This is the public start page of my personal librarinth: an online scrapbook that I used in the course of the research project 'Dialogues with Machines' that ran from February 2017 to October 2024. I undertook this project as a researcher in the Media Arts Studio of the KASK Conservatorium / University College Ghent, and it resulted in a doctorate in the arts as part of the S:PAM, Studies in Performing Arts and Media research group at the University of Ghent. My promotors were Christel Stalpaert and Edwin Carels.

The most tangible public results of this project are a written thesis and my film #59. The public defense of the PhD took place on the 28th of October 2024, and the committee consisted of Charo Calvo, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, Jerry Galle and Jean Paul van Bendegem, with Maximiliaan Martens as chair and Pieter-Jan Maes as the secretary.

The abstract of the thesis runs as follows:

“This dissertation constitutes the written part of the artistic research project Dialogues With Machines. In Joost Rekveld's practice as a media-artist, the notion of a Dialogue with Machines refers to a back-and-forth between devising and observing. Implicit in this back-and-forth process is a relative absence of hierarchy between verbal thinking and making, and between the maker and the made.
The essays collected in this dissertation are attempts to uncover possible sources of the agency of machines. In the long essay Liberate the Machines !, a theoretical and historical context is given to the making of Rekveld's film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59, a feature-length abstract animated science fiction film that looks at the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits during the Cold War. It also narrates Rekveld's personal experience of a dialogue with machines in the process of producing this film and in devising the analogue computing tools that were used for making it. These two strands come together in a view on the interaction between humans and computing machines and the role of media-archaeology in investigating this relation, interpreted as an example of the mutual construction of humans and their technology. Under the title Seven Devices, Rekveld wrote seven media-archaeological essays. Topics are discussed from the history of electronic analogue computing, animated automata, cybernetics and self-organisation, each constituting a different approach to reflect on the agency of machines.”

The full text of the thesis can be found here. The first essay, Liberate the Machines !, is in the process of being published as a book, with generous visual documentation and historical material. Please let me know if you would like to be notified when this book becomes available.

Some more information on the film Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59 can be found here and in the first essay in the thesis that will soon become the book mentioned above.

You can subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on social media to be notified of upcoming screenings, or you can contact me if you are interested in screening it.

