving the dance floor. With his new release 'Honey Badger' out on the VOAM, Blawan and Pariah's label, Rhyw is a quickly rising star on the adventurous techno front.

Rhyw turned heads with the heavyweight two-tracker ‘Biggest Bully’ in 2019, earning himself sets at Berghain, Berlin Atonal, and Boiler Room Tokyo, along with tours in Asia and the US. Online and on-air, he’s guested on Hessle Audio’s Rinse FM show and Mixmag’s ‘In Session’ mix series, and contributed podcasts to Crack and FACT. Even when they leave the gate at full pelt, these sets showcase Rhyw’s subtle sense of intricacy, balancing airy atmospheres against tougher tackle. But whatever the energy level, there’s always an alien presence in Rhyw’s sound—a shapeshifter whose twin motives are to bewitch and disorientate the listener.

Sat 17 | 01:15 at WORM Foyer

Whether on stage, on record or deep in collaboration, the musical ideas of rRoxymore move at such pace and with such frequency, that it can be difficult to keep pace. As respected for her esoteric, offbeat club records - distinctive and sometimes provocative dance cuts that are as satisfying for DJs to blend as dancefloors to soak in - as her semi-improvised live performances, the sheer open-minded energy at the heart of rRoxymore’s work have earned her a place as one of the most vital artists on the fringes of contemporary club culture, rooted in experimentations.

rRoxymore’s compelling and somewhat psychedelic DJ sets have taken her to some of the world’s best-respected club spaces, including Berghain, Oval Space, Fabric and MOMA’s PS1 series, as well as a string of dance and experimental festivals, including Unsound, Mira, Nuits Sonores and Field Maneuvers. Increasingly, rRoxymore’s live set has consumed much of the artist’s world. An ever-evolving carousel of concepts, blending established rhythms with sketches. It has been featured twice on Boiler Room, in 2014 and then in 2018. Alongside appearances on pioneering imprints such as Timedance and Ostgut Ton, rRoxymore has found a home as a key artist on UK label, Don’t Be Afraid, which released her acclaimed LP, Face To Phase in 2019. rRoxymore continues to be defined only as an artist outside of common boundaries; a producer with a constantly evolving and authentic need to express.

“rRoxymore [is] one of the most engaging voices in electronic music today.” — Resident Advisor

“The French-born artist has spent the past decade crafting an increasingly idiosyncratic take on classic club styles, wrapping unvarnished drum machines in analog squelch and treating dance music’s most cherished rules with blithe disregard.” — Pitchfork

“Listening to ‘Face To Phase’, it is a testament to rRoxymore’s talents that these somewhat historicised practises have made for such endearingly original music, which blossoms with repeated listens”
— The Wire

Sat 17 | 04:30 at WORM Central Station

Rotterdam home based dj/producer Bas Mooy (1976) has been active on many fronts in the techno scene since 1999. Heavily influenced by a city that breaths industrial strength twenty-fourseven, he gradually found his way into creating an unique dark sound, which lead him to the forefront of the global techno scene. In 2002 he kickstarted Audio Assault Records with label partner Jeroen Liebregts aka Radial, which resulted in the birth of sublabel Arms one year later. In 2013 Bas started his solo project Mord Records, which rapidly gained a huge fanbase worldwide and has been a major force in techno ever since.

For almost twenty years Bas was a member of the Rotterdam underground collective ‘Strictly Techno’, creators of over a hundred legendary parties since the late nineties. Bas has always been a hard working and devoted producer, releasing music on respected labels such as Mote Evolver, Perc Trax, Pole Group, 47, CLR, Sleaze Records, Planet Rhythm and of course his own imprints Audio Assault and Mord Records. With Mord Records turning 10 in 2023, Bas shows no sign of slowing down.

Sat 17 | 01:30 at WORM Central Station

Afra is right at the forefront of the underground where the electro, techno and acid meet. She takes equal inspiration from the Dutch West Coast as she does from Detroit, from the rawness of Berlin and the realness of her native Rotterdam scene, and pours it all into her own electrifying and all-vinyl sets.

Afra is a true crate digger and vinyl lover. The imperfections that come with the medium and the focus that is needed to mix black gold give her endless energy and a rush of goosebumps. The last year has seen her play Boiler Room and cult clubs Bassiani and Berghain as well as hold down a residency at much loved Amsterdam queer party Spielraum. At any of these places, you can be sure she will serve up unpolished, emotive sounds that pack an emotional as well as physical punch, all with tight technical skills and a knowledge of exactly what to play and when, whether playing time bangers or deeper warm-up sets.

Since setting up the Pinkman sublabel Mindri with Marsman after the COVID pandemic, Afra has established it as a cutting-edge place for fresh electronic sounds from artists like Pluto Junkies, Univac and The Hacker. It is another outlet for her to showcase her unique sense of style and taste as she continues to play some of Europe's most clued-up parties. Right now, there is no stopping her.

Fri 16 | 04:30 at POING upstairs

Francesco Visconti, better known as VSK, is an Italian techno dj and producer, born in Rome in 1986 and based in Berlin. He has got familiar to different forms of techno, his style ranging from a sound usually very hard and dark, often with industrial influences, to a very different one, deeper and more mental, both still easily recognizable as coming from the same mind.

In 2010 he and his friends Conrad Van Orton and Vilix started their own label “Consumer Recreation Service”, which got immediate support from big names in the international techno scene, currently he has been handling “CRS ltd” series, focused on a darker and more industrial sound. Over the years he has released music on many other important labels such as “Ear To Ground, Sonntag Morgen, Genesa, Planet Rhythm, on which he has an important collaboration with the Italian icon Giorgio Gigli, “Silent Age Ep”. In 2016 he also signed an extended six-track Ep with Conrad Van Orton on Developer’s imprint Modularz (USA) and in 2018 on historical SOMA records under the name of
“Symmetrical Behaviuor”.

In 2017 he started performing live, both individually and as part of a duo with the Serbian artist Scalameriya. This collaboration brought to several relevant releases on the British labels Power Vacuum and the legendary Perc Trax, as well as leading to their appearance in the MORD box 002. At the same time he took part in the latest VA on the amazing “47” label along with Ancient Methods, OAKE and the label owner Tommy Four Seven. He also signed 47’s third solo Ep, following those by Headless Horseman and Killawatt.

