Joining the CREW: reflections on Artistic Research
Can professional practice constitute research as understood in academia? My answer is “yes” - providing the practice embodies an investigative inquiry which yields new insights.
LAB
Aneta Mancewicz on ‘Liveness’.
What is live, what is not live in performance?
How do we inter-act in the (not) here & (not) now…?
The very concept of ‘liveness’ emerged only with the evolution of recording and the rise of radio as a medium. How could audiences possibly distinguish between recorded and unrecorded content? To demarcate one from the other new terminology came into being.
Aneta Mancewicz reflects on the notion of liveness.
Aneta Mancewicz is a scholar at Royal Holloway/ University of London
Her academic research focuses on digital media in performance, Shakespearean staging, and European theatre. From 2016 to 2019, she was a co-dramaturgian at CREW and published her findings in ‘Hamlet after Deconstruction’
Soulhacker Study
Summary of a pilot study (May - June 2022) on 27 patients with mild to moderate symptoms of depression.
Can VR be useful in the treatment of depression?
Yes! But only if it builds on effective psychotherapeutic strategies.
By Dr. Georges Otte (Brai3n) & CREW
Philippe Bekaert
It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of Professor Philippe Bekaert, collaborator of CREW and member of our Board of Directors.
Delirious Departures @ SIGGRAPH
A Manifesto for the Future Stage
We don't usually share articles by others, but this manifesto by the Future Stage group seems very much on point.
thetheatretimes.com/a-manifesto-for-the-future-stage-performance-is-a-human-right
A Closer Look at “AI”
In a previous article, we took a critical view of “Artificial Intelligence”.
In this article we’re going to take a closer look at applications of deep learning in specific domains, to see how neural networks can be of interest to society in general and specifically to artistic practice.
Movement and Embodiment in VR
When I arrived at CREW, Eric kept stressing the importance of free body movement in VR, to roam around in large spaces. I didn’t quite pick up on it immediately. Sure large spaces are nice, but in the end VR is about visuals and sound, no matter how you move about. After a while, I realized he was on to something. You see the point is not the space, but the movement. Our mind constructs space by means of our own movement.
Soulhacker
Which role can art and VR play in the treatment of psychiatric patients?
This is the premise of the Soulhacker research project. The artists of CREW, in collaboration with teachers and students of RITCS, will develop virtual environments in which neurologists and psychologists (represented by Brai3n, Dr. Georges Otte, Dr. Dirk De Ridder and Dr. Sven Vanneste) will guide and treat patients.
Avatar Research
To create more than just impressive environments in VR and to fulfil our mission of blending performing arts with digital technologies, CREW is constantly investigating ways to integrate digital characters or avatars. It is the topic of our Horizon 2020 research project PRESENT. PRESENT aims for photorealism, but also realism in a more general sense, which entails many other aspects, aspects that are often underestimated or even ignored.
Cosmic Flowers
For Coup de Ville 2020, CREW_lab showcases research inspired by the work of neuropsychiatrist Dr. Georges Otte and neurosurgeon/scientist Dr. Dirk De Ridder. Together with CREW they developed an environment where art, VR and biofeedback can be used to treat certain psychopathologies, especially depressions.
AI
There's a lot of hype going on about Artificial Intelligence (AI), with scaremongering in the media by tech icons such as Elon Musk. In the cultural world, the technologically gullible go off on rants without really knowing what they are talking about. The truth is AI, as in a quantifiable independent source of intelligence, does not exist.
PRESENT
With its participation in the European research program PRESENT (in the context of HORIZON 2020), CREW strives for increased interaction within the virtual media.
PRESENT wants to create virtual digital assistants and companions - conscious agents - that look completely natural, show and perceive emotional sensitivity, enter into a meaningful dialogue, add meaning to the experience and act as reliable guardians and guides in the interfaces for AR, VR and more traditional forms of media.
