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.

This essay explores Nomadic Aesthetics as a post-disciplinary ethical philosophy grounded in movement, displacement, and moral geography. Through the lens of travelling installations, Dorian Vale interrogates how contemporary art carries not only material form but migratory conscience. Installations by artists such as Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Chiharu Shiota, and Khalil Rabah are examined not as static works, but as mobile testimonies—witnesses to border regimes, global inequality, and spiritual unbelonging. The essay argues that when art moves, it inherits moral weight: the crate becomes a coffin, the gallery a customs post, and the viewer a pilgrim. Nomadic aesthetics reframes mobility not as logistics, but as liturgy. It positions the travelling installation as a modern secular relic—bearing not truth as monument, but truth as residue. This is a theology of movement: truth that survives only by circulation. Title: Nomadic Aesthetics — Travelling Installations as Moral Geography Keywords: Post-Interpretive Criticism, Nomadic Aesthetics, Installation Art, Moral Geography, Migrant Artworks, Travelling Exhibitions, Globalization, Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum, Ai Weiwei, Chiharu Shiota, Khalil Rabah, Ethics of Movement, Conscience in Contemporary Art, Aesthetic Displacement, Witnessing, Museum Critique, Portable Truth, Moral Cartography License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Publication Year: 2025 Movement / Framework: Post-Interpretive Criticism (The Museum of One) DOI (Placeholder until generated): [To be automatically assigned by Zenodo] Journal / Series: The Journal of Post-Interpretive Criticism (ISSN 2819-7232) Volume: III Publisher: Museum of One (Registered with Library and Archives Canada) Persistent Identifiers: ORCID: 0009-0004-7737-5094 ISNI: 0000000537155247 Wikidata: Q136308879 (Museum of One)

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, performance, production, and technology. This interview features Caroline Shaw, American composer, violinist, singer, and producer, whose work moves fluidly between concert music, studio production, and film scoring. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Partita for 8 Voices, Shaw combines historical sensibility with experimental curiosity, creating sound worlds that merge the human voice, instrumental gesture, and digital texture into a single expressive continuum. In the conversation, Shaw reflects on the interconnectedness of composing, producing, and performing; on the role of technology as both a creative and tactile medium; and on the shifting perception of time, form, and space in contemporary music. She also discusses the relationship between notation and sound, the dialogue between acoustic and digital realms, and the value of presence, collaboration, and shared listening as vital counterpoints to digital mediation. Shaw’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living organism, at once human, technological, and emotional, where composition, sound design, and performance converge into an embodied act of imagination and connection.

Desire Machine is an artistic research project that examines collaborative creation through the conceptual framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage and desiring machines. Developed as part of the Atlas of Smooth Spaces research initiative, the project explores how movement, sound, and algorithmic systems can function as heterogeneous components within a non-hierarchical and non-representational assemblage. Real-time body data, generative soundscapes, and responsive lighting are integrated via a recursive feedback structure, allowing for emergent behaviours and dynamic modulation across media. Rather than focusing on disciplinary integration, Desire Machine proposes a co-functional space defined by distributed agency, where artistic production unfolds through competencies and material relations. The project offers a methodological proposition for rethinking compositional practice as a site of continuous negotiation, transformation, and becoming.