Six striking ideas coming to life at the Forecast Festival
The two-day program on October 12 and 13 makes new approaches tangible.
Commonplace Studio
Skeptical of mobile apps as a mode to explore museums, or obtrusive digital displays that take the spotlight away from objects on view, the Canadian-Dutch design duo Jon Stam and Simon de Bakker focuses on ambient forms of public mediation in museums. Their Commonplace Studio in Amsterdam seeks to critically pair the benefits of digital media and the richness of the physical museum space. For their presentation they will showcase a series of prototypes consisting of hybrid devices aimed to engage, contextualize, and spur visitor-activated mediation.
Jon Stam (Commonplace Studio) is mentee of Tulga Beyerle.
Abhijan Toto
Kolkata-based curator Abhijan Toto presents a curatorial project that marks the culmination of the series of artistic interrogations titled The Exhaustion Project, in which he probes the relationship between labor, self-care, and the exhausted body with artists Eglė Budvytytė (LT, NL), Alisa Chunchue (TH), Jessika Khazrik (LB), Sarah Naqvi (IN), and Anna Ridler (GB). The project examines what potential for subversion becomes imaginable and accessible through communal exhaustion.
Abhijan Toto is mentee of David Elliott.
Omar A. Chowdhury
A chance encounter with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Belgian on a train led to Omar A. Chowdhury’s new body of work Augustijn, which revolves around a young man’s conversion to Islam in the post-industrial city of Aalst. The Amsterdam-based artist, who was a Muslim before he became an atheist, constructed a parafiction conflating fabulation and nonfiction to reflect the personal, religious, and ideological questions that arise from his discussions with the real-life protagonist, Stijn, about Islam.
Omar A. Chowdhury is mentee of Omer Fast.
MIIIN
Electronic musician MIIIN seeks to warn a future intelligent being of the human race’s most perilous mistakes. Her composition includes a series of tracks that will be performed live, each pertaining to an event or catastrophe that has changed the course of history. Arguing that the extinction of the human race is inevitable, the Korean artist asks whether humankind’s biases and faults could still be repeated in a posthuman era governed by Artificial Intelligence.
MIIIN is mentee of Holly Herndon.
Saverio Cantoni
What defines space? And what defines agency? In his piece Organism 518400, Berlin-based artist Saverio Cantoni creates an environment that becomes activated by everything within it—visitors as well as inanimate objects, material or immaterial. Investigating what constitutes living matter, Cantoni suggests that a wireless network that invisibly delineates space can be considered a subject with agency. Cantoni’s room at the HKW will include unpredictable variations, inserted as tools to destabilize ur perception of the ordinary and an invitation to explore the conflation of subject and object.
Saverio Cantoni is mentee of Laura Lima.
Julia E Dyck
Montréal-based musician and radio producer Julia E Dyck invites the audience to an immersive sound installation and radiophonic performance in five acts. Her multichannel radio drama Frequency Interference explores concepts of automation, posthumanism, and the relationship between identity and voice. Using live voice acting, choral and musical composition, visual projections, and audio effects, Dyck looks into the unexplored potential of publicly accessible sonic infrastructures.
Julia E Dyck is mentee of Peter Meanwell.