KIKK 2024: the truth, and nothing but the truth
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In today’s digital age and the era of the development of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the KIKK Festival this year aimed to disentangle the true from the false. From October 24 to 27, four days free of dogmatism where creatives, digital professionals and plain old techies met face to face. A common desire: to share a form of truth based on the experiential and the trustworthiness of our sensory perceptions.
Thursday, October 24. Namur. Place d’Armes. A good month after the Fêtes de Wallonie, celebrated at a frenetic pace, péquet drinks and vivid colours made way for the thirteenth edition of KIKK. The international Festival of digital and creative cultures which took over the Walloon capital.
People come to KIKK to learn, be inspired, debate, co-build, network, but also to celebrate. And, in a few figures, it amounts to: 3,000 professionals (around 50% of whom are international), 53 nationalities represented, 47 talks, 9 workshops and masterclasses, 100 entrepreneurial projects present at the KIKK Market, and 10 networking events.
As far as the general public is concerned, some 28,000 visitors meandered the streets of the city on the Meuse under stunning skies. Aficionados and novices appreciated the 70 art installations spread across 12 of the city’s iconic sites. On their own, with friends, but above all as families. Because the kids had not been forgotten. The programme also gave prominence to workshops considered from a child’s eye level.
On the talks menu were highly topical subjects such as creative coding, data visualisation, AI, brand image and strategy, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), bioart, design, research and many others. For the first time, the event provided the opportunity of bringing Friday to a close with a nocturne. The occasion to visit the art trail up to 22.00 and begin the weekend with a DJ set at La Nef. A former church, today transformed into a cultural space and theatre. An absolute gem of Namur’s recently acquired reputation for awesome coolness. Because if the organising team is able to vaunt stable visitor rates, its appetite to widen its outreach to less convinced audiences remains firmly in place.
Anatomy of a KIKK festival
09.40, bang on. The Theatre of Namur opens the festivities. ‘Mastering the Art of Forward Thinking’. The title of the talk given by the Latvian Liva Grinberga, the Design Director at Media. Monks, who is anything but monastic. The first talk of this 2024 vintage set the tone: ‘In today’s busy world, it’s easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed by all the information and constant changes. When things get tough, we often stick to what we know, but that can hold us back and limit our creativity. What if we changed how we see things?’, Liva Grinberga.
A long way removed from speeches involving leaps into the unknown and fake personal development, the speakers sketch out new creative pathways to learn to embrace change, in particular with AI, instead of being in absolute terror of these ongoing revolutions. They follow one another onto the stage. Onto the stages. Of the Theatre of Namur and the Bourse, as well as that of the Delta. Grégory Chatonsky, Bruno Ribeiro, Christina Tarquini, Vallée Duhamel, Dr Formalyst, etc. Although they all adopt different registers, their pathways resonate on the central narrative arc selected by KIKK.
A few weeks before KIKK began, Marie du Chastel, the festival’s curator, told to us that she felt this year has been, perhaps more so than others, witness to the malleability of our understanding of truth. ‘We have also seen the boom of multimodal AI,’ she argues during our video conference. ‘Tools such as OpenAI’s GPT-4V and Google Gemini enable us to process images and videos in an integrated way. We are now living in virtual worlds which act as often distorted mirrors of our realities.’ In the era of deepfakes and generative AI, our perception is thrown into jeopardy. This post-truth society in which we are living progressively blurs the boundary between reality and illusion. To cut through this befuddled fog, the British artist, author and designer Brendan Dawes for his part suggests investigating collaboration. And he is someone who has never been a massive fan of collective work. The space afforded when working alone as a single practitioner always seemed ideal. Yet, as the years slipped by, he was brought to understand that the computer was always an unnamed collaborator anyway and he came to appreciate the idea of collaboration, but above all the opportunities – and the challenges – it permits.
