Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate

Dewi Mac Donald

Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. A warning once printed on punch cards; a stiff paper sheet, punched with small holes that a machine could read as instructions. Damage the card, and the machine could no longer make sense of it. To the machine, a person was only numbers, held in place by holes and their absence.

This kinetic work moves continuous loops of punch cards through the space on an endless spiral. The cards are punched in the format used by knitting machines, the same hole-based logic once used to guide thread through a loom, later adapted by IBM to make machines calculate.

One loop is legible to a machine, the other to humans. What remains of a message once it has passed through a machine that doesn't understand a single word of it?

Digital Nature — Iteration 1

Lucas Dekker

In a world where we are increasingly living digitally, what still keeps us grounded?

Digital Nature explores the often unconscious effect that nature has in our daily lives, and what happens when nature is mediated digitally. It examines our near automatic acceptance of digital representations of nature as either replacements for or additions to the natural world. The idea stems from a dystopian thought: what if there was no nature left? What would we want to preserve through digitization? In this sense, Digital Nature touches upon the concept of the aura (Walter Benjamin). By scanning, reproducing, and transforming nature into something resembling an art object, the question shifts towards what is lost through reproduction and what emerges from it.

Through this artistic research, using 3D scanning and other recording techniques, I iteratively create a VR experience in collaboration with my audience.

Digital Nature is a project in which, together, we can experience through virtual reality the ways in which nature affects us.

Masque

Siré Mane

In my new work "Masque," the viewer is placed within a field of tension between honesty, concealment, and adaptation. The installation consists of two large masks behind which personal and vulnerable stories are hidden. Behind the masks, you hear two individuals speaking in their own languages Wolof and Gussiilay about topics they find difficult to discuss in their daily lives. The emotions behind these masks are clearly audible, yet the words remain largely unclear to most visitors. The masks draw the viewer in, but remain impenetrable. They do not reveal their inner world. In this way, a sense of distance and misunderstanding emerges, connected to differences in language, identity, and culture.

Styx

Tijn Maria

Where does the body end, and where does the landscape begin?

Styx explores the relationship between cremation, water, and ritual. The work is inspired by contemporary funeral practices, in which an increasing number of people choose to have their ashes scattered at sea. In this context, water becomes not only a final destination but also a symbol of transformation, continuity, and our connection to the natural world. At the same time, the work draws on the Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman who carried the dead across the River Styx into the afterlife. Both the myth and the contemporary practice of scattering ashes at sea position water as a space of transition. Styx reflects on the ways in which people may remain connected to the world after death. The work traces the passage from body to ash, and from ash to nature.