PRESENT is a project in the context of HORIZON 2020
Straptrack
On behalf of and in collaboration with Crew, Androme developed a scalable tracking system that allows users to travel a long distance physically and autonomously through a virtual environment.
Technologically, this innovative tracking system allows users to walk freely through a virtual space along a coded path of 150 meters.
With StrapTrack CREW explores the spatial awareness of the immersant, creating opportunities to deal with a completely different kind of virtual environment.
DREAMSPACE
DREAMSPACE, a three-year European Commission FP7 funded project, researches and develops tools that enable creative professionals to work collaboratively and combine live performances, video and computer-generated imagery in real-time. The project comprises some of the top entities from the education, research and commercial sections, including The Foundry, ncam, Stargate Germany, CREW, Saarland University, iMinds and Filmakademie.
xTV
xTV or Explorative Television (2011~2013)
Under the ICON-project CREW participates in research on new ways of experiencing and interacting with television. This project utilizes surround video, enabling the audience to freely look around in the image. The user thus experiences video images from ‘within’ instead of ‘outside’. Passive television might soon become a thing of the past, when active interaction and exploration of video becomes mainstream.
2020-3D Media
The 2020-3D Media project was a four-year research project funded by the European Commission under the FP7 (7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development), and involved 13 industrial, academic and artistic partners. As an artistic partner CREW conducted practice-based research focusing on the translation of cinematographic and performative codes in immersive environments and on changing notions of narrativity, presence and spectatorship.
New Media, Performing Arts and Spectatorship
New Media, Performing Arts & Spectatorship is set up by 10 European organizations to bring recent scientific and artistic new media explorations closer to European audiences. The central motor of the project are the presentations of Terra Nova in 9 European cities. It is a performative installation, using the newest technological media and evoking our contemporary networked here-and-now. It is created by CREW, a company of artists and scientists.
Productions
Delirious Departures
Delirious Departures @SIGGRAPH has now integrated the latest intelligent social agents, technology developed by Inria, Epic games / Cubic Motion / Framestore of PRESENT. The work was selected for SIGGRAPH, the premier conference & exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques, this year in Vancouver, Canada. The work is being performed at the Immersive Pavilion in the Experience Hall.
More on technical concept Delirious Departures.
In a time when traveling abroad is no longer evident and the nearness of others feels destabilising, CREW revisits the boundaries of substance and illusion with the installation Delirious Departures, transforming the Royal Museums of Fine Arts into a train departure hall. The place where travellers cross, say goodbye, make haste, wait. Where fragments of conversation, foreign languages, service announcements, a chilly draught, closing doors, footsteps, coffee slurping travellers and many other (inter)actions and sounds mingle.
The Unheard
Five robotized horns travel through the city in search of an audience.
Hamlet’s Playground
Corona put the performing arts on hold. Venues closed and switched to live streaming, cancelling the immediate connection between performer and audience. CREW elevates the online theatre experience to a new level. The futuristic production Hamlet’s Lunacy by Eric Joris and Mesut Arslan was transformed by Joris and his team into Hamlet’s Playground, a corona-proof interactive theatrical experience happening simultaneously live and online. Live actors guide the audience in a console game-like environment through various rooms, where historical documents and technology provide new insight in Hamlet’s conflict.
Red Dead Redemption 2
UAntwerpen en CREW slaan de handen in elkaar voor een avontuurlijk online hoorcollege.
Corona kluisterde studenten en docenten achter hun schermen. Theaterwetenschapper Kurt Vanhoutte maakte van de nood een deugd en sprak CREW aan om haar know how te delen in een bijzonder opgezet hoorcollege. Samen met drie docenten geeft Eric Joris les in het PlayStation-spel Red Dead Redemption 2.
Soulhacker
Which role can art and VR play in the treatment of psychiatric patients?
This is the premise of the Soulhacker research project. The artists of CREW, in collaboration with teachers and students of RITCS, will develop virtual environments in which neurologists and psychologists (represented by Brai3n, Dr. Georges Otte, Dr. Dirk De Ridder and Dr. Sven Vanneste) will guide and treat patients.
