The KIKK festival in Namur has been promoting the idea of popularising science through art since 2011. On 23 October 2024, the Walloon capital started to move – various venues from the Market in the city centre to a new exhibition at Le Pavillon were opened. I’m not a technical genius, but through art, like many people, I can understand innovations, phenomena, and terms of the digital age. This year’s theme is ‘True/False.’ The curators ask the question: what is true in our time of social media with its algorithms and selfies, and what is generated by AI. How do we distinguish between truth and fake? Today it is a subject of our personal responsibility. In 2024, 28,000 people attended the festival.
This edition illustrated how artificial intelligence is changing the creative professions, becoming a powerful tool for innovation in art and design. In a world where the boundaries between creativity and technology are being redefined, artificial intelligence has become a crucial tool for transforming creative processes and creating new realities. Providing a space for reflection and dialogue, the KIKK festival claims to be a platform where innovation, art and AI intersect, enabling Europe’s cultural and creative industries to push digital boundaries. After two days of a steady stream of people attending performances at venues such as Bourse, Théâtre de Namur and Delta, TRAKK – a creative centre, fab lab and media lab – Namur was transformed into a vibrant hub of artistic energy with workshops and masterclasses.
The official opening of KIKK took place in the Théâtre de Namur’s classic interiors, which connect the past and the future.
We walked through most of the 12 locations of the KIKK in Town festival trail with art director Marie du Chastel. Many of the projects we saw played with our perception of reality. Such is the orange ball – when you roll it, it changes shades. A glowing black dot surrounded by a halo, like Malevich’s Black Square, seems to suck the viewer’s attention into the black holes of the Universe. How many seconds remains before our eyes a ray of light shining in the pitch blackness.
Presented as a conveyor belt, the endless ‘Facebook feed’ mocks the inability to stop once you open the first post in Zuckerberg’s infernal creation. The project of the Polish group PanGenerator is called Kneel&Roll – you are the one who participates in the performance. Get on your knees and fb scrolling in front of you. ‘The infinite scrolling mechanism is often used by social networks and platforms, offering endless amounts of content. Endless scrolling induces a state of constant thirst in the mind, tempting it with an endless stream of new information that it is, however, unable to digest. Scrolling thus becomes a purely sensory experience, putting us into a kind of hypnosis. The soothing monotony of glowing shapes before our eyes completely engulfs us, becoming a daily digital ritual in which we sacrifice our full attention – a priceless gift for digital corporations. Or perhaps it’s time to stop worshipping?’