Sat 17 | 02:45 at WORM Foyer

As resident of the now-defunct Amsterdam festival Strange Sounds From Beyond, this promising Dutch artist is never quite satisfied with simply churning out dance floor fillers, preferring to blur the boundaries between genres and toy with the expectations of the audience and his own. He has come a long way in the last years: from DJing and hosting events in The Netherlands and across the borders at clubs such as De School, Garage Noord, mur mur and RADION (Amsterdam), Het Bos (Antwerp), arkaoda (Berlin) and festivals such as Strange Sounds From Beyond (Amsterdam), Atlas Electronic (Marrakesh), Waking Life (Crato, Portugal), to running his label traumgarten – which started as a conceptually brilliant show on Red Light Radio, currently holding residencies on the new Amsterdam based radio station Echobox Radio and the established Brussels station Kiosk Radio.

Traumgarten grew out to be more than just a radio show, hosting event series at places such as De School and Garage Noord in Amsterdam and Waking Life Festival in Portugal. Due to the pandemic the next phase of traumgarten was kickstarted and the label was born, starting off with a 30-track benefit compilation and followed by a twelve-inch record. The label is set to release the second benefit compilation in June 2022 with artists such as upsammy, Nazanin Noori, Know V.A. and Guenter Råler, to name a few.

Exhibitions

Are machines living among us or are we living among machines? And how can we learn from each other's experiences? This year’s Conflux Festival dives deep into the human-machine dichotomy and raises questions about our relationship with artificial systems through two exhibitions exploring the festival theme of Living Machines.

At V2_ artists Claire Williams, Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, Jorrit Paaijmans, Louis-Philippe Demers and Entangled Others Studio present multidisciplinary works at the intersection of science, art and technology. Under the title ‘Living Machines’ the selection of artworks show alternative views on how technology influences human perception. The second exhibition at Roodkapje presents kinetic light installations and screen based experiments by artistic researchers from the Macular collective, who celebrate 15 years of their nomadic lab practice.

The exhibitions are free of charge. Opening times:

Thursday 15 June: 18:00 - 21:00
Friday 16 June: 14:00 - 20:30
Saturday 17 June: 14:00 - 20:30
Sunday 18 June: 14:00 - 20:30

Artists

Click on names for more info

Thu 15 | 18:00 at V2_

Sediment-laden waters often appear muddily opaque, the multitude of suspended particles disturbed by wind, tide, storm, flood, or even our activities seemingly cloud our view of aquatic life, obscuring them. We spare little thought of the suspended sediment itself, for it signals that there is or was movement, yet it too is full of life, colour and form.

The suspended cloud of inorganic matter is, in fact, a multitude: inorganic particles of silt, clay and sand are the host and neighbour to the algal, the bacterial, mingling with particles of organic matter, microorganisms and larger, yet still small, lifeforms that find their sustenance and shelter in the obscure. Furthermore, the minerals and denizens diffuse and reflect and ultimately diffuse the light, creating complex conditions within the microscopic.

Sediment Nodes explores the connections and interconnections of what we assume inert, yet disturbed, of the complexities of colour and light hidden from us by the scale and the diffusion of light and osmosis within a liquid medium.

Entangled Others Studio are Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo.

Entanglement is a complex state one where no single entity can be said to be separate, or somehow unaffected, by any other present entangled, we cannot consider ourselves without others, act without interacting, speak without being heard. It is a multitude of you, and others, equally present and alive, together.

The rich substrate of the uncanny, eerie spaces between us and the non-human world cannot remain as an aesthetic space, our world cannot bear this self-imposed distance and denial of our inter-twined state of us and others.

Becoming entangled others studio is about moving further into an entanglement with the more-than-human world of us & others. A world where diversity and inter-connectedness are nurtured and engaged.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at Roodkapje

In the kinetic light installation ‘The Abysses of the Scorching Sun’ Nicky Assmann examines the passage of time, the finite and the infinite, global warming and the changing climate of our planet. Thinking of the Earth and Sun as perpetuum mobiles, it considers how we humans are part of this earthly existence, processing and sharing feelings of anxiety from the impending ecological apocalypse and how accidental and ephemeral our existence is compared to the cosmos.

The light sculpture, inspired by the early work of light art pioneer Thomas Wilfred, follows the trajectory of the Sun using a sun tracer. Its telescope moves slowly, almost invisibly, throughout the day. The machine is based on the concept of a sundial, but instead of indicating time, it projects light back to the Sun. The light travels through several reflective and diffractive elements before projecting its rays onto the walls of the space. The visuals move throughout the space as the installation follows the sun and are accompanied by a score composed of perpetual drones.

The different cycles lead to an ever changing prismatic coloured visual output, which, together with the moving wheels and mirror cones, is reminiscent of the eye of a storm: the calm before the chaos.

This presentation is part of the 15 years Macular exhibition.

Research & concept: Nicky Assmann

Sound composition: Joris Strijbos

Realisation: Nicky Assmann, Jeroen Molenaar, Spectro Productions, Joris Strijbos, Daan Johan, Dieter Vandoren, Christian Friedrich, Joep de Jong, Joris Rockx, Erfan Abdi, Margreet Hoekstra

Co-production: Werktank / With support of The Creative Industries Fund NL & The Flemish Government.

The immaterial and intangible character of light, colour and motion forms the starting point of Nicky Assmann's spatial installations, in which she endeavours to heighten our perception. With a background in Film and ArtScience, she combines artistic, scientific and cinematographic knowledge in experiments that use physical and chemical processes, such as turbulence and fluid dynamics. Topics that serve as a metaphor for the turbulent and fluid times in which we live. The changing climate and its turbulent consequences are a recurring theme in her work. In the lineage of expanded cinema, Assmann experiments in her work with the different components of the cinematic apparatus. By implementing natural and optical phenomena she creates visual compositions for a sensorial experience. The resulting visual, kinetic, and spatial compositions evoke sensory interference in self-created and often ephemeral macro-universes.

Her work takes shape in the form of kinetic light installations, video-installations and performances. Besides expanded cinema, her work is embedded in a context of visual music, synaesthesia and what Assmann calls hypercolour. The sun inspires her in a perpetual quest for these very intense colours – which are brought out by its light and occur both in nature and the digital colour spectrum. In using distorted mirroring materials, she challenges preconceived notions of our surroundings to open up space for other possibilities in our perception. Set against the backdrop of a visual culture whose reality is increasingly perceived in the virtual domain, she returns to the physical foundations of seeing in which the embodied experience and the notion of affect are central.

