Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

What’s new this year is that we will be holding two conference days, with themes such as Immersion – The Art of the True Illusion and The Cinematic Experience, a conference organised in association with Interface (a new academic platform set up by KASK (Royal Academy for Fine Arts, Ghent), Ghent University, Free University of Brussels & Utrecht University), Sint-Lukas Brussels – Transmedia.

These conference days are aimed at everyone who wants to know more about the theory behind technology and cinema. Speakers from Belgium and other countries will familiarize you with these subjects.

Media art is the ultimate medium when it comes to immersing the spectator in a virtual world.
The viewer can fight this newly created reality, he can endure it or get carried away by it. Fact is that images, words or music rarely leave you unmoved and sometimes linger in your mind. This phenomenon, called immersion, will be the subject of lectures by a number of artists, art historians and philosophers.

With: Oliver Grau (Professor, Humboldt University, Berlin), Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau (Artists & Professors, University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria), Lawrence Malstaf (artist), Gudrun Nys (Postdoctoral researcher, Ghent University), Marnix De Nijs (Artist, Rotterdam), Kurt Vanhoutte & Philippe Bekaert (Professor, Antwerp University / professor, University of Hasselt) en Christel Stalpaert (Professor, Ghent University).

Read Robrecht Vanderbeeken’s article about immersion and some abstracts.