The View from Nowhere
Covid-19 made the theater -- 'the space where we breathe the same air’-- defunct. Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams were some of the few shared spaces that were left to us, theatre people. Instead of connecting directly from private space to private space, we aimed to create a stage in between, adding some kind of mediation. The View from Nowhere is a short online performance that will be using Zoom in an interactive and interpassive way.
Revolve! & Enacted Astronomy
Hamlet’s Lunacy
Back in the days of Hamlet the seven celestial spheres and their planets still revolved around the earth and the murder on the king –the Minister of God- made nature revolt.
By combining historical sources and technology in a futuristic theatre production, Eric Joris (CREW) and Mesut Arslan (0090) give new insights into Hamlet's conflict.
Straptrack “Do not be seated”
In Straptrack, an immersant, (a visitor equipped with video glasses, PC and headphones), strolls through a virtual sculpture. Meryem Bayram designs and activates the geometric objects of this sculpture, while Eric Joris intervenes in different combinations with drawings and recordings via so-called Motion Capture.
The Internet Trilogy
For three years, Urland researched the internet under the wings of the Theater Rotterdam Production House. The most important development of this modern era took shape in three successive performances. EXPLORER / Prometheus unleashed, the second part of this Trilogy, is a joint creation of Urland and CREW and is central to this performance.
C.A.P.E. Molenbeek ‘Everything on the table’
CREW wants art to move outside its institutional frameworks within the urban multicultural society. As part of the Brussels operation, we realized an 'omni-directional video installation' together with Agora M, Vaartkapoen. The screenplay was written by a group of Moroccan-Belgian women who are active within Agora M, substantively and technically supported by CREW.
Super Nova
Tijdens de tech show Super Nova presenteert CREW tijdens het Open Deur weekend een mix van live-performances en installaties.
Citizen.Com
Citizen.Com is an ambitious, collaborative experiment with a medium developed by CREW, the HeadSwap technology that can connect multiple people live in an intimate way.
Hands-On Hamlet
Hands-On Hamlet is CREW’s long-term pursuit that addresses key Hamlet- questions on how to be a moral subject and how one is determined by his or her cultural mind-sets.
The performance was created in 2017 in cooperation with the Dutch performance company Urland and partly integrated in the later plays Hamlet’s Lunacy, 2019 (with Mesut Arslan, Keez Duyves and Jerry Killick) and Hamlet’s Playground, 2021 (with Thomas Dudkiewicz, Jerry Killick and Nick Chambers).
Hamlet Encounters
Hands-On Hamlet & Hamlet Encounters (prototype of Hamlet's Lunacy) are the last steps towards the final production Hamlet's Lunacy. In this long-term pursuit art takes the lead again pushing the experiential potential of immersive media with an artistic project which addresses questions on how to be a moral subject and how one is determined by his/her cultural mind-sets.
Collateral Rooms
Collateral Rooms is an immersive live-art installation developed by CREW for the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2016.
C.A.P.E. Drop Dog
C.A.P.E. Drop Dog is a virtual performance inspired by two texts from Dutch writer and poet Tonnus Oosterhoff. State-of-the-art technology immerses the visitor in a different world and places the viewer in the heart of two short stories.
EXPLORER/Prometheus Unchained
EXPLORER/Prometheus unchained is a staged performance by CREW and Urland, a collective of young makers, in collaboration with Productiehuis Rotterdam and premiered at Krijn Boon Studio, Rotterdamse Schouwburg (NL). EXPLORER/Prometheus unchained is the centerpiece of The Internet Trilogy, a series on the rise, expansion and limitless promise of the internet. The World Wide Web. The point of no return. We are ON. Unchained. We are FREE.
Absence
Absence is a dance creation inspired by the tsunami in Japan (2011). The idea is simple: a woman and a man meet. There is a trauma. They move, they talk.