Assmann received the Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Oeuvre Award 2020. Her work ‘Wervel [Turmoil]’ was nominated for the Spatial Media Award at The Media Architecture Biennale 2020 and longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2023. Her work ‘Solace’ gained an Honorary Mention in the 2011 StartPoint Prize. She has shown her work worldwide at various art institutes, museums and galleries.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at Roodkapje

“Cycles” is an audiovisual installation in which the spectator is immersed in an abstract world of light and sound. The installation is largely inspired by the work of Thomas Wilfred who in the 1920s developed his “Lumia”, an abstract form of light use that he saw as a visual music. This input combined with modern technology laid the foundation for “Cycles”. In the piece abstract light patterns are created by shooting laser beams through rotating transparent objects. The constantly varying geometric and organic shapes that occur have a synaesthetic relationship with the evolving and realtime sound composition. The result is an immersive space in which sound and image come together into a hypnotic experience.

Daan Johan is an artist who explores the technology from the past to create new instruments, often with a form of sculptural value and craftsmanship.

Starting out in graphic design at St. Lucas in Boxtel, he soon got interested in electronic music. After making electronic music for a while, he soon realized that the technology behind the music was of greater interest to him. Since 1997 he’s been exploring the guts of analog synthesizers, lab equipment, and hifi equipment to create unique and often unexplored forms of sound creation. First by means of circuit bending, and later, after some studying and experimenting, by modifying and creating his own mechanical and electronic equipment. Using these techniques together with software, he started creating interactive installations. At the same time he kept on drawing and made his first steps into stop motion animation.

In 2006 he entered the Image & Sound / ArtScience program at the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatory, where he received his BFA in 2010 and earned his MFA at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 2012.

Joris Strijbos is a Rotterdam-based artist whose work focuses on the synaesthetic relation and interaction between moving image and sound.

His work consists of a series of kinetic audiovisual installations and new media performances inspired by an ongoing research into cybernetics, emergent systems, artificial life and communication networks within groups. In his installations he combines artificial, electronic and digital media with models and algorithms based on biological systems. In many of the pieces, the viewer witnesses a process in which machines, computer programs and the physical world interact with each other, resulting in a generative and multi sensorial composition.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at Roodkapje

Revolve is a kinetic machine designed to scatter abstract light-patterns into its surrounding space. Hundreds of LEDs are mounted on a fast spinning rectangle performing an algorithmic generative composition consisting of stroboscopic pulses and lines of light. Complex patterns emerge between the fast flashing lights, and the spinning of the object. Resulting in some kind of entity which can be seen as a data flow, a morse signal or even an abstract visual language spoken by the machine itself. ‘Revolve’ is looking for the boundaries of human visual perception. Due to a sensory overload, produced by the stroboscopic light, the after image effect occurs. As a result, the imaginary negative light patterns produced by the retina, become an integral part of the experience, as they mix-up with the light produced by the machine.

Daan Johan is an artist who explores the technology from the past to create new instruments, often with a form of sculptural value and craftsmanship.

Joris Strijbos is a Rotterdam-based artist whose work focuses on the synaesthetic relation and interaction between moving image and sound.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at Roodkapje

The synthesis of analog video and analog audio is based on oscillations. Audio uses oscillators at a lower frequency than video, but in general creating the signal for analog audio and video is based on the same principals. Drifting is a study of these oscillations and was created using vintage video synthesis equipment coupled with contemporary audio synthesis modules.

In the mid 70s engineer Bill Hearn built the Hearn Videolab after a conversation with video art pioneers Bill Etra and Steve Rutt. The design of the Videolab was based on Don Buchla’s architecture for modular audio synthesizers which he pioneered a decade earlier. The Videolab is a modular voltage controlled video synthesis system that can be used to process and produce a wide range of video. For Drifting the focus was on the synthesis capabilities of the system by combining multiple oscillators to create patterns. These patterns were routed through other video processing modules, such as the Jones Colorizer.

By simultaneously routing the video signal into and out of a contemporary Eurorack modular audio synthesizer, feedback and modulation patterns emerged that introduced unpredictability into the signal flow. The unstable nature of the analog system -producing its inherent drifting- became a defining characteristic of the audiovisual instrument. The film was recorded as an in-studio live performance at the Signal Culture artist in residency.

Eric Parren (NL/US) is an interdisciplinary artist operating out of Shanghai. His practice is situated at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Using a combination of digital and analog media, he investigates our understanding of the ideas and technologies that shape the future. Eric's works are often visceral, sensory experiences exploring modes of perception and the physics of light and sound. Informed by a deep knowledge of the histories of media arts, electronic music composition, and expanded cinema, his work makes links between the past, the present, and what is to come.

Eric is an Assistant Arts Professor in Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai where he conducts research and teaches courses on programming and electronics for artists, real-time audiovisual systems, and kinetic light art. He is a founding member of the art collective Macular and runs the experimental music show La Force Sauvage.

Eric studied at the Interfaculty ArtScience of the Royal Academy of Art and Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he received his BFA in 2009. He went on to study at the Design Media Arts department of the University of California Los Angeles, where he was awarded his MFA in 2012. His works have been shown at galleries and festivals across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at Roodkapje

The video installation Liquid Solid explores the cinematic qualities of a freezing soap film in the sub-Arctic region of Finland. The colourful soap slowly sinks down in the film of soap, until a vacuum of a very thin layer of water remains, in which frozen crystals whirl round. The constantly shifting iridescent quality of the liquid soap membrane disappears as it freezes, leaving a solid, crystallized colourless surface. Only at a very low temperature, an accelerated freezing process occurs, during which ice crystals transform into fractal-like patterns. For Liquid Solid the artists composed a soundtrack with a mixture of soundscapes, ranging from singing whales to recordings with self-made instruments, such as VLF antennas and monochords played with electromagnets.

Liquid Solid was made possible with the generous support of:
Creative Industries Fund NL, Gemeente Rotterdam, The Finnish Society of Bioart

Nicky Assmann and Joris Strijbos are Rotterdam-based artists whose work stems from an interest in nature, science, technology and perception. They are both part of the Macular collective and create multi-sensorial artworks in the form of light and kinetic sculptures, videos and audiovisual performances. Their work has been shown worldwide at art festivals, museums and galleries.