• presentation at Alchemy Filmmaker symposium in Hawick, Scottish Borders (March 2017).
• article about analog computing in Arts.Codes online magazine (May 2017).
• presentation at the symposium “Arts Filmiques et Expérimentations Optiques Contemporaines” at the ENS Louis-Lumière in Paris (October 2017).
• premiere of #57 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 2018), and a blogpost about #57.
• artist's talk at the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (September 2018).
• keynote and artist's presentation at the VectorHack Festival in Zagreb and Ljubljana (October 2018).
• Film programme curated for the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam (November 2018).
• artist's talk at the 'Golf' festival, Haarlem (December 2018).
• artist's talk as part of the 'Memoires Vives' exhibition at the Zebrastraat, Ghent (January 2019).
• artist's talk at the Digital Media Program of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (January 2019).
• exhibition of installation #71.1 during the Sonic Acts festival at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (February 2019).
• artist's talk at Creative Coding Utrecht (May 2019).
• exhibition of (partially reworked) installation #71.1 at iMal in Brussels. (November 2019)
• seminar at the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). (February 2020)
• artist's talk at the Design Art Technology department of ArtEZ, Arnhem (May 2021)
• artist's talk at the Institut für Musik und Medien, Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf (July 2021)
• artist's talk at Media Arts Technology, University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) (October 2021)
• Lasertalk Brussels at iMal, Brussels (December 2021)
• artist's talk at the Design Art Technology department of ArtEZ, Arnhem (April 2022)
• artist's talk at the Collegium Helveticum, Institute for Advanced Studies, Zurich (May 2022)
• exhibition of video and in-progress analog computer plots at the exhibition “Wave: Moonshot Part Three”, Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (July-September 2022)
• artist's talk at the Vectorhack Festival in Zagreb (October 2022)
• try-out screenings of my film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Vectorhack Festival in Zagreb and Šibenik (October 2022)
• try-out screening of my film “Ueda's Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59” (2023, 14 minutes, 2K DCP) at the “Eureka!” event in the Beatrixpark, Amsterdam (October 2022)
• artist's talk at the Dutch Film Academy in Amsterdam (November 2022)
• artist's talk at the Digital Media Program of the Hochschule für Künste Bremen (November 2022).
• screening/performance of “Ueda's Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59” (2023, 14 minutes, 2K DCP) during the opening night of the Inscience Science Film Festival, Nijmegen (March 2023)
• artist's talk during the “Shifting Cosmologies: More Than Human XR” lunch series, V2 Lab, Rotterdam (May 2023)
• try-out screening of my film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Anifilm animation film festival in Liberec, Czechia (May 2023)
• artist's talk “Dialogue with the Tool”, Tetem, Enschede (May 2023)
• premiere of my film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (May 2023). A review by Dana Linssen (in Dutch) can be found here.
• artist's talk “Liberate the Machines !”, live visuals performance and screening of film “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” at Conflux festival, Rotterdam (June 2023)
• screening/performance of “Ueda's Shattered Egg, Prologue to #59” (2023, 14 minutes, 2K DCP) during the “Obviously Unthinkable #6, the Art of Cold War Science” event at iii in The Hague (September 2023)
• presentation “Tending to Machines” during the “Alien Organicisms” panel at the 2023 conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, in Tempe, Arizona (October 2023)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Light Matter Film Festival in Alfred, New York (November 2023) A review by Michael Sicinski can be found here or here and a shorter review can be found here.
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the International Science Film Festival Inscience in Nijmegen (march 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) as part of the feature film competition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Michigan (march 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) as part of the feature film competition of the Kaboom Animation Film Festival in Utrecht/Amsterdam (april 2024)
• talk “A Stroll through Technological Worlds” in the “Sensorial Otherness” panel, part of the “Shifting Cosmologies: More Than Human XR” track of the Politics of the Machines conference in Aachen, Germany (april 2024)
• talk “Exaptation and the Analogue of Fabric” in the “Evolutionary Pathways” panel, part of the “Holistic life of the machine – The machinic beyond – What is it like to be a machine ?” track of the Politics of the Machines conference in Aachen, Germany (april 2024)
• talk “Lightning Empiricism: Analog Computing and Homology” at the “Future Tense Symposium 3.0” at the UCI Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, California (april 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at Anthology Film Archives in New York, as part of the Prismatic Ground Festival (in an amazing pairing with the Indian abstract film “SYZYGY” by Akbar Padamsee from 1969) (may 2024)
• participation in the panel “Computing Using Physics; What Can AI learn from Analog Computing ?”, that I co-organized at the CPDP.AI conference in Brussels (may 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) in Cinema OffOFF in Ghent, Belgium (may 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Slovenian Cinematheque in Ljubljana, as part of the Adela Festival. Before the screening there was a lecture by Wolfgang Ernst on analog computing, afterwards we had a panel discussion (june 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) in Cinematek, Brussels, Belgium (june 2024)
• talk “Lightning Empiricism: Thinking Through Devices” at the Hugarflug artistic research conference at the Icelandic University for the Arts in Reykjavik (september 2024)
• talk “A Palimpsest on the Electronic Analog Art” at the Vasulkas Reloaded Symposium at the Vašulka Kitchen in Brno (october 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at the Vašulka Kitchen in Brno, as part of the Vasulkas Reloaded Symposium (october 2024)
• talk “Dialogues with Machines” at the Center for Audiovisual Studies at the FAMU, Prague (october 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at MIMIK in Deventer, as part of the Instruments Make Play festival organized by De Perifeer (october 2024)
• public PhD defense “Dialogues with Machines” at KASK in Ghent (october 2024)
• screening of “Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena; #59” (2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP) at KASKcinema, Ghent (october 2024)

The idea and form of this librarinth are inspired by FoAms libarynth. They describe it as: “a hybrid between a library and a labyrinth, a maze of pages in various stages of completion. It is a deeply intertwingled collection of documents, notes and randomness”.

Even after completing this project, I am still navigating the question of how to reconcile my desire for openness and sharing with the need for a walled garden where ideas are allowed to be fragile. Over time the issue has also arisen that the pages on this site contain the material for several potential articles or other publications, so sharing before writing and publishing those has become a less obvious thing to do. So far, the path of least effort and resistance has been to just keep everything private, but not without regrets. The idea is that parts of this garden will open up and be listed below, other things will find their way to my blog. Eventually, all that is worthwhile in here will become public.
If you are one of those with guest access, your password will open this door for you.
You can always contact me here.