Petervan Studios — April 2025 Update

10 min readApr 4, 2025

Spring update on Petervan Studios. The previous update was one year ago! It is not that nothing happened. A lot has happened since then. Let’s have a look at what’s on/in my head.

Head measuring device — seen in GUM Science Museum — Wunderkammer of Truth

General Status

Since February 2024, I have disconnected from all social media, including FB, Twitter, and LinkedIn: You won’t find me there anymore
My life is getting slower and quieter: I am more or less living the perfect day and am freed from desire. I am getting into a hermit-like lifestyle that I like.
There have been fewer conversations, but the remaining contacts have become true friends, project & sparring partners.
It is challenging to find budgets for anything that even smells artistic.
On the family front, there was both joy and grief. Joy: Astrid passed the entry exam and started her bachelor’s at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Ghent. Grief: My mother-in-law passed away on 1 June 2024. She was a saint. The mourning set some of the tone for the rest of the year. Join me in wishing my father-in-law, my wife Mieke, and my daughter Astrid strength in dealing with this loss.

Green Green Grass of Hope — Bicycle ride 26 Oct 2024

The Art Studio

The main focus of the art studio was digital. I did a deep dive into what I would call “immersive software”. A deep dive means spending a lot of time in the Unity Editor, following numerous online courses, and doing a lot of little experiments.

Example of Ableton Live with Envelop for Live 3D Source Panner

An example of a simple VCV Rack set-up

Static example from Wave Unstable rule in CAPOW software by Rudy Rucker

Although not intended this way, most of the knowledge and skills acquired culminated in the first and subsequent versions of the New New Babylon performance, giving leeway to other projects. Some of these projects are detailed below.

I did make some analog work, mainly pencil and Chinese ink on paper, and very little with paint on canvas.

Crop from Curves work Anni Albers — Gouache on paper — ca 1955

Back to School

Summer of Protocols 2024 (SoP24)

Together with some friends, we submitted a SoP24 Protocol Improvement Grant proposal for Conversation Protocols for Humans and Machines. Unfortunately, our team did not make it to the 2024 season of the Summer of Protocols. There were 130 candidates and only 5 residencies available. We learned a lot in preparing the submission material.

Toolmaking for Spatial Intelligence

Followed DigitalFutures Workshop “Toolmaking for Spatial Intelligence” and got my certificate

Masterclass XR in Industry

I am following the Masterclass XR in the Industry (an online course with some on-site assignments) at the Howest Academy in Kortrijk (with Digital Arts & Entertainment as one of the best game schools in the world) and HITLab (Human Interface Technology Lab) until June 2025.

The curriculum includes:

1) Unity Essentials

2) Enhanced reality use cases

3) Enabling remote expertise (remote assistance)

4) Augmented inspection (BIM/3D concept visualization)

5) Visualizing the unseen (IOT data visualization/digital twin)

6) Virtual control (interaction with machines/robots via XR)

Performances

Performance: Claim Your Cybernetic Word — 17 June 2024

I was invited to do an online performance for the 60th-anniversary conference of the American Society for Cybernetics.

Attendees were encouraged to participate actively by offering cybernetic terminolog y. We discussed for example the Paskian Knobs required to steer randomness and the style of the outcome. The session resulted in more than 300 generated words. They were consolidated in an on-the-spot generated word cloud. We also created an AI-generated cybernetic song.

Performance: What Makes Us Human? — 28 August 2024

The Cybernetic performance uses a new format for delivering and creating content in some dream-state flow. I showed it to Josie Gibson from the Catalyst Network, who invited me to create a similar online workshop “What Makes Us Human?”

This performance is an engaging, immersive, and poetic screen-foray crafted to elicit compelling language embodying The Catalyst Network’s human dimensions. Attendees are encouraged to offer catalyst and humanistic terminology, visually depicted in an immersive cloud-like interactive video installation and a bespoke soundscape. The session opens with an artistic cinematic dream sequence. Through facilitated brainstorming sessions with the audience, participants can fine-tune word generation. The session closes with a cinematic catalyst song outro “A Woven World of Humans”.

Performance: New New Babylon

This has been my main focus over the last months, and that paid off: I made good progress on this performance. This performance is now available for virtual and physical on-stage delivery.

The New New Babylon performance is a 45–60 minute immersive experience, divided into six chapters-Awakening, Stepping, Flying, Gliding, Folding, and Vertigo. Each chapter explores different facets of the New New Babylon concept, blending art and interaction. Audience members are invited to actively participate, engaging with interactive elements that promote a sense of community and shared creativity. The performance integrates rich soundscapes, video projections, visual art, poetry, masks, VR, and stage props to create a multisensory journey.