The immaterial and intangible character of light, colour and motion forms the starting point of Nicky Assmann's spatial installations, in which she endeavours to heighten our perception. With a background in Film and ArtScience, she combines artistic, scientific and cinematographic knowledge in experiments that use physical and chemical processes, such as turbulence and fluid dynamics. Topics that serve as a metaphor for the turbulent and fluid times in which we live. The changing climate and its turbulent consequences are a recurring theme in her work. By implementing natural and optical phenomena she creates visual compositions for a sensorial experience. The resulting visual, kinetic, and spatial compositions evoke sensory interference in self-created and often ephemeral macro universes.

Joris Strijbos’s work focuses on the synaesthetic relation and interaction between moving image and sound. His work consists of a series of kinetic audiovisual installations and new media performances inspired by an ongoing research into cybernetics, emergent systems, artificial life and communication networks within groups. In his installations he combines artificial, electronic and digital media with models and algorithms based on biological systems. In many of the pieces, the viewer witnesses a process in which machines, computer programs and the physical world interact with each other, resulting in a generative and multi sensorial composition.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at V2_

Automatic Signum (2013–16) is a series of kinetic drawing devices, which continuously draw a point, line or circle. Starting from Kandinsky’s basic elements as described in Point and Line to Plane (1923), this series of machines demonstrate an attempt to mechanize the expressive quality of the act of drawing. Jorrit Paaijmans aims to deconstruct the act of drawing by researching whether the machine can be used as a replacement – or the executor – of a human act. What is being executed by the machine, however, is equally as important as the presence of the machine as a sculptural-performative element in itself. The machines are made by hand and rooted in principles of physics. By choosing a crafts-based approach to mechanics in a time of ongoing automation and digitalization, Paaijmans attempts to move beyond the man–machine dichotomy.

Jorrit Paaijmans (1979) works at the intersection of craftsmanship and technology. His artistic practice is an ongoing exploration of the drawing discipline: he plays with perceptions and expectations of what drawing can be. Draughtsmanship serves as the springboard for all of his works, whether it concerns a drawing, a performance or a kinetic installation. Paaijmans regularly outsources the production of drawings to handmade machines. He mechanizes the act of drawing to research the role of the body, and to bring attention to craft as a concept. In doing so, Paaijmans touches upon a larger debate on the position of craft – and the craftsman – in today's technological society.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at V2_

Linearis Objectum No.3 (2023) is based on two benchmarks in the development of the drawing discipline: the invention of perspective drawing in the Renaissance and the early 20th century manifestation of the line as a sculptural element, being freed from the two-dimensional plane. The artistic practice of Jorrit Paaijmans finds itself in the field of ‘expanded drawing’. The boundaries of the drawing disciplines are being challenged, in this specific case by a process of mechanization. Linearis Objectum No.3 creates seemingly infinite spatial drawing configurations in which the process and its mechanics are equal actors. All elements of the installation are openly demonstrated, from its functionality to its vanishing points.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at V2_

A Monocular Dialogue incarnates myths in the age of Information and Technology. It is an encounter with a single-eyed robot that stares at you and endlessly whispers its inner ruminations. Underneath this confluence of a Cyclops from Greek mythology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) from modern technology, lie intriguing, albeit metaphorical, similarities. This 3D printed Polyphemus, figuratively and literally, symbolizes their narrow and limited perspectives; suggests their creation from Gods and higher powers; alludes to the monumental tasks they perform and refers to their ambivalent brute force and potential destructiveness. Between irony and nostalgia, this eye-to-eye dialogue is staged as “the AI is present” and it embodies AI prowess into a mythical monstruous, yet seemingly inoffensive, figure.

Reminiscent of the omnipotent cybernetic brains of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Kubrick) and “Alphaville” (Goddard), this monocular pinhole has the persistent and unnerving inquisitive presence of a much larger hidden entity. As Odysseus, will we poke the eye of AI, this single-eyed brute, to trick our way out? Let this Cyclops serenade you with a dialog that equally indisposes and seduces, like any mirrors we cross upon.

Louis-Philippe Demers makes large-scale installations and performances with technologies, AI and Robotics in particular. He participated in more than seventy artistic and stage productions and has built more than 400 machines. Demers’ works have been shown worldwide and primed at Ars Electronica, Vida, Japan Media Arts Festival and at Helpman Awards (Australia). Demers’ academic journey brought him to the Superior School of Design/Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), the Nanyang Technological University, the Queensland University of Technology, the University of the Arts London, the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing) and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at V2_

How can a fully occupied hotel of infinite scale continuously accommodate an infinite influx of new guests? David Hilbert was among a contingent of mathematicians, stretching back to Zeno, who pondered such questions of infinitesimal spatial granularity.

“Hilbert Hotel” is a curvilinear ion trap that electrically levitates its myriad microscopic guests. These hollow glass microspheres float along startlingly square-shaped orbits, tracing the quadrupolar electric fields that keep them airborne.

When charged particles are levitated by electric fields an exotic state of matter emerges, known as a Coulomb crystal. Paving the way to quantum computers and to physics beyond the Standard Model, Coulomb crystals also offer uncharted perceptual territory. Their direct observability has lead to a series of ion crystal artworks that will culminate with Atom Chasm, a laser-cooled ion trap laying bare individual atoms.

Dmitry Gelfand (b.1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (b. 1972, Minsk, Belarus) create installations and performances that merge physical phenomena with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings of consciousness.

Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, Domnitch and Gelfand's installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer's sensory envelope. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion.

Thu 15 | 18:00 at V2_

Six shapes rest in the center of a big flat disc. One recalls the amorphous pieces of silicon produced by the impact of lightning strike on sand, while the others may resemble to jellyfishes, corals or seaweeds living in the depths of unknown seas. Each one is filled of a matter-energy which shades and structure are unique.

These six shapes are all different but they no doubt belong to the same class of objects, the same category of things. To physicists they recall the tubes used by Heinrich Geissler to experiment on the behavior of certain gases when electrical current flows through them. To those who visit shops in science museums they remind the luminous globes that react to touch. To explorers of the northern latitudes, they recall the aurora borealis. They are at once all of these and at the same time neither of them.

They are filled with noble gases that compose the interstellar environment: argon, neon, krypton, xenon, nitrogen. They are made of the same matter of the sun: plasma. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, it composes 99 % of our visible universe but none of the 100 % of the one we evolve in. What is strange is to hear its activity as if it came from inside our bodies, when we place our elbows on the ring that surrounds the disc. The entire installation pulses to the rhythm of the sun’s electromagnetic activity.

A production Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains

The artworks of Claire Williams take the form of woven antennas, glass sculptures filled with plasma or devices that sense the invisible.

