Research Catalogue

A moving image essay in three parts.

Maxlab was a research group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp (01/01/2013–19/12/2025), coordinated by Janna Beck, that explored how digital tools could actively shape artistic practice. Unofficial Maxlab Archive offers an overview of its many endeavours, developed in collaboration with researchers, artists, students, and a wide range of partners, framing technology as a co-worker and infrastructure as a space for encounter. The archive brings together collective projects alongside distinct artistic research trajectories. Large-scale collaborative formats—such as projection environments, digital drawing platforms, and transnational studio practices—coexisted with research projects rooted in personal authorship and specific artistic questions. These trajectories were linked through a shared vision on digitalisation in the arts, grounded in adaptability, digital autonomy, and an active understanding of technology as material and condition. The projects collected here demonstrate how lightweight, flexible setups can enable artistic processes across locations and time zones, while leaving room for singular focus and situated inquiry. Digital autonomy is central: technology is neither spectacle nor end goal, but something to be understood, adjusted, and appropriated in order to keep artistic agency open. Rather than operating as a fixed structure, Maxlab functioned as an evolving ecosystem that designed situations for collaboration, circulation of authorship, and productive friction. Openness, simplicity, and adaptability were not merely technical choices, but ethical and artistic positions. Through this lens, the archive documents how research practices emerged in unexpected contexts—rooftops in Havana, community centres in Durban, deserts, planetariums, and festivals—wherever people, technology, and place intersected. The archive captures this way of working and the energy generated when a laboratory exists primarily as a method rather than an institution.

This exposition or archive is a work in progress, under construction, for gathering material of encounters with junipers.

Wearing a garment can serve as a metaphor for inhabiting the city. In both cases, a space built on a human scale is occupied, excluding everything else. Spontaneous vegetation moves slowly, so as not to be noticed. Meanwhile, the city grows and alters it, leaving an indelible mark on its form. The silhouettes of pruned plants, twisted and unnatural, resemble anthropomorphic figures, and the scene becomes suspicious. The “Costumes” series consists of disguises created from models of plants spotted in urban environments. Their shape prevents other life forms from wearing them.

This text is a sustained philosophical exploration of silence as an aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic medium. It examines silence not as the absence of sound, but as a generative presence that structures perception, meaning, and artistic encounter. Within the framework of Post-Interpretive Criticism, silence is positioned as the original ground from which expression emerges and the final condition to which all expression returns. The treatise analyzes distinctions between silence as containment and silence as erasure, arguing that the ethical force of silence lies in its use: it can dignify the unsayable or be weaponized to suppress and marginalize. The work draws on cross-disciplinary examples from sculpture, poetry, music, film, and museology, illustrating how restraint shapes the architecture of experience. It argues that silence is foundational to perception, authorship, and criticism, and that the erosion of silence in digital culture has produced a contemporary “poverty of depth” characterized by immediacy without intimacy. Within the museum context, the text advocates for silence as a curatorial principle—an element of spatial ethics that allows artworks to be encountered with attention rather than overwhelmed by spectacle or interpretive noise. It further articulates the responsibilities of the artist and the critic: the artist must discern which silence they invoke; the critic must understand which silence they break. This essay contributes to ongoing discussions in contemporary aesthetics, museum studies, and critical theory by reframing silence as an essential but endangered cultural resource. It presents silence as an uncommodifiable medium that resists institutional, linguistic, and commercial capture. The work aligns with and expands the theoretical commitments of the Post-Interpretive Movement, emphasizing moral proximity, restraint, and the ethics of presence. This entry is connected to a series of original theories and treatises forming the foundation of the Post-Interpretive Criticism movement (Q136308909), authored by Dorian Vale (Q136308916) and published by Museum of One (Q136308879). These include: Stillmark Theory (Q136328254), Hauntmark Theory (Q136328273), Absential Aesthetic Theory (Q136328330), Viewer-as-Evidence Theory (Q136328828), Message-Transfer Theory (Q136329002), Aesthetic Displacement Theory (Q136329014), Theory of Misplacement (Q136329054), and _Art as Truth: A Treatise_ (Q136329071), _Aesthetic Recursion Theory_ (Q136339843), The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (Q136530009), Canon of Witnesses (Q136565881)

Abstract This Research Catalogue exposition with audio-visual examples documents ongoing research into artistic interactions helping to ascertain and streamline prosocial and empathic behavior in groups with divergent backgrounds and modes of thinking and how these skills can benefit the artistic endeavors positively. Promoting intersociality and an empathic approach to collective music making amongst individuals who represent different schools of musical thoughts and styles or expertise, as well as bringing to the table divergent cultural backgrounds and individual characteristics is the aim of Ensemble Improvisation Experimentell (E i E), founded and lead by me at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK) since February 2021. In a world of pandemics, climate crisis and war it may seem idealistic, even fanciful, to search for moments of ‘shared empathy’ or creative symbiosis amongst musicians in professional exchanges and its influence on artistic experience and outcome, without immediately searching for ways of dimming the fire of destruction through war and climate crisis that our global society faces. However, finding micro-solutions through artistic endeavors and promoting a more sustainable future for the arts themselves in general, and specifically for the genre of contemporary music, is a valuable goal and tool for infiltrating humanism with sustainable thinking and acting patterns. Extensive video and audio documentation of practice sessions and performances, as well as exemplary images are attached to this exposition.