{"id":12166,"date":"2023-11-15T15:45:44","date_gmt":"2023-11-15T14:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kingkong-mag.com\/?p=12166"},"modified":"2023-11-29T15:16:24","modified_gmt":"2023-11-29T14:16:24","slug":"kikk-2023-talks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kingkong-mag.com\/en\/kikk-2023-talks\/","title":{"rendered":"KIKK 2023: a menu of talks in 42 sittings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\nTwo days. Four venues. 42 talks. 52 speakers from around the globe to narrate, popularise, reveal, inspire, retrace, affect. At one and the same time, even. A public of professionals jockey for position at the entrance gates, leading to jampacked halls at times. Incognito, kingkong took the pulse of this 2023 vintage of lectures made in KIKK. \n\n\r\n<\/p>\n\n\n

You can spot them straightaway, the people who are setting foot in the Walloon capital for the first time. At the train station, eyes riveted to their GPS applications, they all head in the direction of the lower part of the town. They work within a wide variety of sectors in the creative and digital industries: data visualisation, brand strategy, design, research, virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), etc. Several of them (us included) pick up the pace as they make their way down Rue de Fer. They certainly wouldn\u2019t want to miss the opening lecture of this twelfth edition of the KIKK Festival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has just gone 10.00 at the Namur Theatre when the great Nelly Ben Hayoun-St\u00e9panian<\/a> \u2013 whom we spoke to you about in the article announcing the festival<\/a> \u2013 takes to the stage in her candy-pink dress and imitation leather cowboy boots. Accompanied by the Japanese Nobumichi Tosa, vice-president of the arts company Maywa Denki<\/a>, they warm up the gathering with a morning dance routine. It turns out that the two performance artists have known each other for quite a long time. \u2018In the summer of 2008, I had the opportunity to do an internship at Maywa Denki,\u2019 remembers Nelly. \u2018I was introduced to the philosophy of their enterprise: \u201ccomplete nonsense<\/em>\u201d. Life is a nonsense and design and art must reflect that.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Nelly Ben Hayoun-St\u00e9panian @ Antonin Weber<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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After several sways of her pelvis, Nelly involves us in the quest for a radical imagination, as she likes to call it. The designer teaches this way of thinking at the University of the underground<\/a>. A one-of-a-kind institution which she created in 2017. The first university in the world to be established in nightclub basements. \u2018The way we have constructed human thought is so limited,\u2019 she declares. It\u2019s true that when you think like Ben Hayoun, your outlook necessarily broadens. She in particular works closely with the SETI Institute and explains that each of its staff members must be able to give an answer to an unknown variable of the famous Drake equation. This well-known mathematical hypothesis which attempts to estimate the potential number of extraterrestrial civilisations within our galaxy.
Slightly behind schedule, she speeds up the pace at which she shows us her over 200 pop-kitsch slides, but before making way for other speakers, Nelly Ben Hayoun-St\u00e9panian puts on her director\u2019s hat in order to present the trailer for her most recent work for the very first time: \u2018Doppelg\u00e4nger<\/em>\u2019, a German term which literally means \u2018the identical lookalike of a living person\u2019. In this futurist-tinged documentary, Nelly and her two \u2018doppelg\u00e4ngers\u2019 challenge notions of space, time, design, but also the politics and economics of performance. You will be able to see for yourselves very soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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@ Antonin Weber<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After this inspiring appetiser, the professionals are let loose and scatter to the various talks venues. A shift in the mood at the Bourse with the Australian Jack Isles<\/a>, architect, researcher, cartographer and first and foremost a member of the Swiss-based investigative agency Border Forensics. His presentation documents the intersections between climatology, migration and human rights in the light of the border violences sponsored by the European States. In the Friends Room at the Namur Theatre, a totally new hall for the KIKK Festival, talks for the most part in French are held in small groups and above all can be attended free-of-charge. A format and a space which enables (finally) a brief exchange between speakers and public. On the menu: funding opportunities for the cultural and creative industries (CCI) in collaboration with ST’ART<\/a>, gamification and innovations in terms of extended reality (XR) technologies, deconstructing the myth of the starving artist, etc.
At the Delta, the former Namur \u2018Maison de la Culture\u2019, an elixir of love with Valentina Peri<\/a>. The artist, author and independent exhibition curator explores the issues of dating in the digital age. \u2018The contemporary phenomenon of online dating and the use of new technologies to get singletons to match up with one another has a longer history than one might think\u2019, she reveals. \u2018Over the last century, the history of amorous practices has shown that the acquiring of new freedoms often goes hand in hand with suspicions and stereotypes. What seems disturbing for one generation often ends up being accepted by the next.\u2019 She continues by unloading a mass of other data: \u2018one out of five couples has met on a dating site. The scale of this phenomenon is ample proof of its potential for profit and for collecting data on users. Dating sites and apps for pulling partners are today ranked third amongst online paid content sites, ahead even of pornography\u2019. Her research on the subject has enabled her to put together an itinerant exhibition called Data Dating Desire<\/em><\/a>, which has been touring Europe since 2018 and in particular stopped off at the iMal digital arts centre in Brussels at the end of October 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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