Data of radio telescopes and scanners materialise themselves in knitted stitches, sound vibrations or through luminous plasma. She sculpts her electronic components to make visible the electromagnetic movements from the cosmos, through our magnetosphere, to radio waves that cross our terrestrial environment or the ones emanating from our bodies.

She is currently working on the exploration of ether, at the cross roads of experimental and occult science practices. In this way she explores our relationship to the world of the invisible and their instruments by reviving abandoned leads of certain scientific and researches of the mid 19th century.

Sat 17 | 14:00 at UBIK

Citadels is a series of installations and performances that facilitate investigations into the hallucinatory realm created inside eyes stimulated by flickering light.Discovered around 1800 by the bohemian physiologist Johannes Purkyne, who waved his hands in front of his closed eyes while looking at the sun, the flicker effect has captivated many over the years. Most notably was its resurgence in the 60’s. Beat culture, psychedelics and new methods of expanding consciousness proved a fertile ground for further creative investigations into Purkyne’s phenomena. Most influential however, was the invention of the Dream Machine by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville. A cylinder with slits cut in the sides lit from inside, rotating on a turntable, produced a stroboscopic light that produced a whirl of kaleidoscopic visions behind the onlooker’s closed eyes.
The Citadels series is a new kind of dream machine. No longer is there a need for closed eyes, a layer of vivid patterns is instantly laid over reality. The installation lets the observer investigate the endless complexities produced within the eye itself. A geometric dimension of unworldly colours, fractals, pixels, shapes and dazzling form.

Research into the effect, 200 year after Purkyne, by Bressloff et al suggests that these patterns arise because of interference in the signal from the eye to the primary visual cortex, spherically transformed according to the retinotopic map the eye. This transformation creates the typical structures seen in hallucinations. More importantly these common structures are thus not only a construct of the mind, but percepts with a physical origin in the inner architecture of the eye.

In the Citadels series space is transformed into various observatories for the eye’s inner structures and visual archetypes. It creates a space to meditate on the relation between sense data and reality and constructs of the mind.

Matthijs Munnik develops new technology that aims to realize sensory experience and compositional possibilities. Mostly working with light, his installations and performance range from hallucination inducing flickering landscapes, to serene infinite colour spaces, spinning holographic forms and singing micro-organisms. He graduated from the Royal Academy in Den Haag, and finished a two year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2016/17. His work consists of performances and installations which play with the perceptions of spectators. He has shown his work in museums like Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Fries Museum Leeuwarden, and festivals internationally, like Sonic Acts (NL), Ars Electronica(AU), TodaysArt (RU), Mapping Festival(CH). He received a Prix Cube Award (FR) in 2013 and Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award (NL) in 2010.

Thu 15 | 19:00 at WORM Facade

In this kinetic light installation two balanced aluminium tubes spin slowly, illuminating their movement and environment. A light at one end, and a brass weight at the other, with the centre of mass at the central shaft. By shifting internal balances, and affected by external forces, such as air currents, a choreography of movement and light emerges. Inspired by the concept of the barycentre used in physics and astronomy, describing the balance point, or centre of mass of two or more bodies that orbit one another.

Performances

Conflux Festival explores the broad and murky boundaries between humans and their machines over a four day program of innovative sound performances, live audiovisual presentations and experimental cinema showcases by a cross-section of internationally renowned artists, happening across a diverse range of environments throughout the city of Rotterdam.

For the free opening concert on Thursday, Conflux Festival presents a public sound art intervention at Plein 1940 featuring elements of the Kinetic Sounds multichannel sound installation. On Friday, the concrete cathedral Brutus will host an expanded cinema showcase of audiovisual works going beyond the traditional frame of a screen. On Saturday, visual artists and musicians will present a series of immersive screen-based performances at the Arminius Kerk, and on Sunday experience experimental theater and sound performances at Worm.

Artists

Click on names for more info

Thu 15 | 21:45 at Plein 1940

This performance is free of charge. Just as the other opening performances on Thursday 15 June.

Industrial veteran Drew McDowall has spent the last 40 years exhuming awe and wonder from the mundane, creating ritual music from serendipitous moments, and finding magic in the most ordinary of spaces. A crucial member of British occult electronics group Coil throughout the 1990s, until the untimely death of founder John Balance in 2004, McDowall has been living in New York since 2000 and continuing his spiritual practice as a solo artist since 2012, creating mesmeric soundscapes from field recordings and modular processing, released as a series of albums for Dais Records.

Performing on Thursday 15 June as part of the Conflux Festival opening concert at Plein 1940, McDowall will debut his latest album written through the horror, beauty and enduring mystery of the Pandemic on the multichannel Kinetic Sounds system.

Drew McDowall's works are sacraments to alterity. An artist who has refused to conform in music and in life, McDowall mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness. His meditative compositions are haunting and spiritual, melding intricate modular soundscapes with cut-up samples, and deconstructing sounds into their most basic shuddering structures and shapes. The disorienting ambient mirages that result elicit terror, tender melancholy, and heavenly flickers of expansive beauty.

His backstory reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman, and outright insane. Growing up in the gangs of 1970’s Scotland, McDowall—fatigued by years of daily violence and the chaotic madness of that life—sought aggressive self-expression in punk and found a home in Glasgow's rich underground music community. After a stint with The Poems, a band he started with his then-wife Rose McDowall, he joined the ranks of UK avant-gardists Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, John Balance, and countless others who would come to define the industrial music's blossoming experimental vanguard. McDowall eventually collaborated with Psychic TV and became a full-time member of the cult outfit Coil, where his influence shaped the group's later output: exercises in magical practice and music-as-psychoactive effect.

While McDowall has adhered to electronics throughout his career, he has escaped making music confined to any one genre. This is partially because of his diverse collaborations; since moving to Brooklyn 20 years ago, he has worked with esteemed acts like Hiro Kone, Puce Mary, Croatian Amor, Varg, Uniform, Rabit and Shapednoise, and toured a live AV reinterpretation of Coil's seminal drone work, Time Machines, at festivals across the world.

His performances and showcases led to his first studio album on Dais Records in 2015, Collapse, which was quickly followed by Unnatural Channel and The Third Helix. September 2020 will see his fourth release on the label, Agalma—his most expansive and imaginative work yet. Its seven tracks include contributions from Caterina Barbieri, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Kali Malone, Maralie Armstrong-Rial, Bashar Suleiman, Elvin Brandhi and MSYLMA. Together, they create a keeling sound synonymous with McDowall's traditional production method, but integrate aria, pipe organ, and choral mass to strike a fresh—and nearly devotional—chord.

