MEDIA DIGITAL ART AND CULTURE IN FLANDERS BELGIUM - BAM

or experiences outside the familiar are personalised, made familiar. Or, the
other way around, something familiar is put in a new context where it triggers
the attention of a new group of people. Appropriation is a playful activity. Via
various playful ways of working together, people investigate the structures of
media environments, products and experiences and look for opportunities to
personalise them (Zimmerman in Wardrip-Fruin & Harrigan, p. 159 ). People
turn media into a lived and experienced place, full of personal memories,
traces, security and emotions (Tuan, 1977). These appropriating activities often
take place in what Garcia would call Art and Science Labs. Here media artists
appropriate technology developed in a scientific environment or scientists
appropriate the low tech (or sometimes high tech) designs, prototypes and
technologies developed by artists for scientific reasons.
In Belgium only a few labs come close to the definition of an Art and
Science Lab. Luc Steels has been leading a quite interesting lab since 1983,
namely The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the VUB (VUB AI-Lab). This lab
develops artificial systems that research aspects of intelligence, like knowledge
systems, autonomous robots, machine learning systems, natural language
processing components, design and implementation tools. A well-known lab,
mostly driven by the artist Godfried-Willem Raes, is the Logos Foundation.
Funded by the cultural government, this lab is a well equipped laboratory for
the design and the construction of music related electronic hardware, digital
and analogue. They create new and original instruments as well as hardware
user interfaces and equipment for interactive music applications. At EDM
(Expertise Centre Digital Media) Philippe Bekaert works together with Crew, a
media art collective creating immersive theatre, and the University of Antwerp.
Together they develop new tools and environments that play with immersivity
and mixed realities.
Some artists turn science labs temporarily in Art and Science Labs.
Workspace Unlimited – Thomas Soetens and Kora Van den Bulcke – temporarily
makes its place into scientific environments, serving as a kind of mobile
laboratory. Workspace Unlimited collaborated with EDM and other labs abroad
such as the Society for Art and Technology in Montreal for the creation of
immersive Virtual Reality environments. An artist who willingly works together
with scientific institutes, is Frederik De Wilde. Together with the University
of Hasselt for instance, he developed ways to translate the communication
patterns of electric sensorial fish species in a sound installation (EOD02 &
EOD04). For his Open Structures project, which hacks the infrastructures of our
society and searches for new ways to connect, Thomas Lomée’s collaborated
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