Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

Baltan Laboratories is a Dutch lab for media art and new technology, which supports artists that conduct experiments where art, technology and audiovisual culture meet. BALTAN’s artistic advisors are four artists who have been actively involved in the creation and development of BALTAN since its inception: Geert Mul , Marc Maurer (Maurer United Architects ), Lucas van der Velden (Telcosystems) and Gideon Kiers (Telcosystems).

Especially for Almost Cinema, Baltan Laboratories will present a diversified evening with live performances and talks. The evening features live performances of three works that, using a minimal and formal approach, create an own time-space continuum: LSP by Edwin van der Heide, SYNCHRONATOR by Bas van Koolwijk & Gert Jan Prins and PV868 by TeZ. Talks with the artists and a panel discussion will shed light on the research, the motivations and the working processes of the featured artists.

In LSP Edwin van der Heide explores the relationship between sound and three dimensional image using laser projections. He composes with the frequency and phase relationship of the sine waves, aiming at creating signals that have both a structural musical quality and a time-based visual quality. Van der Heide is the winner of the 2009 Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award. An independent jury nominated him for the strength of his unique position within the new media and the visual arts.

SYNCHRONATOR is a video and audio research project by Gert-Jan Prins and Bas van Koolwijk that combines digital and analogue means in a rigorous down to earth approach: they work with a vocabulary of electrical signals that is characteristic of machines themselves and that often cannot be recorded. PV868 is an experimental performance by TeZ in using a combination of flickering video and binaural beats to produce an audiovisual feed/stimulus which allows moving visual patterns to emerge directly in the brain.

What these artists have in common is that they are all interested in researching the core elements of their medium. They are deeply interested in the physical, physiological and psychological phenomena that make a medium possible. They create their own tools to realize their artistic ideas and perform with their self-built soft- and hardware machines.
The discussion will focus on the use custom technologies, self-built technological set-ups as musical instruments, performing and improvising with self built machines and generative systems, and also on the expanded concepts of space, sound composition and cinematic narrative in contemporary audiovisual work. What sort of a space is created in these works?

The panel will be moderated by Arie Altena, and apart from the featured artists of Almost Space, also includes contributions by BALTAN’s artistic core.