Sun 18 | 22:15 at WORM Central Station

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer and sound-artist from France. She accesses concepts as diverse as Noise, contemporary classical, free jazz, and experimental traditions but adheres to none of them. Her music mixes deep melancholia with harsh noise-walls at ear-bleeding levels, and was described by the New York Times as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities”.

Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Leila challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and unorthodox amplification methods, to the extent she sometimes seems to be playing the P.A system rather than the cello. Her compositions frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations, and focus on neurological perception and our physiological relationship to sound and space.

Leila is a dedicated improviser and “rising figure in New York’s improvised music scene” (The Chicago Reader).
As per the tradition of improvised music, she has maintained a very active concert schedule sharing the stage with a wide range of artists including Marina Rosenfeld, Lee Ranaldo, Eli Keszler, Anthony Coleman, Peter Evans, Thurston Moore, Nate Wooley, SENYAWA, C. Spencer Yeh, Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, Susan Alcorn, Ingrid Laubrock, Zeena Parkins, Weasel Walter, Kim Gordon, Chris Corsano, Aki Onda and more.

Her collaborative projects are notoriously numerous and diverse, and include duos with Bill Nace (Body/Head), Japanoise artist Tamio Shiraishi (Fushitutsa), techno producer Bookworms, bassist Zach Rowden, sound-artist Julia Santoli, saxophonist Michael Foster, and a freely improvised trio with Sean Ali and Joanna Mattrey.

Her work has been showcased at notable venues such as The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, Issue Project Room, Lincoln Center, the Stone, Roulette, Pioneer Works, Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Cafe Oto (London, UK), All Ears Festival (Oslo, NO), KRAAK Festival (Brussels), Sound of Stockholm Festival, BRDCST Festival (Brussels), Control Club (Bucharest), Ausland (Berlin, DE), Ftarri (Tokyo, JP), the Heresy Series for Women in Sound (Manila, PHL), and countless basements across the U.S.A.

Leila is a 2021 Jerome Foundation Artist Fellow and an Artist in Residence at the GRM, Paris. Past residencies include Exploring the Metropolis (NYC), E.M.S, Stockholm (2019), Les Brasseries Atlas, Brussels (2018), the MacDowell Colony (2017), Issue Project Room (2016) and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (2013).

Fri 16 | 23:00 at Brutus Kathedraal

In a new performance Telcosystems will present a status update of their long-running research into spatial media. In this site-specific performance, this research manifests through sound and light as a means to explore, interrogate and modulate the architecture of Brutus.

Picture from Bini Oculus by Telcosystems, taken by Pieter Kers | Beeld.nu at Klankvorm #4 at V2_
Commissioned by Klankvorm & Spatial Media Laboratories

Telcosystems is an experimental art collective based in Rotterdam. In their audiovisual works they research the relation between the behavior of programmed numerical logic and the human perception of this behavior; they aim at an integration of human expression and programmed machine behavior. This becomes manifest in the immersive audiovisual installations they make, in films, videos, soundtracks, prints and in live performances. The software they write enables them to compose ever-evolving audiovisual worlds. Telcosystems’ installations and films focus on real-time, self-structuring, generative processes, in their live performances they focus on the interaction with these processes. Their work is the result of an ongoing search for an own language of non-referential image and sound, and is characterized by lucid and restrained aesthetics, closely related to the technology they use. In interaction with machines Telcosystems fuse the auditive and visual domains into one immersive spatial experience that explores the limits of the human sensory apparatus.

Sat 17 | 22:00 at Arminius

Especially for the Saturday AV event at Arminius church, Conflux Festival initiated the collaboration between internationally renowned sound artist Ulla and Rotterdam based visual artist Nan Wang for a one-off audiovisual performance.

Ulla (Ulla Straus) is an artist by ways from Kansas and California, but currently based in Philadelphia. She has released music on an array of labels such as Quiet Time, Experiences Ltd, West Mineral Ltd, Boomkat Editions, 3XL and her recent record Limitless Frame on Motion Ward.In 2020, Ulla released her critically acclaimed Tumbling Towards A Wall which has received praise as one of the best albums of 2020 from Resident Advisor, Pitchfork, Washington Post, and Bandcamp. Ulla has also collaborated with a number of other artists including Perila, Pontiac Streator, Exael, and Ben Bondy.

The visual part of this collaboration by Nan Wang is based on the immersive audiovisual Hue Shift performance. Hue Shift reveals the hidden beauty of light refraction of transparent materials by using DIY projectors and polariscopes. The composition of visuals and sound is based on the binary system from I Ching hexagrams, creating an ever-changing cycle of mesmerizing audiovisual experience.

Ulla is a Philadelphia-based ambient artist. She started releasing music in 2016. and within a short time produced an output that is impressive both in quantity and quality. In 2020, starting with the album Tumbling Towards A Wall, she changed her artist name from Ulla Straus to Ulla. Her latest album is foam from 2022.

Nan Wang is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, her practice focuses on material-based abstract works. She often finds beauty and philosophical meanings in unwanted objects or substances and creates works that revolve around the topic of identity, technology, and social interactions. She uses both digital and analog techniques and her works take the form of interactive projection installations, optical devices, live audiovisual performances, and experimental films.

Sat 17 | 21:00 at Arminius

#2623 is an improvised audiovisual performance by three performers in a web of unpredictable processes. Anne La Berge and Fani Konstantinidou work with microtonal textures, environmental soundscapes and the live processing of sound sources. Joost Rekveld made software that was inspired by the collective intelligence of social insects such as ants and bees. This results in images in which swarms of particles together shape the landscapes that influence their behaviour. In a set-up aiming for total improvisation, three performers shape a collective audiovisual landscape by reacting to each other's signals and traces.

Fani Konstantinidou is a composer and performer interested in the sonic imprints of cultural, cross-cultural, and social identities. Her work is characterized by urban and rural sonic environments, culturally associated musical instruments, and computer-generated sounds. She produces shifting sonic textures that circulate between drones, noise, arrhythmic melodies and atonal rhythms. With her music she explores the potential and the antitheses between analogue versus digital and aims at musical dialogs and public communication through sound. Her latest solo album 'Bacterial Dance' is available by the Manchester based record label Decaying Spheres.

