*Michel Van Dartel skateboarding at the competition on the streets of Eindhoven, taken by Maarten van Viegen. Image courtesy of the curator.*

Michel van Dartel (born 1976) is the Director of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media and Research Professor at the Avans Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (CARADT). He holds an MSc in cognitive psychology and a PhD in artificial intelligence. Alongside his work at CARADT and V2_, Michel is the figurehead of the Art route of The Dutch National Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, NWA) and member of the taskforce Professional Doctorate Arts+Creative as well as the ISEA International Advisory Committee. He also acts as an advisor and independent curator. As an advisor, he sat on committees of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), Taskforce for Applied Research (SIA), Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, Amsterdam Fund for the arts, Creative Industries Fund NL, Mondriaan Fund, Dutch Culture, Van Beek-Donner foundation, Willem de Kooning Academy, Piet Zwart institute, ShanghaiTech University, Festival Ars Electronica, Future Everything, the Nam June Paik Art Center and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre.

LUCIJA ŠUTEJ: I wanted to start with your transition from working in music to your curatorial practice. How has your experience as a musician and DJ shaped your practice?

MICHEL VAN DARTEL: It's funny because I never expected you to start with my brief stint as a musician (laugh).

LŠ: Starting off from a less formal angle is more fun! (laugh)

MvD: Yes! So, I'm trained as a scientist and worked in cognitive sciences, starting in cognitive psychology and then moving into robotics and artificial intelligence, particularly looking at knowledge representation. Throughout my studies and brief career as a scientist, I was always involved in arts and culture. I grew up a skateboarder, and still am to this day, a street culture with close ties to art and music, besides being a form of expression in itself. The graphics on boards sparked a love for the visual arts in me; I got involved in organizing cultural activities for the skateboard community and became an active member of my local music scene (e.g., as a member of the band The Rose Frustrates). That was my separate pocket of culture, nicely isolated next to my scientific pursuits for a long time. At some point, I moved from making music in a band to DJing, which was easier to organize alongside my scientific career. DJing was interesting because I could be responsible for my schedule rather than coordinating with others for practice and concerts. (laugh).

For a long time, even while doing my PhD research and DJing, it was pretty separate until I realized that artists were also actively engaged with the domain of artificial intelligence. Delving into it, I found more and more artists that were working with robotics and interactive technology. At the same time, I started becoming more critical and aware of the limitations of scientific modes of investigation. I was missing the type of excitement and interaction with an audience that I knew from my activities in the cultural domain. I was doing research that I thought was fascinating, but I felt that communicating it to peers and the outside world was very limiting! They didn't allow for exploration outside the normal trajectories in science. Gradually, I became interested in how artists engaged with some of the scientific questions that interested me - mainly questions dealing with knowledge representation in the brain: how we store memories and perceive the world around us.

While my PhD research was evolving, I became more familiar with artistic approaches to these questions and aware of the vast international network of artists, curators, and organizations allowing these artistic experiments. That's how I came across the organization V2_ in Rotterdam. When I wrapped up my PhD research, I felt ready to move in that direction, and by sheer chance, there was a vacancy opening at V2_ for a project manager, which I jumped on. That was almost 20 years ago, and I am still here (laugh).

LŠ: You mentioned the different relationships and communication between the science community, its audience, and the art community.

MVD: Just as I have seen the limitations in the scientific community after being involved in it for a while, I have to admit that I also see limitations of artistic approaches now that I'm in the arts (laugh). One of them is that artistic methods are flexible. Creative processes are often very intuitive, and there is resistance to being precise or towards descriptions and definitions. Although I regard its subjective nature simultaneously as the strength of this domain, as a trained scientist, I sometimes get very frustrated when artists make loose decisions based on their intuition (laugh). I often find myself being the one asking - Why? Why are we doing this? Why is it relevant, or how did you get there exactly? (laugh) It is the scientist in me. I believe you can get the best of both worlds by creating a space between them. Although I've witnessed a lot of naivety in attempting to create art-science collaborations because often the expectations projected on them don't hold in practice - I do think there is a lot to gain in terms of having relevant questions addressed by both scientists and artists and having an exchange of insights between them.

There's much for scientists to learn from artistic approaches and vice versa. That's also why I'm now involved in initiatives that are creating those bridges between the domains of art and science while trying to be sensible about what we can expect from art-science collaborations. As Director of V2_, I am interested in making research public, and I am responsible for positioning V2_ as a platform where those bridges between art and science can be made and to help everyone involved in making that happen. I have also added a few roles outside of V2_ that allow me to do this - one is as a professor in art, design, and technology at Avans University of Applied Sciences, and another is as a figurehead to the National Research Agenda of the Dutch Research Council (NWO). The latter is an agenda shaped around societal questions that researchers (including artists) should address. Besides art, the agenda also covers research domains such as energy and space, which have their figureheads.