To get here, I have spent loads of time in Unity Editor (a software tool to create 2D, 3D and VR environments, well known in the game development industry), did some in-depth reading on modern urbanism, registered for a masterclass “XR in the Industry”, and partnered with NUMENA, a renowned interdisciplinary creative studio from Germany, specializing in award-winning spatial design and programming.

For the next iteration, we plan an API-supported LLM infrastructure to enable live interactions with AI Agents. We aim to facilitate real-time exploration of historical New Babylon research resources during on-stage and online sessions. This infrastructure is currently being developed by Thomas McLeish, Adjunct Lecturer — at Berkeley Master of Design, and master creator of the 2018 replica of the Colloquy of Mobiles. Arthur Moelants — a talented young cinematographer and immersive audio expert from Flanders — also joined our project.

We submitted the performance as a candidate for the Venice Biennale College 2025, but we did not make it.

Performance Dream My Dream

The team decided to re-work the New New Babylon performance into a live experience that does not require any hardware (headsets) for the audience. We have renamed the performance to “Dream My Dream”

Dream My Dream is an immersive performance experience in six dream states: Awakening, Stepping, Flying, Gliding, Folding, and Vertigo. A live VR performer embodies an architect-researcher and dreams about the New New Babylon, a speculative future society transformed and eroded by automation, artificial intelligence, and digital technology. The dream explores profound and universal questions about the essence of existence. The audience is invited to interpret the dream in their own unique way.

This artistic performance has a poetic, gentle, and profoundly human touch, evoking a dreamy, Magritte-like surrealism. The atmosphere is calm and harmonious, steering from Sci-Fi or dystopian themes toward a non-aggressive, understated, and subtly utopian vision.

We submitted “Dream My Dream” to the Cannes Festival Immersive 2025 competition but did not make it to the final ten.

We are now revisiting the synopsis and tagline of this performance and making some adaptations to the treatment with the ultimate goal of premiering at one of the major film/immersive festivals.

Artistic Research Project: New New Babylon

The performance is one of the deliverables of the main artistic research project. There has been renewed interest from several parties interested in partnering on the main New New Babylon project.

We are looking for a team/consortium to overlay an existing city (district) with a VR environment for A/B Testing of the urbanistic, economic, and governance aspects.

The deliverables of Phase-1, the Vision-Phase, are:

A beta version of an Urbanistic Artistic Rendering VR Environment, inspired by an existing or planned City or Real Estate project
Artistic Performance (minimum Online, ideally IRL), see above
Art Expo (minimum Online, ideally IRL)
Art Book

Stealth

A new project, very embryonic, written and directed together with Andreea Ion Cojocura, complemented by my cousin (a 17th-century art expert) and a world-renowned artist as the MC.

The project is an experimental alternate reality experience about the nature of flesh, human suffering, and technological advances. It seeks to find an answer to the question: “Who are the new Gods that can deliver us from suffering?”

It is a surreal experience to see the truth. It happens over a three-year timeline. Unfolding in real time, the project involves participants in the preparation, execution, and aftermath of the fictitious latest ecumenical council.

The multi-year project entails a prelude phase as a mockumentary in 360 video, audio, and VR, followed by an in-person council, concluding in new canons and summarising mockumentary.

At the moment of writing, we are finalising the pitch.

A theory of space/time dimensions

The analog gnarly curved art projects, the 3D software learnings, the few conversations, a couple of computation and math books about flat and 3D dimensions (see books section below in this blog), and especially the Stealth project led me to fantasize about a multi-dimensional (not multiverse) world that is suddenly revealed and that changes everything we know about science.

Image generated by Gemini 2.0

One of the fantasies envisions a world encircled by a Saturn-like ring of knowledge-infused water, unveiling stereoscopic windows into higher and lower dimensions of time and space-if such concepts even exist.

Don’t take anything here too seriously. To quote Rudy Rucker: “I am a science fiction writer and the secret of science fiction is pile on the bullshit and keep a straight face”

Delicacies

“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.

Check out the May, June, September 2024, and February 2025 editions here.

Books

Highlights:

Geometry, Relativity and the 4th Dimension — by Rudy Rucker (1977)
Art, Technology, Consciousness: Mind@Large — by Roy Ascott (2000)
Love & Math — by Edward Frenkl (2013)
Behave — by Robert Sapolsky (2017)
Mind in Motion — by Barbara Tversky (2019)
Soft City — by David Sim (2019)
and re-reading The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul — by Rudy Rucker (second edition 2016)