Anne La Berge's passion for the extremes in both composed and improvised music has led her to the fringes of storytelling and sound art as her sources of musical inspiration. She performs as a multimedia musician and is one of the composer/performers in the Amsterdam based ensemble MAZE. She works as an improvisation and live electronics coach worldwide and is currently coaching at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague. She can be heard on the Largo, Artifact, Etcetera, Hat Art, Frog Peak, Einstein, X-OR, Unsounds, Canal Street, Rambo, esc.rec., Intackt, Data, verz, Real Music House, Relative Pitch, Carrier, Present Sounds Recordings and Splendor Amsterdam labels. Her music is published by Frog Peak Music and Alry Publications; and her Max-patch based compositions are available from her privately.

Fri 16 | 21:30 at Brutus Kathedraal

During the Friday evening of Conflux festival 2023, we will present a selection of expanded cinema performances at Brutus. One of these projects is by Acidic Male and Jelmer Noordeman, who started their collaboration at the initiative of Klankvorm. Their performance is a combination of harsh noise structures, hypnotic beats and analog video hardware.

Acidic Male has an interest in industrial sounds, hypnotic drum patterns and experimental vocals. Having her performer name as a revenge title, she searches to “other” herself into the position of a poetic perpetrator. Her sounds have been described as “elegant industrial”, yet in her selections she attempts to showcase her love for genre-wide experimentalism.

Visual artist Jelmer Noordeman develops his hypnotic visuals with analogue video experiments. His compositions flow, disintegrate and transform into abstract landscapes. With his work, he explores changing experiences of time and the possibility of signal noise and fragmentation.

Fri 16 | 21:00 at Brutus Kathedraal

SpaceTime Helix is a site-specific audiovisual performance with an optoacoustic instrument designed by Michela Pelusio in 2011 and performed since then all around the world.

SpaceTime Helix is a giant spinning standing wave in a white string, forming a large helicoid up to the ceiling. The surface is bright and transparent, with waves running over it, disappearing into the future, more and more distant in space-time.   A white string, a line, a boundary, twists into a giant spinning standing wave, a large helicoid uniting earth and sky. A vibrational dance between physical and metaphysical phenomena, inducing retinal persistence of vision and synaesthetic journeying for those caught in its vortex.

With this work, I wanted to explore helical symmetries and infinity, frequencies and geometry, elementary particles and quantum physics, sonic visions, and perceptions. SpaceTime Helix's performance is a play with elementary physics and particles. At the time when the symmetry is broken is the birth of the universe. In my work, I often play with physical and natural phenomena which stimulate the observation and perception of our inner and outer space. This work is a metaphor for the return to the root of things, a dive into singularity, duality, and multiplicity. Examine the weirdness and complexity of the macro and microcosmos and the architecture of the mind and nature.

Michela Pelusio's work seeks to realize spatial and temporal experience through immersive installations and multisensory performances questioning the possibility of an intimate connection between the participants and nature, triggering astonishment and new perceptions of natural phenomena. She creates immersive audiovisual performances with her custom made instruments, installations, and kinetic sculptures. Her research explores human perception, physical phenomena, art, and science. http://www.michelapelusio.org/SpaceTimeHelix/

In 2000 she graduated with Laude in Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art of Carrara in Italy. In 2004 she moved to The Netherlands to study and got her Master's degree from the Interfaculty of ArtScience. This unique program considers art and science as a continuum and promotes the development of new art forms and artistic languages. The ArtScience Interfaculty is embedded in both the Royal Conservatoire, The Royal Academy for Fine Arts in The Hague, and Leiden University, in The Netherlands. She graduated in 2006 with a Master in ArtScience and subsequently started teaching at the same Interfaculty for three years. In 2010 she moved to Crete in Heraklion and started a 5 years project called ResidenceSEA- Sensing your Environment through Art. She currently lives in Athens, Greece.

Michela Pelusio performs and exhibits worldwide at spaces such as NXT Museum in Amsterdam, Onassis Foundation Stegi Theater, Bozar Center of Fine Arts Brussels, Max-Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Munich, all Mutek festivals in the world, Chroniques Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques, Gmem Center National de Création Musicale in Marseille, TodaysArt festival in Den Haag, Electrones Libres at Stereolux in Nantes, Miraikan The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, Lexus Hybrid Art Exhibition in Moscow, Museum Quartier Q21 A.I.R. in Vienna among many others.

Sun 18 | 21:00 at WORM Central Station

Originally trained as a biologist, the Congo-born, France-based painter and sculptor Olivier de Sagazan has since turned to a practice of "Living Performance Art" with the ever-present idea of questioning organic life. He performs 'Transfiguration' on Sunday 18 June as part of the Conflux Festival's closing concert at WORM.

“Having studied biology, I understand to what extent we are controlled by our genes and all these urges which push us towards survival and the maintenance of our species. How do we avoid falling into the same behavioural pattern, to not keep painting the same thing? ‘Blind’ painting set something free within me. Before I was too involved in this idea of the artist who slaves away to make a pretty picture. But what counts isn’t beauty in the classical sense, but what we can call the question of a presence.”

Originally trained as a biologist, Olivier de Sagazan turned to painting and sculpting with the ever-present idea of questioning organic life. From his passion to give life to matter came the idea for him to cover his own body with clay in order to observe the resulting “object”. This experiment gave rise to the creation of a solo, « Transfiguration », in 1998, in which we see a man gradually disfiguring himself with clay into a kind of half-man, half-beast searching beneath his masks for who he is.

Fri 16 | 22:30 at Brutus Kathedraal

Initiation is an open-end ceremony initiating the audience to the cult of infinity. The gigantic human-machine-interface is driven by the officiants controlling ancestral tools. As time seems to suspend itself, the crowd emerges into an ever hypnotizing state of oscillation. In this place the swing of the pendulum acts as the ever stimulating vector to guide the audience onto higher grounds.

Encor is an art studio founded in 2016 by swiss artists Mirko Eremita, David Houncheringer , Valerio Spoletini & Manuel Oberholzer.

They use light and acoustics as messenger and symbolic value to project themselves into a world which like the properties of light itself are still mainly mysterious and out of reach of our full understanding.

Their work documents our place in time by creating kinetic sculptures, motion design, contemporary architecture, installation art, sound visualizations and its distributions. By developing and combining their own tools and technologies with social processes and high- and lo-fi materials they redefine the limits of all used mediums.

The very strong group identity is built upon each member contributing his own skill set and sensibilities when approaching each project.

