KIKK Festival 2016

KIKK festival is based in Namur (Belgium) and covers different fields included in the digital and creative culture. The festival proposes conferences, workshops, a digital market and an art exhibition. To make this even cooler the festival takes place in the beautiful Théâtre de Namur and entrance is totally free! I will try to share with you some of the cool stuff that I got the chance to see during those 2 days.

Day 1 @ KIKK Festival

• Conference: WILD

WILD is a studio based in Vienna. The conference was focusing on a few rules that you should apply in your startup to still enjoy your work and to grow up your company culture.

• Conference: All those bots are gonna steal your job — Yannick Schutz

Yannick Schutz is a tool engineer at Heroku. His mission consists in helping the Developers to maintain their team productivity focusing on the internal process. The conference was covering the experience (issues and learning) that he had while he was setting up the “work flow” between the different dev teams.

You can have a look at the slides of his conference over here.

• Conference: Games Art & TESTOSTERONE — Volker Morawe & Tilman Reiff from //////////fur////

That was the most unexpected conference of the festival. This studio creates art entertainment interfaces. They went through some of their more famous works:

1/ The PainStation — No pain no game

They created a Ping-pong Retro game which gives some electric shocks when you lose. That can seem a little bit crazy explained like that but, I think the public’s reaction was even more crazy.

A lot of people became addicted to the pain station and their work was presented in a lot of museum around the world.

People were queuing to be able to play. So that was kind of interesting to see how far users can go to win/play a game.

You can have a look at the demo video and some extra explanation over here.

2/ Moshpit — Heavy Metal Orgasmatron, 2011

The MoshPit installation detects your head banging’s movements and translates it in some metal music. Again here the public participates to the process and creation of the experience.

You can have a look at the intro video.

I will not write here about all the projects that were shown during the conference but as you have might have understood their work is really creative and play-based. If you want to know more, you can have a look at some of their others creations.

• Conference : Architecture, Light and Rhythm — 1024 Architecture

This Architecture studio is really well known for their light installations based on mappings projected on construction material. They collaborated with Vitalic and Etienne De Crecy both well-known Djs in the electro scene. They seem to be fascinated by cubic shapes and all its deviations like for example their Tesseract installation. They are also well known in Belgium because of the “Christmas tree scandale” that happened with one of their installation ordered by the Brussels City Council. Apparently some people were not ready for such innovation.

• A little walk in the Digital Market

As I told you in the introduction, a digital market also took place at the festival. That gave people who developed innovative products to present them to the public and see their reaction. I will speak about the one which caught my attention but you can find all the products of the market over here.

1/ The XOXX Composer — Demo here

Inspired by the principle of a music box, XOXX Composer generates samples, sound loops. The particularity of this project is that we find moveable magnets instead of the small pins, whereas the steel comb has been replaced by magnetic sensors, ready to trigger any kind of instrument or sound. Intuitive, this device helps the user understand the relationship between sounds thanks to a mechanical system that is simple and adjustable at the same time. Compatible with the MIDI protocol, XOXX Composer is usable through an app. The digital music box is easily handled, always in a playful and iterative way, but an accidental creation is never out of the equation. And that’s precisely when things get interesting.

2/ Spector — Demo here

I got the chance to meet Fiona O’Leary the designer of this product who is from London. The tool allows you to recognize fonts and pick the color of the element that you scan. I think that is going to improve the design practice a lot.

3/ The oval — demo here

Oval is the first ever digital handpan, a new generation percussion instrument. It works both as an electronic music instrument and, once connected to an app, as an intuitive and reactive MIDI device. With it, you can program or alter sounds, learn to play music, but also share your compositions or execute live performances. Oval is so versatile that it can be manipulated by professionals as well as kids or just curious people eager to discover new means of musical expression.

Day 2 @ KIKK Festival

• Visit the Art exhibition

Every year an Art exhibition take place at the KIKK. Here is a showcase of the creations which I like the most but again you can find all the projects of the exhibition here.

1/ Ralf Baecker — Interface 1

Interface 1 highlights the relationship that links the infinity of signals and material operations of the installation with their fairly stable and orderly outcome. It investigates the construction of digital images, and what they set in motion.
One facet sees a machine made of motors; strings and elastic bands excite the system’s behaviour with random impulses of pulling strength. The other facet sees a living web emerge, whose various elements draw a global motion.

2/ Gabey Tjon A Tham — ))))) repetition at my distance

Transforming space and sensory environment through motion, light and sound is the challenge that the artist Gabey Tjon a Tham has taken on. The starting point of her installations is nature, of which she tries to grasp the fundamental behaviours. Her work explores the relationships between humans, nature and technology. Conflicts, harmony and unpredictable processes are her subjects of choice. The artist develops unprecedented techniques and mechanisms, embedding different materials that perform at various poetic levels. Gabey Tjon a Tham’s installations demand patience and attentiveness from viewers, who will in turn be rewarded with the immersive nature of her works’ constant evolution, extending an invitation to question and investigate how the world touches us.

