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CONFLUX FESTIVAL

September 19th-22th
Conflux 2024 theme: Symbiotic Realities 

Happening across various locations in Rotterdam from September 19–22, 2024, Conflux returned for its third edition under the theme “Symbiotic Realities.” This year, Katoenhuis Rotterdam hosted the festival’s exhibition.

The exhibition featured works by Jeroen Alexander Meijer, Renzo van Steenbergen & Kristjan Pütsep, Macular, Mariska de Groot & Dieter Vandoren, Sabrina Ratté, Mint Park, Klara Ravat & Saåad, Alberta Balsam, Fronte Vacuo, Nicky Assmann & Joris Strijbos. 

Photo credit: Boudewijn Bollmann

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Perception is a vital conduit between the external world and our inner experience, shaping the very foundation of how we understand and construct reality. At the Conflux Festival, the exhibition invites artists to explore and challenge these processes by presenting works that offer alternative views on how our sensory systems mediate and sometimes distort our relationship with the world around us. Through abstract fields of light, immersive soundscapes, dynamic video patterns, and innovative interventions, the artists reimagine the boundaries of perception, reflecting on the festival's theme, "Symbiotic Realities." 

"Symbiotic Realities" calls for a deeper reflection on the interconnectedness between human consciousness, technology, and the environment, suggesting that reality is not a fixed concept but a fluid and evolving experience shaped by myriad forces. In this spirit, the exhibition serves as a laboratory for sensory experimentation, where the audience is invited to experience how perception itself can be stretched, reconfigured, or augmented, forging new connections between the organic and the digital, the natural and the constructed. 

Visitors find themselves immersed in a series of experimental light- and sound installations and artworks that challenge conventional ideas about how we perceive reality, encouraging them to engage actively with the sensory interplay that defines our existence in an increasingly interconnected world. 

Featured artists:

Jeroen Alexander Meijer

Jeroen Alexander Meijer is an interdisciplinary mindscape artist who navigates psychology, philosophy and cognitive science to create interactive experiences that help us become aware of the mysterious properties of our attention. For Conflux Festival 2024, Jeroen Alexander Meijer presents 'The Pendulum Always Swings Back to Stillness,' an installation that playfully explores the psychological effects of light overstimulation on the sensory system. This newly commissioned artwork features a large pendulum with a powerful light source, focusing on the phenomena of hypnosis and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).

jeroenalexandermeijer.com

Renzo van Steenbergen & Kristjan Pütsep

With the installation “Portaal”, Renzo van Steenbergen and Kristjan Pütsep created an evolving environment in which several standalone sculptures are controlling the vibrations of audio and image (light) in the space. Together the vibrations emitted by the machines form harmony and disharmony that will fill the entire space.

renzooh.com/portaal

Macular

Macular is an initiative of a group of artists who share a collective interest in art, science, technology, and perception. The members of the collective collaborate on the creation and production of multi-sensorial artworks that are presented at media arts festivals, galleries, and other arts institutions around the world. Line-AV 2.0 is an evolution of Daan Johan's original sound piece called 'Line'. The piece consists of 24 speakers and custom built LED fixtures. The result is an immersive field of sound and stroboscopic lights which reveal the characteristics of the rudimentary light and sound system.

Mariska de Groot & Dieter Vandoren

Intrigued by the phenomena and history of optical sound, Mariska de Groot makes, performs and composes for comprehensive analog light-to-sound instruments and installations which explore this principle in new ways.

Dieter Vandoren is an artist, performer and creative tech developer. His work draws from diverse backgrounds in music, IT and experimental architecture and revolves around the creation and play of spatial audiovisual instruments and environments with a focus on embodiment, immersion and primary sensory experiences.

In LFS2, innovative and antiquated technologies meet in a forest of light and sound emitting nodes. Sculptural light beams orchestrate the continuously transforming, pulsing and waving field emerging from the swarm of autonomous units, intersected by the shimmering tips of an underground rhizome.

Sabrina Ratté Floralia

Sabrina Ratté is a Canadian artist based in Montreal. Using tools, such as 3D scans, analog video synthesizers, and 3D animation, her formal approach serves as the foundation for the creation of ecosystems that manifest across various platforms, from interactive installations to series of videos, digital prints, sculptures, or virtual Reality. For Conflux Festival, Sabrina Ratté will be exhibiting an adapted version of her work Floralia for Klankvorm’s open content installation SVNSCRNS.

sabrinaratte.com

Nicky Assmann &  Joris Strijbos

Nicky Assmann has a background in Film and ArtScience, and combines artistic, scientific, and cinematographic elements in experiments with natural phenomena and chemical processes such as turbulence and fluid dynamics.