A scenic performance made by Eric Joris and writer Peter Verhelst, in collaboration with NTGent.
Tuned Senses
BOZAR Music Opening Night Festival 2015 with CREW, the BOHOstring players conducted by David Ramael, and with Christophe De Boeck.
A live ‘immersive’ concert with live and processed music in rooms adjacent to the live hall at the Bozar Rotunda in Brussels. In an installation context devised by CREW and Chantalla Pleiter listeners are invited to lie down on tilt-beds equipped with transducers. The experiment converts an initial loss of control into a heightened awareness of the body and gives the visitor a physical experience of the music.
C.A.P.E. Anima
C.A.P.E. Anima brings the visitor right into the heart of the Pastoral, offering a tableau vivant in which he can feel and taste the inner world of Beethoven's 6th Symphony, performed by Anima Eterna.
Celestial Bodies
Can complex matters like the historical explanations of the solar system be more easily understood on an “experiential” immersive base? Is it i.e. possible to collaboratively walk around in a solar system while embodying planets and making gravitational forces understood in terms of experience?
Celestial Bodies is a concept for using immersion and virtual production tools in education and arts.
Centrifuga
Interactive installation at Coup de Ville exhibition in St Niklaas, creation in collaboration with ChampdAction.
‘Centrifuga, 4 studies in scaling’ takes omnidirectional audio-vision to another level. The spectator has a choice of perspective by moving in front of the screens.
aXes
Two installations, two audio-visual spaces focus on the connection between viewer and image and play with our perception, our sense of perspective... In aXes, it is the observer who affects the image by moving.
C.A.P.E. Vooruit
C.A.P.E. Vooruit is a 25' performance created in the framework of VOORUIT100, celebrating 100 years of Vooruit, the impressive Ghent cultural house of Flemisch socialism turned into a lively contemporary arts centre. C.A.P.E Vooruit swings you back and forth between the here and now and the early years of Vooruit, when streets were buzzing with parades and marching bands. Join the parade, move on the rhythm of the Internationale and follow the slightly distorted beat of a band that seems to have been mutated through time.
C.A.P.E. Horror
C.A.P.E. Horror was created in collaboration with performance students of the Maastricht Theatre Academy. They take you along into an eerie world where it is dangerously difficult to distinguish reality from fiction...
C.A.P.E. KIT
C.A.P.E. Tohoku
NOHORIZON
Voor de expo SuperBodies tijdens de Kunsttriënnale in Hasselt selecteerde Pieter T'Jonck beeldend werk dat focust op de manier waarop ons lichaam onbewust vormgeeft aan onze ervaringen. De installatie NOHORIZON onthult een nieuw perspectief in de zoektocht van Eric Joris en CREW naar de vluchtlijnen van onze ervaring.
Terra Nova
A live art performance that combines theatre and immersive experience
Terra Nova takes us back to R. F. Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole, in 1911. Beaten by only a month by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, the English explorer and his team perish dramatically on their way back. Unfolding the steps and thoughts of the commander, Peter Verhelst's text plunges the audience into the debacle of the expedition. During the performance, each spectator is immersed in other bewildering realities. The spectator's own remarkable voyage unveils a universe of the ‘self', previously unknown to him: his own interior Terra Nova...
C.A.P.E. Brussels
Commissioned by the Brussels-Capital Region, CREW created the performance C.A.P.E Brussels for its participation in the World Exhibition Bejing 2010. During the visit to the Belgian pavilion, visitors discovered our capital through an unusual and artistic virtual walk.
C.A.P.E. Pierrefonds
C.A.P.E.
Would you like to take a walk, using ‘my’ body?
C.A.P.E. (Computer Assisted Personal Environment) is the newest mobile immersive installation of CREW, presented for the first time at the World Expo in Shanghai in September 2010. Come and experience for yourself what the future of cinema might be like! With C.A.P.E., we can shift your presence from one place to another in no time. Thanks to its state-of-the-art immersive technology, you can step into another body and walk around in a maybe far away city or a faraway time...
