KIKK Festival is an international festival of digital & creative cultures in Namur, touching the art, science, design and tech industries. It's worth mentioning that this 2-day conference is totally free! I really liked the conference so I decided to write a short summary on what you can find there and what I liked the most.

The venue

First of all, I’d like to highlight the venue itself. The main conferences took place in the Theater of Namur, which looks stunning both from the outside and the inside, giving the festival a great, royal-like but cozy atmosphere.

The conferences

Two days of presentations is a lot of information to digest. The many interesting and inspiring personalities on the stage inspired me, made me laugh, and some just flatout left me thinking “WTF did I just watch?”. Here are some of them.


The art of science

In a pursuit of finding the secrets of the universe, Fabian Oefner uses science to create stunning pieces of art. The attached video presents the colorful salt crystals put in motion by the sound coming from the speaker which they were laying on. It looks amazing! He also plays with soap bubbles and oil to create great pictures, which in turn could be seen in the exhibition hall. I completely fell in love with his art!

Another thing from his presentation that stuck with me, was the statement that both art and science look at our environment, only in a different way. In his works, Fabian tries to remove the barrier between the two.

 

(re)Designing human body

Agi Haines talked about how technology can have an impact on our bodies. She also speculated about the future of body modifications which could help us adjust to our ever-changing lifestyles, even prevent some diseases. What if AI had feelings? Or what if we could "design" newborns to breathe under water or have extra features to help them survive the global warming? You can check her project here.

 

Stefan Sagmeister about beauty

Stefan Sagmeister told us about the importance of designing aesthetically beautiful things, no matter if it's architecture, a website or an interface.

What I remembered from the talk was that Beauty is a part of being a human - even in the stone age we had a sense of beauty even though it wasn't necessary to survive.

Another interesting observation was that even when we loose our mind, we still recognise beauty. This is proven by the experiment on patients with Alzheimer disease who were asked multiple times to prioritise a set of pictures from the most beautiful to the least beautiful. The results were always the same. So, even though they don't remember their names or what happened 10 minutes ago, the sense of beauty still stays the same.

 

A guy who wanted to be a goat

OK, this one officially won my “WTF Did I Just Watch” prize. Thomas Thwaites is an extraordinary designer intrigued by technology, science and who knows what else… but apparently mostly toasters and goats. From his presentation I remember his 2 projects. The first one was about his idea to make an electric toaster from scratch (including making his own metal and plastic). What he ended up with was pretty impressive too!

The second project was his attempt at becoming a goat. Already in ancient times humans wanted to acquire animal features. In his project, Thomas wanted to see how technology can help him achieve that. He went pretty far, making special prosthetic goat legs and an artificial stomach for digesting grass. In the end of the day he even managed to make some friends with one goat, so I guess the project was a success ?

 

Context is the only medium that matters

Such a lovely Christmas tree, isn't it?

Context is the framing around the content and it’s the only medium that matters. Or at least that’s what Pablo Garcia claimed during his presentation. He started strong by showing his project in which he presented sexcam models replicating some iconic art pieces (check out Webcam Venus) After all, is it that different? Where is the border between art and pornography? Does it all depend on the context?

I also remembered the concept of context collapse, which basically means that we all act in a different way depending on who we are interacting with. This behavior appears not only offline but also online – on different social media. Pablo brought a funny series of Dries Depoorter called Tinder In where he put the Side by Side profile pictures of LinkedIn & Tinder of the same person.

 

Interactive exhibitions & tech market

Away from the presentations, there were also 2 other venues – interactive exhibitions for kids (and not only!) - LittleKikk, and a tech market showcasing innovative projects that use new technologies. Chocolate 3D printer, real-life font finder, drones, digital graffiti – you could try it all!

One of the my favourite projects on the market was Spector - the real-life font finder designer by Fiona O’Leary. With this small device you can easily find the name of any font from a printed or a digital media and try it out in InDesign. Great stuff and it looks lovely.

 

Final thoughts

All in all, KIKK was a great and inspiring conference and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone interested in art, design, creative thinking, and/or technology. It’s also a good excuse to visit Belgium, which is a beautiful country by itself. See you next year? Who knows!