Thu 15 | 22:35 at Plein 1940

This performance is free of charge. Just as the other opening performances on Thursday 15 June.

During the opening night of Conflux 2023 at Plein 1940, Mint Park will present a sound piece which is specially composed for the Line-AV installation by Macular.

The Klankvorm commissioned installation ‘Line-AV’ is an evolution of Daan Johan’s original sound piece called ‘Line’. In the piece 50 speakers and LEDs are addressed by using single mono signals. By using custom build circuitry the wave signal is split up and divided into different segments which are played by different speakers and LEDs in the system. The result is an immersive field of sound and stroboscopic lights which reveal the characteristics of the rudimentary light and sound system.

Mint Park is a Seoul-born, sound, and new media artist who works at an intersection of music, technology, science, and art. In recent years she has been researching the phenomenon of turbulence and making a weather-like ecosystem of fluid dynamics with sound, air, and lights. Her audio-visual practice focuses on the experience of the inter-weaving physical environment and virtual spaces within immersive environment created with sound, light, and spatial apparatuses. By designing her own audio-visual systems and instruments that is spatial and site-specific, she makes live performances and compositions to question and understand the constantly fluctuating existential qualities in today’s binary space and machine-quantified time. Besides her own projects, Mint has been running Unheard Records, an electronic music label focusing on experimental music and sound practices of femme, queer and P.O.C artists. She is currently based in Amsterdam.

Thu 15 | 22:20 at Plein 1940

This performance is free of charge. Just as the other opening performances on Thursday 15 June.

During the opening night of Conflux 2023 at Plein 1940, Daan Johan will present his "Sinus" composition on the Line-AV installation.

The Klankvorm commissioned installation ‘Line-AV’ is an evolution of Daan Johan’s original sound piece called ‘Line’. In the piece 50 speakers and LEDs are addressed by using single mono signals. By using custom build circuitry the wave signal is split up and divided into different segments which are played by different speakers and LEDs in the system. The result is an immersive field of sound and stroboscopic lights which reveal the characteristics of the rudimentary light and sound system.

Starting out in graphic design at St. Lucas in Boxtel, Daan Johan got interested in electronic music. After making electronic music for a while, he soon realized that the technology behind the music was of greater interest to him. Since 1997 he’s been exploring the guts of analog synthesizers, lab equipment, and hifi equipment to create unique and often unexplored forms of sound creation. First by means of circuit bending, and later, after some studying and experimenting, by modifying and creating his own mechanical and electronic equipment. Using these techniques together with software, he started creating interactive installations. At the same time he kept on drawing and made his first steps into stop motion animation.

Sun 18 | 15:30 at Cinerama 1

#59 is an abstract animated science-fiction film that takes the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits as its starting point. Our computing technology emerged during the Cold War as a byproduct of the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems. In 1961, at what was perhaps the coldest point of this period, Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos in their computers. In film #59, humans, aliens and electronic devices vacillate between these poles of a human fever dream of planetary control on the one hand, and lively machinic chaos on the other.
All images in the film were produced as analog electronic signals, in a re-enactment of antiquated ways of computing. These signals were generated using period equipment, including an analog computer from 1963, early sonar and radar oscillators, and bits from military flight simulators. This film is an attempt to liberate these technologies from their problematic origins. Narrative elements derived from Cold War era science fiction films set the tone, while references to radar and television scanning result in images that evoke very early computer graphics. These progressively unfold into organic calligraphies, in which the negative space between the patterns becomes one of the protagonists. Resemblances with manmade phenomena are gradually left behind, and the film evolves into a nonverbal meditation on material processes, human perception and the arrow of time.
What would circuits do without people ?

Joost Rekveld is an artist who is motivated by the question of what we can learn from a dialogue with machines. In his work, he explores the sensory consequences of systems of his own design, often inspired by forgotten corners in the history of science and technology. These systems combine temporary dogma’s in the form of procedures or code, with more open-ended elements such as material processes or networks of interactions that are too complex to predict. His films, installations and performances are composed documentaries of the worlds opened by such systems. In their sensuality they are an attempt to reach an intimate and embodied understanding of our technological world.

His abstract films have been shown world-wide in a wide range of festivals and venues for experimental film, animation or other kinds of moving image. He had retrospectives at the Barbican in London and the Ann Arbor film festival amongst others, and in 2017 he was filmmaker in focus at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Individual films were screened at hundreds of venues, including the ICA and the Tate Modern in London, The Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. His film “#11, Marey <-> Moire” was the first Dutch film ever to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival.

He has realized several installations and was involved in many collaborative projects involving composers, music ensembles, theatre companies, dance companies and artist’s labs. These included dance company Emio Greco | PC (Amsterdam / Marseille), music theatre ensemble De Veenfabriek (Leiden), contemporary music ensembles such as ASKO / Schonberg (Amsterdam) and ensemble Intercontemporain (Paris), Opera North (Leeds) and The Royal Opera (London) and electronic art and music laboratories such as IRCAM (Paris), STEIM (Amsterdam) and the V2 Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam).

Sat 17 | 22:30 at Arminius

Meaning 'pulse', 'heartbeat' in Greek, Παλμός (palmós) is an audiovisual performance by Pandelis Diamantides derived from the art collection with the same title. The artworks contextualise the heart as a metaphor for emotion, and the notion of vibration as a connecting element between physical, biological, and social activity.

Data collected from a single vibration, a beating heart, and the amount of movement of the crowd around a social point of interest are used to navigate the parameters of bespoke software for artistic creation. The result is an audiovisual work that explores the universal experience of cardiac activity in response to thought, emotion, and movement.

Pandelis Diamantides is an electronic music composer, new media artist, and researcher who splits his time between Cyprus, Greece, and the Netherlands. His music compositions and audiovisual performances are carefully crafted to provide audiences with a truly immersive experience. Diamantides is the author of several acclaimed series of works, including Green, False Awakenings, Go Back to Hiding in the Shadows, Quickly Photographed and Released Unharmed, and the recent Παλμός. Through a series of collaborations he has created sound, visuals, and software for contemporary dance and theater, interactive audiovisual installations, and audiovisual performances co-creating artworks such as Drowning, plplpl.pl, Mutual Wave Machine, Polaris, Anima, In Circles and Tune In. His work has been showcased in many prestigious venues, including international festivals, concert halls, clubs, theaters, galleries, and museums in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and the United States.

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New kinetic light installation Cylinders by Macular premieres at Conflux

Festival theme: Exit Human