Beyond Binary

Koenraad Jonckheere 

When One and three chairs become One and more chairs. A note on materiality and immateriality in art

Consider Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It echoes a framework dating back fifteen centuries. This seminal work of conceptual art gives visual form to ideas already articulated in medieval thought and deeply embedded in the Christian understanding of images since late antiquity. But what precisely does it reveal and what can it tell us about today’s (art)world?

Martina Menegon

Becoming Chimeric. Glitching Toward Radical Hybrid Identities and Unruly Collective Becoming.

Martina Menegon (University of Applied Arts, Vienna) presents her current PhD research and workshop practice Becoming Chimeric. Rooted in cyber-queer-glitch-feminist perspectives, the practice explores hybrid selfhoods and glitched transformations through digital self-portraiture, myth-making, and algorithmic processes. It conjures unstable, chimeric avatars that unsettle normative ideas of identity and embodiment. As both artistic practice and research methodology, Becoming Chimeric opens collective spaces for experimenting with hybrid bodies, more-than-human kinships, and unruly futures of becoming.

Marcel Van Brakel (Polymorf) 

The Body as Medium: Multisensory Futures in Art and Technology

In his lecture, Marcel van Brakel (Polymorf) will discuss the collective’s pioneering work at the intersection of art, design, and technology. Polymorf creates multisensory and performative experiences that combine VR, AR, AI and immersive storytelling, often engaging not just vision but also touch, smell and taste. Their projects challenge conventional notions of immersion and embodiment, positioning the body itself as both medium and site of exploration. In doing so, Polymorf reimagines how technology can shape new forms of perception, intimacy, and connection with our environment and each other.

Steven Humblet

The Original Copy

In his book ‘Beyond Digital’, the architectural historian Mario Carpo briefly refers to the age-old distinction between original and copy, claiming that in today’s AI driven culture the distinction is losing its relevance. More precisely, he continues, we are again entering an age where ‘the copy’ is leading. At the same time, however, it seems we’re lacking the necessary vocabulary to understand this cultural shift. In my talk I would like to ‘return’ to two specific moments in art history where processes of automatisation (or copying) were met with a similar kind of resistance.

David Young

The Illusion of Control

Our digital era promised us control—over processes, outcomes, and understanding itself—but as we transition toward machine learning's organic neural networks and quantum computing's simultaneous states, are we losing that control—or was it always an illusion? While we think we can control AI systems, what if their logic fundamentally differs from our own? Quantum computing pushes even further beyond binary thinking, embracing simultaneity in ways that suggest radically different futures. Through examining these transitions, I'll show how I navigate technological uncertainty and why non-technical voices—including artists—are essential for shaping more diverse technological futures.

Victorine Van Alphen 

The Oracle and Other Posthuman Stories

In her lecture, Victorine van Alphen explores the tension between our sensual and rational modes of existence in a technologized society. Known for works such as IVF-X: Posthuman Parenting in Hybrid Reality and The Oracle: Ritual for the Future, she creates futuristic microsocieties and performances that question binaries such as natural/artificial, material/immaterial and male/female. Blending philosophy, media art, and ritual, her practice evokes intimate, often unsettling encounters that invite reflection on how technology reshapes bodies, identities, and relationships.

Ilona Puskás

Ilona Puskás represents the New European Bauhaus, a creative and interdisciplinary initiative of the European Commission that connects the European Green Deal to our daily lives through art, design, sustainability, and innovation. With a background in fostering collaboration between cultural institutions, researchers, and policy-makers, she brings insights into how transdisciplinary partnerships can shape the future of art, technology, and society. At Beyond Binary, Puskás will highlight how NEB stimulates new ecosystems and collaborative consortia, inspiring ways for artists and institutions to rethink their role within Europe’s technological and ecological transition.

Vanessa Hannesschläger

Vanessa Hannesschläger is head of European Collaboration at Ars Electronica, steering the company’s engagement in numerous pan-European partnerships with well over 100 partner institutions in the context of Ars Electronica Platform Europe. She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Vienna, and teaches courses on digital humanities, research policy frameworks, and digital legal literacy at universities across Europe. At Beyond Binary, Hannesschläger will share insights into how Ars Electronica builds networks and consortia across Europe, offering inspiration for institutions seeking to strengthen the tech/science/art ecosystem and foster sustainable partnerships.

CREW

CREW is a Brussels-based collective led by Eric Joris and Isjtar Vandebroeck that has pioneered immersive performance and research at the crossroads of art, science and technology. Collaborating with scientists, engineers and academic partners, CREW explores how technological innovation reshapes perception, embodiment and storytelling. Their groundbreaking projects—often combining VR, AR, motion capture, and live performance—have positioned them internationally as key players in the art–science field. At Beyond Binary, CREW will share their long-standing experience with interdisciplinary and European collaborations, offering insights into how artists and researchers can build sustainable partnerships.

Workshop: The Blind – Immersion, Disorientation and Digital Disappearance

This workshop takes The Blind (1890) by Maurice Maeterlinck as a point of departure to explore the aesthetic, philosophical, and political dimensions of immersion in the digital age. In Maeterlinck’s play, twelve blind characters are stranded in a forest, abandoned by their guide who has died. Their condition of waiting—uncertain, disoriented, without direction—serves as a metaphor for our contemporary experience of technological overwhelm and collective paralysis.

Over the course of three hours, participants are invited into a series of reading sessions, exercises and reflections that move between performance, theory, and digital experiment. This workshop begins with a lecture-performance inspired by The Blind, introducing themes of waiting, disorientation, and the collapse of orientation as metaphors for our contemporary condition in a digital age where the real and the virtual overlap. From there, the workshop introduces the concept of the portal as an artistic and philosophical threshold between realities: a fragile moment of transition where the real and the virtual overlap. Participants experiment with these portals—physical, performative, or digital—before collectively enacting states of waiting and suspension reminiscent of The Blind.

The notion of liminal blindness—seeing too much without orientation—becomes a lens to reflect on broader questions of technology, ecology, and politics. How do we act when knowledge is abundant but direction unstable? How can collective movement emerge out of uncertainty?

Rather than offering solutions, the workshop cultivates a shared space of exploration and reflection. By oscillating between experience and analysis, presence and absence, reality and simulation, participants are encouraged to reimagine blindness not as a lack, but as a condition for new forms of attention, solidarity and action.

Kristof Timmerman

Kristof Timmerman is an artist-researcher whose work explores the intersections of performance, technology, and hybrid environments. With his collective studio.POC, he creates performances and installations that place the relationship between body and technology at the centre, often using virtual reality, motion capture, sensors, and projection mapping, anchored by tangible installations that function as portals into the digital.

Alongside his artistic career, Timmerman plays a leading role in artistic research and education. He is chair of the Research Council of the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, chair of Maxlab (a research group on digital arts), and co-initiator of the Immersive Lab at AP University College. He lectures in Immersive Storytelling and is frequently invited as a guest lecturer, coach, and jury member.

His doctoral research, Sense of Wonder. Artistic Portals between the Real and the Virtual, investigates how transitions between physical and virtual spaces can intensify immersion and transform subjectivity. Through his dual role as artist and researcher, he aims to advance the integration of digital technology in performance and installation art.