When we talk about art/science, we can only ask ourselves a lot of questions.

What can arts bring to science and vice versa? How can they work together when their methodologies, and even languages, tend to respond to completely different aims and criteria?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these collaborative experiments? Can they positively impact each other? What are the benefits of such cooperation? And what are the secret ingredients for truly successful, transversal, equal connections between art and culture, university and research?

These are some of the questions that will be addressed by the three art/science projects that will be presented on the opening day of the Cookery: Lumson, Imagining Ecological Futures (KIKK) and Sustainable Robotics (Ohme).

After the 3 presentations there will be an open dialogue with the audience.

In 2024, Ohme launched the first artist-in-residence programme at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies (BrIAS), in collaboration with FARI – Institute of Artificial Intelligence for the Common Good, both co-founded and co-led by the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB).

Through an open call, the artists selected are Kris Verdonck and Dewi Brunet.

Camilla Colombo, co-founder and artistic director of Ohme, will present the project as well as offer insights in Ohme’s long-standing collaboration with the scientific community in artistic projects.

The residency gives artistic researchers from various fields the opportunity to work on the intersection of art, science and ecological questions. The aim is to develop useful arts-led interdisciplinary research tools and artworks to examine how cultural practitioners critically address and creatively negotiate ecological futures.

In collaboration with Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles - Digital arts, Goethe Institut Belgium and CCN/Namur Cultural Center.

The talk will present the various themes of the LUMSON project. The project develops an artistic and collective framework around inaudible frequencies, voices, sound synthesis, artificial intelligence and materials research, with critical involvement of a diverse group of partners.

The presentation will look at the inaudible sound domain and what it means in our daily lives. What kind of radiation footprint do we leave behind and what is the relation with natural radiation phenomena. How can we generate awareness of this extended bandwidth and what kind of artistic output are we developing.

We will talk about the many different types of inaudible waves and how we can transduce them into the audible. What type of translations are possible?

In this talk, we will also discuss a prototype of a electroluminescent loudspeaker being investigated and developed at IMO-IMOMEC. This light emitting loudspeaker will form the basis of how we will amplify sounds.