Speakers

Teacher, Researchers and Head of the Training Committee Programme at KASK & Conservatorium/HoGent

As a teacher and researcher, Carels is affiliated with the School of Arts KASK/HoGent, where he holds a PhD in the arts, and finished the post-doctoral project ‘Counter-archives.’ He is also the coordinator of the audiovisual department there and a longstanding member of the VAF (Flemish Fund for Audiovisual Art). Carels publishes essays on media-archaeology, visual arts, film, and animation. For more than two decades, he was also senior film programmer for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. As a curator, he has worked together with, among others, Luc Tuymans, Chris Marker, The Quay Brothers, Zoe Beloff, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kubelka, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Jean-Luc Godard.

GUM & Botanical Garden (Ghent University Museum)

Marjan Doom (UGent, GUM) is director of Ghent University Museum & Botanical Garden. She is Master in Veterinary Medicine and holds a PhD in anatomy. As director of the museum, she sets out its mission and vision, in which the crossovers between science and art play a prominent role. GUM aims to evoke reflection on critical thinking and the process of knowledge creation through scientific and artistic research, rather than to clarify research output.

​LUCA School of Arts

Leen Engelen holds a PhD in Social Sciences from KU Leuven and conducts research in the field of film and media history and the history of visual culture. She published on a diversity of topics – history of cinema in Belgium, media and film during the First World War, cultures of spectacle, panorama’s and ephemera such as film posters and postcards – in several academic books and journals. She has a special interest in archives, cultural heritage and digital access. Among other projects, she collaborated with the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp and with the Heritage Department of the city of Leuven. In 2019, Leen was awarded the Annual Prize for Science Communication by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB).

Senior postdoc at University of Antwerp

Evelien Jonckheere is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow (FWO) of the research project “Physiognomic culture in popular performance: on the use of stereo-‘types’ in fin-de-siècle Brussels” at the University of Antwerp (2021-2024). She is an art historian with an expertise in visual culture, performance history and media archaeology. Her research resulted in several exhibitions, artistic projects and publications on spectatorship, café culture and music hall history, (spiritual) magic lantern performances, and human zoos.

​Utrecht University

Frank Kessler is professor of Media History at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He is a co-president of DOMITOR, the international association for research on early cinema and one of the founders of KINtop. Jahrbuch zur Erforschung des frühen Films. His research interests are focused on the emergence of cinema as a mass medium and cultural form. In his latest research projects, he has worked on the role of the optical lantern as a medium for knowledge transmission in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

​Royal Conservatoire Antwerp

Soprano Pauline Lebbe explored Belgian art song ever since her master thesis, which presented interfaces between Belgian symbolism and music from 1880 to 1945. She works as a researcher and coordinates the Labo XIX&XX research group at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp, immersing her in the endless world of the mélodie, the rich mosaic of romanticism, modernism, impressionism, expressionism, futurism and avant-garde, and the socio-cultural context in which art song flourished. Her recent research activities focused on songs by women composers, magic lantern show music and orientalist art song. Additionally, her performing practice includes oratorio, music theatre, opera and cantorship.

University of Antwerp

Bart G. Moens is postdoctoral researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles and member of the SciFair team at the University of Antwerp, working on the "Panorama, Diorama and Cosmorama: Performing History and Geography" subproject. He specialises in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century visual culture with a particular interest in material and intermedial aspects of arts and media. In 2023, he completed his PhD "Emotions on Demand: Melodramatic Structures of Feeling in Optical Lantern Culture (1890s-1920s)" in the framework of the EOS funded B-magic project.

​Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

Kristof Timmerman is an artist and researcher working in the field of live, interactive digital environments and virtual reality. He has worked for several theatre companies, including the experimental CREW. In 2006, he founded the digital artist collective studio.POC with which he has since been creating theatre performances and installations. He chairs Maxlab, the research group on the interaction between art and digital technology at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He is currently working on his doctoral research "Sense of Wonder. Artistic portals between the real and the virtual" on the context of immersive experiences.

​University of Copenhagen​

Melissa Van Drie is a cultural historian and performance artist interested in sensory and somatic practices of knowledge production. She works on how sound, hearing and listening are important aspects of worldmaking for both humans and nonhumans. Her PhD (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) explored the intersections of science and theatre in the elaboration of nineteenth-century sound media. Subsequent postdocs and grants in Performance Studies and Music, STS, Media Archeology, and Environmental Humanities permitted further research on the roles and regimes of the senses in histories of art, health, food, and multispecies ecologies (Cambridge, U. Copenhagen, EHESS, CNRS, U. Maastricht).

​University of Antwerp

Kurt Vanhoutte is professor and chair of theatre and film studies at the University of Antwerp. His research focuses on the interplay of performance and science. Currently, he is spokesperson-coordinator of B-magic, an EOS (Excellence of Science) programme enabling an interdisciplinary consortium to study the magic lantern and its impact as a visual mass medium between instruction and entertainment. He is also Principal Investigator in Historical Bias, a project researching ideological bias through intersectional analysis of past data (c.1800-c.1940). Vanhoutte has published many book chapters and articles in journals including Early Popular Visual Culture, Contemporary Theatre Review and Foundations of Science.

​University of Antwerp

Benjamin Verhoeven is a theatre maker, director and teacher. He worked as a theatre educator for a number of companies, including Opera Ballet Vlaanderen and hetpaleis(Flanders’ largest youth theatre). Today, he is a teaching assistant in Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Antwerp. Verhoeven also has his own theatre collective, FLATLAND, with which he makes audiophile theatre. Within the network group Game|Play (an initiative of CiASp and ULB), he is further exploring research on video games.

​Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA), University of Antwerp

Nele Wynants is assistant professor at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA), University of Antwerp. As an art and theatre scholar, she focuses on the interactions between performance, media and science and their overlapping histories. She coordinates the EU-funded project ‘Science at the Fair: Performing Knowledge and Technology in Western Europe, 1850-1914’. She is a member of the Young Academy of Belgium (Flanders) and the Project Management Board of B-magic, a large-scale research project on the magic lantern in Belgian history. As editor-in-chief of FORUM+ for research and arts, she is also involved in contemporary practice-based research and research in the arts.