3/ Peter William Holden — Autogene

The one that I preferred. It’s an umbrella installation which interact with the classic song singing in the rain.

4/ Nils Völker — 12X16

12x16 is a static wall installation build with garbage plastic bags. The sculpture takes life when the bag are inflated and deflated with air. It’s like a breathing process.

• Conference: Context Is the Only Medium That Matters — Pablo Garcia

Art is what you said is it

Really interesting conference which points out the fact that only the context matters. With a series of work like Venus Cam, Pablo Garcia confuses and interrogates in which context something should be considered like art or why some of those visual images will not have place in a museum.

99 years ago, Marcel Duchamp made Fountain. He didn’t “make” the object — it was a commercially manufactured urinal — he “made” the artwork. Fountain is art because Duchamp called it art. Its influence on art is undeniable:
it made context a medium alongside paint, clay, film and the other Fine Arts. A century later, context is arguably the only medium that matters. It’s through context that content earns meaning. But content easily migrates through innumerable coincident contexts, thanks to the proscenia of web browsers and hardware bezels, sharing networks, high octane appropriation,
and digital manipulation. Something you make can be endlessly recontextualized. If all contexts are plausible destinations to any given content, what happens when you live within the context of all contexts?

• Conference: Migrating a live platform from one technology stack to another— Fabian Penso

To be honest this conference was really technical so I’m not sure if I got everything. But basically Fabian Penso shared with us the process that he put in place to switch the base code of Stuart to a more efficient technology.

When joining Stuart in 2015, the existing platform wasn’t built to scale and the code base was below acceptable quality standards. I decided to fully rewrite the platform, and switch from a language to another. The existing PHP code was rewritten to Ruby while keeping the business going, and increasing the number of deliveries per day. The platform didn’t suffer from downtimes, and the whole codebase was migrated within months.

This talk is about our experience successfully switching a live platform and outlines what we did to prevent downtimes and minimise issues.

• Conference: KYBDslöjd. Type In Beyond the Scrolling Horizon— Raquel Meyers

Raquel Meyers awesome 8bit image with old with a Commodore 64 computer and teletext technologies. You can see a video of her work here.

Raquel Meyers’ aesthetic is akin to the brutalist movement in architecture. Here, technology and the series of keystrokes tell a simple story where text is used unadorned and roughcast like concrete. Brutalism is often associated to dystopia, and yet KYBDslöjd evokes an object of nostalgia through the constant repetition of its creative process. The artist subtly hints at concepts of our times: consumption and the obsolescence of hardware and software.

• Conference: Free yourself from Web Frameworks slavery. — Fabrice Lejeune

In this conference Fabrice Lejeune raises the idea that developers should “not follow the hype” and try to free themselves from the framework’s slavery .

“Enough is Enough”

How to choose the appropriate framework for appropriate project:

1- Always check how the code looks like

2- Is it used by a lot of other developers?

3- Is still maintained ?

“Learning a language with a framework it’s like being a cook and use a micro-wave”

Browser not always involve with the framework. That’s why using the right tool at the right moment is important.

In Conclusion:

Don’t blindly follow the hype and keep it simple. The main question is : For who am I building a website, for my ego or for the final user.

Going back to the basics.To be a good developer knows your basics language, the browser and your final user.

Not a day goes by without new frameworks appear on the web. Although some are useful and well done, people forget the basics. During my conference, I will explain why you should free yourself from this slavery.

• Conference: The Happy Talk — Stefan Sagmeister

So for the last conference of the day. We try to get into the main theatre to watch Stefan Sagmeister’s conference. I said we tried because people were waiting to see him and already took seats since early in the morning. Luckily for us KIKK was live streaming the conference in another conference room. To be honest I didn’t really know who Stefan Sagmeister was and why he is so popular. So I asked to some designers who he was and they answered me “ he is Sagmeister the master”. That didn’t really answer the question but he seems pretty good.

He was talking about how the fact that people start to build everything in a functional way was ruining the beauty of the architecture.

Stefan Sagmeister needs no introduction. The internationally acclaimed designer is the founder of the New York-based agency Sagmeister Inc, which became Sagmeister & Walsh in 2012. Stefan Sagmeister does it all (environmental art, typography, package design, conferences, books, happenings) and he does it well: he has earned practically every important international design award under the sun. Clients of his include the Rolling Stones, American cable network HBO, the Guggenheim Museum, Lou Reed and Brian Eno. In his talk, Stefan Sagmeister will reveal his sure-fire method when it comes to designing a product: when thinking about an object’s design, you must start off with another object altogether. The pen example is quite telling. Shall we tell you more about it?

Ok after reading this I felt a little bit ashamed not knowing who he was but I guess we learn everyday.

Finally,

Closing party live AV shows

The afterwards a performance show was taking place in a church with two visual Djs

Jerobeam Fenderson — full album here

Lumisokea — video here