Percussa provides digital artists with progressive and unconventional music interfaces that are beautifully designed, encouraging intuitive interaction. As founder Bert Schiettecatte says; “Percussa is all about opening doors to new ways of sound design.” Percussa is constantly on the look out for off-the-beaten-path artists that take digital music to the next step.
The audiocubes are not only inventive, they're also Belgian!
]]> An short explanation by the founder (in Dutch)De AudioCubes zijn de eerste tangible interface in de wereld die zonder infrastructuur werkt. Dat is een hele boterham --
Even verklaren :
Tangible interface : een computer bediening waarbij men objecten ten opzichte van mekaar beweegt om iets duidelijk te maken, in plaats van 1 object waarvan de plaats wordt bepaald, zoals de muis bijvoorbeeld. zo kan men bijvoorbeeld aan een computer duidelijk maken dat je een foto wilt op een website zetten door de foto in het echt in de buurt van een ander object te bewegen.
Zonder infrastructuur : er zijn nogal wat tangible interfaces waarbij men projectoren en camera's gebruikt om te detecteren waar de objecten zich op de tafel bevinden. het probleem daarmee is dat het een erg ingewikkelde installatie is die men moet opstellen, die bestaat uit een nogal dure projector en camera's en bijhorende computer die alle bewerkingen moet doen. De tangible interfaces die dus deze apparatuur nodig hebben om te kunnen werken gebruiken een infrastructuur. De audioCubes hebben geen infrastructuur nodig en detecteren gewoon mekaar, zodat je ze snel overal kan meenemen en gebruiken zonder al te veel instellen en prutsen met tafels en projectoren, etc.
De bedoeling van de AudioCubes is dus het maken van electronische muziek en geluid door het bewegen van objecten ten opzichte van mekaar. Dat kan verschillende doeleinden hebben :
- live optreden met een computer en DJ software zoals dat nu gebeurt, maar nu eindelijk een visueel aantrekkelijke show kunnen bieden aan de mensen die komen kijken (zoals het geval bij de show Frame by Frame van Maurice Engelen en anderen, die de voorbije maanden overal vertoond werd en waarin de audioCubes een centrale rol spelen in de act rond Breakfast in Vegas)
- exploratief muziek en geluid maken en bewerken : voor mensen die op zoek zijn naar nieuwe muzikale ideeen en niet met knoppen en druktoetsen van muziekapparatuur die op een dictatoriale manier werkt meestal
- in muziek of geluidstherapie kinderen of andere mensen laten spelen met geluid zonder dat ze met een computer moeten geconfronteerd worden, ... waarbij licht en kleur een extra positieve bijwerking kan hebben, etc
Het interessante aan de cubes is dat je kan muzikale combinaties en remixes maken spelenderwijs, en dat je omdat je niet met de computer bezig bent, met resultaten eindigt die je misschien nooit had gevonden op andere manieren.
De cubes worden per 2 of per 4 verkocht en worden met geluiden, USB kabel, software, handleidingen geleverd. Je kan ze op je computer aansluiten en een gedrag en kleur toewijzen, nadien kan je ze losmaken en ermee spelen (eentje laat je wel aan de PC hangen). Het is Mac en PC compatibel.
As said the audiocubes are used in Breakfast for Vegas (Maurice Van Engelen)
(photo ©Jan Wuytack) ]]>
Made In Gent is a creative event where selectedcreatives will bring you into their world of fashion, art, multimedia, images, performances, interior, exterior, design, music, dj's and so on... Every artist will exhibit their work in a shipping container spreaded around the Sint-Pieters square. 
The exhibition spaces of Galerie Fortlaan 17 are located opposite the Citadelpark in Ghent, near the S.M.A.K. - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst. The gallery is famous as a centre for international contemporary art. Each year Galerie Fortlaan 17 organizes four or five exhibitions with works of artists which have either never or only occasionally been on display in Belgium, but which are considered highly important on the international contemporary art scene. The open and diverse program of the gallery attempts to summarize all features of the contemporary art spectrum. As an intermediary between the artist and the public it is the gallery's responsibility to confront and establish a dialogue. Every exhibition is both internationally representative and includes Belgian talent.
OPEN: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: 14h – 18h
and Saturday: 12h – 18h
Galerie Fortlaan 17
Fortlaan 17
B-9000 Ghent
Belgium
Phone: +32 (0)9 2220033
Fax: +32 (0)9 2216327
mailto:galerie@fortlaan17.com
http://www.fortlaan17.com
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Daniël Ost, born in Sint-Niklaas, Belgium in 1955, has been one of the world’s most highly regarded ‘florists’ since the 1980s.
The extraordinary creativity of his works justifies his being described as a floral artist. His arrangements consist of flowers, but also leaves, branches and fruit, which interact with the environment, whether a mist-covered pond, a contemporary object or a historic house. Daniël Ost crosses the world from west to east, taking care to capture permanently on film these unique moments characterizing each of his
Even though Daniël Ost’s gardens are to date seen as all too rare interludes in his work, they have already captured people’s imagination. There have been many public ations featuring the best-known of these gardens, which is located in Belgium.
Faced with the ephemeral in his ‘plant expressions’, Daniël Ost establishes through gardens a new relationship with plants and nature, that of a living and evolutionary work. Conceived as a dialogue between architecture and the organic, his gardens do not seek to be an additional offshoot of the buildings or a structuring of the outside area. Right from the design stage, they reflect his intentions: to fit the building and its exterior into their environment by working on the plant species in the immediate vicinity, in the form of plant mannerism.]]>
Dirk Braeckman is born in 1958 in Eeklo, Belgium. He lives and works in Ghent.