The names keep coming thick and fast. A few compromises have to be made between this talk or that one. And another attempt at truth emerges. Historical, this time. Having arrived directly from the Big Apple, the duo Peter Aigner – Director of the Gotham Center for New York History – and Alex Wright – an academic who juggles several functions simultaneously, but we will present him as the Head of User Experience at Google News – are still jetlagged. In a panel in partnership with the University of Namur, Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) and wake! by Digital Wallonia, the two experts reflect on the power of plural and historical narratives when they are placed in the service of the common good.
Stories to distinguish the true from the false
‘We are always considering the future of AI, but what of the present and the past of AI?’, wonders Alex Wright. The New Yorker lingers for a moment on one of the precursors of the database, conceived by the German bibliographer Vincent Placcius. At the end of the seventeenth century, Placcius developed a physical system of note-taking called a ‘scrinium literatum’(literary cabinet). This large wooden cabinet contains thousands of suspended paper cards. On each of them is a piece of information or an idea. The cards can be easily reorganised and indexed, thus enabling an efficient management of knowledge.
Those who work with or are exposed to AI often have a tendency to look for the next innovation rather than considering what happened before the advent of these technologies, their history. However, it is the sole means of understanding the truth, in other words, what is happening today.
Alex Wright, UX EXPERT
Whilst we no longer (or almost never) store our data on paper nowadays and the digital momentum we are living through offers infinite possibilities, AI combined with other disruptive technologies – VT, metaverses and the like – also allows voice to be given to the actors of History and thus the production of more inclusive historical accounts. Historical avatars, immersive environments, video games, applications, etc. ‘Those who work with or are exposed to AI often have a tendency to look for the next innovation rather than considering what happened before the advent of these technologies, their history,’ continues Alex Wright. ‘However, it is the sole means of understanding the truth, in other words, what is happening today.’
Telling stories is also what Andreas Refsgaard endeavours to do. The Danish national confines that he is still suffering from a bout of flu which has dogged him from Copenhagen. It is not the first time he has taken to the stage during KIKK and the audience (Namur based and from elsewhere) seems delighted to (re)discover him. Because, even though feverish, the artist and creative coder knows how to generate interaction. His work explores the creative potential of emerging digital technologies such as AI. In his artistic practice, he adopts a humorous approach to digital tools and their applications, occasionally to turn them against themselves or to have us reflect on the uses they are put to.
From the get-go, he has the audience participating by testing his latest plaything: an application used to scan the contents of academic studies in order to extract from them a comic strip drawn with simplistic lines in four panels. Randomly, he takes an example: an American report on the symptoms of fever. The assembly cracks up on reading the comic strip created by this language model. Another test, provided by Better Poems About Things. Another of his digital art projects which builds on the foundations of its predecessor Poems About Things. This AI writes satirical prose on the basis of the images which are fed into it. Without thinking twice, he takes a photo of the crowd at the Delta with his computer, runs the application, and a poem steeped in an approximation of armchair philosophy is displayed on the large screen. Peals of laughter and applause flood the hall. ‘But who are you clapping?’ he asks, with a gullible look. ‘The innocents who never agreed to their data being used? Chat GPT, which generates these poems? Or me instead?’ The truth remains a question of perspective.
Namur, this Creative City
We have to fess up: when kingkong was invited to moderate a panel at KIKK on Creative Cities, we had no idea what this expression covered. Seated in a semi-circle, eight representatives of European cities. Eight ‘Creative Cities’. Amongst others, Caen (France), Tbilisi (Georgia), Viborg (Denmark) and Karlsruhe (Germany). This network of cities initiated by UNESCO in 2004 promotes cooperation with and between cities having identified creativity as a strategic factor of sustainable urban development. 350 cities across the globe currently make up this fabric and are working together towards a common goal: placing creativity and the cultural industries at the heart of local development and to encourage cooperation between these cities on an international level. The work carried out by KIKK in particular has for that matter enabled Namur to be a part of this creative network since 2021. A title which has certainly given a boost to the Walloon capital’s aim to reach the final for another title, which will perhaps see it crowned the European Capital of Culture in 2030. Fingers crossed.