Bolscan
Line_Up
Is this the story of a daydreamer and if so, are his daydreams possibly dangerous for you?
Is this CREW's newest creation? Or is it yours? Is this the story of a daydreamer and if so, are his daydreams possibly dangerous for you? Step into Line-Up and find out. Line-Up is a follow up of EUX, a one to one performance using the newest technology in omni-directional video and a mind-blowing physical experience
W (Double U)
W (double u) is een interactieve installatie voor twee personen. CREW nodigt je uit om deel te nemen aan hun onderzoek naar de mogelijkheden van immersieve technologie. In W (double u) testen ze een set-up met twee immersanten op twee verschillende locaties. Via technologie word je aan je tegenspeler gelinkt. Jullie zoeken een weg in een openbare ruimte... maar kan je je eigen ogen wel geloven? Je gezichtsveld is niet langer dat van jezelf en je doodgewone wandeling wordt plots een gelaagde en intense ervaring.
O_Rex
An encabled tragedy. The mythological figure of Oedipus symbolizes modern man and his tragic fate. Oedipus is blind when he can still see and he only starts seeing when he physically blinds himself. He never succeeds in obtaining a central perspective on the world. In O_Rex the immersive experience is integrated within a classical theatre set-up.
EUX
EUX or to live in plural. Since Romanticism, the image of the doppelgänger is regularly used to depict the encounter with the self. He symbolizes the blurring of the distinction between reality and fantasy. Is the world that surrounds us a representation of ourselves - or is it just the other way around?
U Raging Standstill
U Razende stilstand is een immersieve ervaring voor één persoon tegelijkertijd. Het is de allereerste voorstelling waarin elke toeschouwer individueel als protagonist effectief rondloopt en op zoek gaat in een ‘transitionele’ ruimte. Dit is een ruimte tussen de echte en de virtuele ruimte, in een tijd tussen nu en vroeger, tussen echt beeld en opgenomen beeld. Het verhaal van Saskia De Coster thematiseert regressie en dementie waardoor de immersant het gevoel krijgt zichzelf te verliezen en bijna lichamelijk terug te vinden.
Crash
Crash takes you on a delirious trip through the labyrinth of your own head. Your senses are captured and manipulated by computers and cameras, or are they not? And then the question arises: what happens when your eyes coincide with someone else's eyes? What do you feel when you don't know where you are anymore?
Philoctetes
Philoctetes, bewerkt door Peter Verhelst en opgevoerd in een opstelling van CREW, bouwt verder op Icarus, een voorstelling die de idee van multimedia als prothese in het licht stelde. Ht lichaam van de verlamde acteur Paul Antipoff versmelt met een hoogtechnologische omgeving, zijn genetwerkte lichaam wordt symbool voor de dubbele relatie van de mens met techniek.
Icarus / MAN-O-WAR
Multimedia as a prothesis ...
With Icarus CREW introduces its outlook on multimedia as a prosthesis.
Audience and actor are located in a 8x7x4m computer cave which is completely controlled by the paralyzed actor Paul Antipoff. He speaks, draws, 'acts' through a computer interface which he can manipulate by his tongue, his chin and a laser attached on his forehead
Beta_Icarus 1, 2, 3, 4
1999 Beta_Icarus 1, 2, 3 and 4
The Bêta-projects served as preliminary studies for Icarus/MAN-O-WAR.
A first preview (1999) of Bêta_Icarus was shown during De Nachten in deSingel: a combination of live body scans, music by Peter Swinnen and the SuckmyP-texts by Peter Verhelst.
Kaufhaus Inferno
Those who press enter, abandon all hope
Kaufhaus Inferno is based on La Divina Comedia, written by Dante in 1314. It consists of and connects a newspaper comic (in De Morgen), an interactive website, a live performance, a book and an exposition.