Braeckman starts his artistic career as a photographer of portraits and self-portraits. Later, he chooses subjects of abandoned spaces and deserted rooms, body parts, surfaces of desks, walls, beds, etc for his black-and-white photos. Fragments are enlarged and take up the dimension of an all-embracing still life. With vague contours, the enlarged detail aims at catching a pure and essential, universal and anonymous image. By direct attention for the detail, the miniscule is elevated to auratic dimensions of the icon. The pictures are diaphanous yet suggestive: one recognises a personal narrative behind the large, unframed, black and white, but mainly grey photos. Braeckman had a solo exhibition “z.Z(t)” at SMAK, Ghent in 2001.
The Royal Family of Belgium commissioned the artist in 2002 for a permanent installation in the Sphinx Room of the palace in Brussels.
He exposed work at “Beaufort 2003: Triënnale voor Hedendaagse Kunst aan Zee” at PMMK in Oostende. In 2004, Braeckman had a solo exhibition at de Pont Foundation in Tilburg. In 2006 his work was included in the group show 'clickdoubleclick', which travelled to Munich (DE) and Brussels (BE), and in 'DARK' at Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam (NL).In 2007 a solo show opened in Athens (GR).]]>
"My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable."
A consummate technician, Magrittes work frequently displays a juxtaposition of ordinary objects in an unusual context, giving new meanings to familiar things. The representational use of objects as other than what they seem is typified in his painting, The Treachery Of Images (La trahison des images), which shows a pipe that looks as though it is a model for a tobacco store advertisement. Magritte painted below the pipe, This is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), which seems a contradiction, but is actually true: the painting is not a pipe, it is an image of a pipe. (In his book, This Is Not a Pipe, French critic Michel Foucault discusses the painting and its paradox.) Magritte pulled the same stunt in a painting of an apple: he painted the fruit realistically and then used an internal caption or framing device to deny that the item was an apple. In these Ceci n'est pas works, Magritte seems to suggest that no matter how closely, through realism-art, we come to depicting an item accurately, we never do catch the item itself, per se, as a Kantian noumenon, but capture only an image on the canvas.
His art shows a more representational style of surrealism compared to the "automatic" style seen in works by artists like Joan Miró.
In addition to fantastic elements, his work is often witty and amusing. He also created a number of surrealist versions of other famous paintings.
More on Magritte at wikipedia ]]>
Paul Delvaux (September 23, 1897 – July 20, 1994) was a Belgian painter, famous for his surrealist paintings with female nudes.
The paintings Delvaux became famous for usually feature numbers of nude women who stare as if hypnotized, gesturing mysteriously, sometimes reclining incongruously in a train station or wandering through classical buildings, accompanied by skeletons or puzzled scientists. Delvaux would repeat variations on these themes for the rest of his long life, although some departures can be noted. Among them are his paintings of 1945-47, rendered in a flattened style with distorted and forced perspective effects, and the series of crucifixions and deposition scenes enacted by skeletons, painted in the 1950s.
In the late 1950s he produced a number of night scenes in which trains are observed by a little girl seen from behind. These compositions contain nothing overtly surrealistic, yet the clarity of moonlit detail is hallucinatory in effect. Trains had always been a subject of special interest to Delvaux, who never forgot the wonder he felt as a small child at the sight of the first electric trams in Brussels.
In 1959 he executed a mural at the Palais du Congrès in Brussels, one of several large scale decorative commissions Delvaux undertook. He was named director of the Académie royal des Beaux-arts of Belgium in 1965. In 1982 the Paul Delvaux Museum opened in Saint-Idesbald.
Delvaux died in Veurne in 1994.]]>
S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art - Ghent, has an international reputation due to its collection and several impressive exhibitions, e.g. Chambres d'Amis, Over The Edges, and The Quadriennial. A visit to the S.M.A.K. can be very divers. Next to the different exhibitions you will surely find an activity to follow in our museum. You can find a survey of guided tours and workshops on their webpage. As an individual visitor you can discover the museum at your own pace. If you want some more information about the exhibitions or the collection you can always ask an audio guide at the reception desk or you can read the texts that you can find in different rooms of the museum. Hungry or thirsty? Take a seat in the museumcafé and enjoy a coffee, breakfast or lunch.]]>
Openinghours Museum: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Public nocturne: every first Friday of the month between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. Entrance fees to the exhibitions and collection €5: individuals €3,80: groups from 15 persons, under-25s, over-60s, students €2,50: school groups Free for under-twelves, disabled and persons accompanying groups. Special exhibitions excepted. Admission to the museum is free every Sunday morning from 10 am to 1 pm. There is also a free guided tour for individual visitors at 11 am. Please reserve in advance: info & bookings: S.M.A.K. Public Activities - Esther Ooms Citadelpark – 9000 Gent T +32 (0)9 240 76 64 (Tue-Fri 10am-noon & 2-5pm) F +32 (0)9 221 71 09 E reservaties.smak@gent.be ]]>
Panamarenko (Antwerp, 1940) is an exceptional and unclassifiable figure in contemporary art, who has been described as 'one of the great creators of the end of the century'.
Artist, Engineer, Poet, Physicist, Inventor and Visionary, and has for thirty years pursued a singular course of exploration of space, movement, flight, energy and the force of gravity.
His work, fusing artistic and technological experiment, takes many forms: Aeroplanes, flying carpets, cars, flying saucers, submarines and birds. Spectacular structures of strange beauty, both playful and inspiring.]]>