Africa given pride of place
Apart from the AfriKIKK project launched by KIKK in 2019, a very wide range of artists and experts from the African continent and its diaspora came together during this 2024 edition to look into African prospects in the digital era. The continent is a genuine vector of cultural imagination, of social and oral traditions and of intangible heritage. Without forgetting to mention the Brussels-based DJ Rokia Bamba, who got La Nef rocking to the rafters during the 100% African opening night, the South African Vulane Mthembu for his part offered a talk called ‘The Machine Speaks’. In reminding us that Africa is not a cast in one piece country, the artist-composer-technophile explains: ‘AI can either reduce or reinforce societal stratification if the data is skewed and inaccurate. Despite Africa being at the forefront of this revolution in terms of innovation and current work done in this field, the cognitive bias imbued by the creators and Big Tech still influence the language models immensely.’
At another panel exploring the art and the creativity of new media in Africa, the guest speakers are of a similar mind. It is Doctor Tegan Bristow, a researcher and curator specialising in art, culture and technology in Africa, who takes to the floor first: ‘African digital artworks must not be perceived as separate forms of art. But it is undeniable that for an artist, reality is something else entirely if you come from the West or from Africa. That goes from access to tools and spaces, and includes the audience. To whom is our artistic practice addressed?’
That is one of the findings the expert draws from her work for one of the African continent’s largest innovation and digital art events, the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival. And the Lebanese-Senegalese artist Linda Dounia Rebeiz adds: ‘I do not feel represented by technology. Not by those who make it, nor by those who produce it, and that is what led me to talk to you, today.’
Her work focuses on finding media platforms for her memories – she draws massively on her childhood – as alternative realities and evidence of the exclusion of certain ways of being and doing. As an algorithm militant, she raises the question: ‘We very often type “Imagine” into Midjourney or ChatGPT, but what would it be like if we instead asked these AIs to “remember”? What does technology erase owing to the biased organisation of algorithms and which we have to remember for a majority of people to feel represented?’
The last word? Bingo!
After four days of prospecting, the question remains an open one: how to distinguish the real from the fake in the era of the digital and of the development of generative artificial intelligence? But there is not the shadow of a doubt, the 2024 KIKK Festival has allowed us to extract threads of truth and to sharpen our knives of veracity. One speaker crossed the Channel to offer an umpteenth version of truth as regards their most intriguing, yet inspiring, journey.A former commercial illustrator, Mr Bingo was certainly one of the headline acts of this edition. In front of a full-to-bursting Theatre of Namur, he concludes with the last of the talks, entitled ‘How I got here and what I’ve learnt’. Not a whiff of fake news. The Londoner’s talk is divided into two chapters, the first dealing with the journey, the second with the learning.
In the audience, snorts of laughter, giggles, people being deeply affected. On the stage, the oddball performer continues non-stop, apart from a ‘short pause of fifteen seconds’ in order to rehydrate himself with a mouthful of water to the sound of elevator music. Packed with English-style humour, in his red socks, his salmon shorts and his open Hawaiian shirt, Mr Bingo has been everywhere: The New Yorker, The Guardian, TIME, CH4, The New York Times. The digital archive of his thousands of illustrations does not exist, because he got bored once in a motorhome and deleted his entire portfolio website.
In 2015 Mr Bingo launched a Kickstarter to fund a book about his Hate Mail project. The campaign featured a rap video and a diverse selection of madcap rewards including being trolled, being insulted on Christmas Day and getting shitfaced on a train. It was at this time that he decided to never work for clients ever again and instead focus on being some sort of freelance artist, which he’s done ever since. ‘If I have learnt one thing, it is that people are ready to self-harm in order to buy art. My artistic process? I think of a stupid idea. I talk about it to the internet. The internet responds positively. The stupid idea becomes art.’ Bingo! And in fact, that may be what it all boils down to. The truth, when it is artistic, can create itself. It even has to. ‘And above all,’ he concludes, ‘don’t forget to have fun.’
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