Joris Strijbos is a Rotterdam-based artist whose work focuses on the synaesthetic relation and interaction between moving image and sound.
The collaborative works of Assmann and Strijbos are the result of an empirical and on-going research in the fields of kinetic art, light and perception. In their installations the artists focus on creating new media for audiovisual compositions, which are mostly based on internal interaction between different components like motion, light and mechanics. The results can be seen as a form of visual music, an abstract intervention that evolves over time and in space, which have a direct influence on the senses.

nickyassmann.net

jorisstrijbos.nl

Mint Park

Mint Park is a Seoul-born sound and new media artist who works at the intersection of music, technology, science, and art. Her audiovisual practice focuses on bringing speculative and virtual spaces into a physical environment through sound, light, and apparatuses.

Mint Park will be working on a Composition for the Line AV 2.0 installation by Macular. This open content installation and the compositions made for this installation will be exhibited in Katoenhuis. Her composition can be experienced from Friday 20 to Sunday 22 September.

mintpark.net

Klara Ravat & Saåad

Klara Ravat is an olfactory artist an experimental filmmaker based in Berlin. By opposing the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Ravat absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice.

After touring across Europe with I Pilot Dæmon, Romain Barbot founded Saåad in 2009, a project-laboratory whose music revolves around the notion of reminiscence: music of memories or memories of music, soundscapes that play with a hypnagogic state conducive to introspection.

During the exhibition at Katoenhuis, Conflux is showing a Klankvorm commissioned piece by Saåad & Klara Ravat who were among the first new audiovisual collaborations which Klankvorm initiated back in 2017. For this film, which is presented as a video-installation at Katoenhuis, the original analogue 16mm projections of German/Catalan filmmaker Klara Ravat were digitized and edited to the complex and immersive soundtrack of French musician Romain Barbot better known as Saåad.

klararavat.com

saaad.bandcamp.com

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Alberta Balsam

Alberta Balsam's love for science-fiction permeates throughout her productions. A strictly hardware-based affair, her live performances flex immeasurable skill as a tech-savvy producer able to construct danceable, yet simultaneously lush and expansive interludes. The results are rooted in early experiments with machine-made music but also a journey across time and space, tuning into the frequencies of cybernetic entities arriving from the future. As a DJ, Alberta's sets incorporate a signature blend of leftfield techno, electro, IDM, broken beats and breaks, pivoting between off-the-wall experimentation and bold, slicing beats.

For the Conflux Festival exhibition at Katoenhuis, Alberta Balsam made a composition for Macular's Line-AV 2.0 installation.

albertabalsam.com

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Fronte Vacuo

Fronte Vacuo is a transdisciplinary performance group founded by artists Marco Donnarumma, Margherita Pevere and Andrea Familari. It combines body art, dancetheater, audiovisual performance and emerging technology to create pieces that are “rarely seen in conventional theaters” (Neu Wiener Theaterkritik).

In MμRMUR: The Deer, the otherworldly characters from the Humane Methods saga hit the streets engaging the people around them to reflect on the morphing of local ecosystems. This 24 km long walking performance, is  a quest for posthuman empathy, a rite to attune with kin species.

During Conflux Festival Fronte Vacuo will present MμRMUR: The Deer which can be seen both within the exhibition, which opens on Friday the 20th of September, and in the performance programme on Saturday the 21st of September.

frontevacuo.com

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Concrete Culture

Concrete Culture uses the generative power of art, culture, and technology within (historic) real estate and area developments to make a social impact, drive economic growth, strengthen communities, and combat gentrification. Concrete Culture’s flagship initiatives include Koelhuis Eindhoven (former Campina Vrieshuis) and Katoenhuis Rotterdam. Both initiatives focus on Immersive Experiences (IX), offering communal workspaces, studios, and presentation spaces that actively support creative and technical talent. By bringing diverse artists, technologists, and makers under one roof, Concrete Culture initiatives create a space for research, experimentation, and presentation of immersive experiences and contribute to the growth of the immersive technology sector in the Netherlands.

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