*Michel Van Dartel interviewing Daan Roosegaarde during Test_Lab: Intimate Interfaces at V2_ in 2009. Image courtesy of V2_.*

LŠ: Speaking of V2_ - it's such a unique institution and a pioneer in digital culture. How do you see its evolution, and what can younger institutions working in a similar sphere learn from it?

MvD: It starts by asking questions that various domains relate to. Although there should always be room in the arts to ask questions that purely relate to the arts, otherwise the arts cannot innovate itself; from V2_'s position, it has always been very fruitful to ask societal questions related to technology. Questions on topics that we know are interesting to artists - because artists are working on them already or because there's a movement in that direction - yet that are also interesting to technologists (e.g., in terms of how to realize it)and to scientists (e.g., in terms of how to understand it).

And although we are not too concerned with “newness", we do seem to always ask questions that are a little ahead of the curve. For instance, V2_ has a long history of working on virtual and augmented reality experiences, now spanning three generations or waves of interest in this topic. People think it's a new technology, but it's been around for a while (laugh), and V2_ has made quite a substantial contribution to where this technology is today. One that we're at present also quite self-critical of.

If you look at V2_'s agenda from 20 years ago, the first questions we addressed predominantly concerned how you could use these technologies as an artist, what kind of experiences would become possible, and how those relate to traditional media. In its second wave, we looked at how to make such technologies accessible for artists to work with them. A lot of the early work V2_ did on augmented and virtual realities had developers create tools for artists to work with them as a medium - we were making DIY tracking systems to know where people were in a space and using experts in computer visuals to make that position coordinate with whatever the person saw. That's how we created these virtual and augmented reality productions - that was the first wave, just making it work, accessible, and exploring the medium as artists. It generated a lot of interesting work in the sense that it showed the possibilities to an audience broader than the scientific community.

A series called Exercises in Immersion with artist Marnix de Nijs comes to mind when thinking back to this period. It consisted of a series of groundbreaking artistic experiments, resulting in experiences that allowed an audience to take note of these technological possibilities and discuss their significance based on their own experience. For example, one of these exercises would be an augmented reality experience that gradually, without a user consciously registering it, would become increasingly virtual. When you turn around, suddenly, a wall will appear, giving the audience a sense of the difference between virtual and real experiences, and the discussion on what kind of future this will open up.

In the current (third) wave of research on the topic, suddenly, we're the partner in international consortia not researching these technologies for artistic gain by merely exploring the medium or presenting its possibilities but critically looking at what life in today's world with these technologies means. We commission artists to take a critical stance about this technology becoming a common thing in our everyday reality, asking questions about the ethics of, looking at who is excluded from their use, and whether or not that is a bad thing. So you see an evolution of work on a topic that at different points takes different things from science and feeds it to science, sometimes posing technical challenges to the technology community, sometimes taking things from it. That's a very healthy and symbiotic relationship.

LŠ: What do you think other institutions working in similar fields can learn from your work, given that the field is exponentially expanding?

MvD: The bottom line is that you should have your agenda as an institution and constantly iterate that agenda. We keep coming up with new relevant questions in this particular technology domain because we spend a lot of time internally talking about what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what an interesting next step would be. You can only do that if you take your own agenda and ideas seriously, and not just serve as a platform for those of others.

I see a lot of interest in the kind of work V2_ does at festivals, and increasingly from museums that don't engage with the work from a genuine interest in these topics they speak to. It suddenly becomes this thing you step into for a while and step out of, like a fashion trend that institutions hop on board with. Those fleeting engagements with our domain do not bring anyone anything worthwhile. I advise new platforms starting in this domain to be clear on what you want to address through the works you present. And, even better, support the experimentation and production efforts that precede their presentation

All the work that we produce and present are collaborative efforts with artists. As they also come in with their ideas and questions, we spend a lot of time matching our interests to theirs so that we can both gain from projects. I can imagine if you start a platform now, it's very intriguing to just see what comes in and do that, but you need to shape your own agenda and not let others do that for you. Also, if you have your own agenda, you're less prone to having the funding guide your way instead.

There's another interesting thing when looking at V2_'s history. When V2 started in the early 80s, there were a handful of organizations in the Netherlands involved in media art, but most of them decided to dedicate themselves to very specific types of media, like radio for instance. Most of those phased out together with the interest in the medium. Part of the reason why V2_ has been around for so long is that from the early days on, they didn't dedicate themselves to a specific medium but to characteristics in media or media technology in general. I would advise against starting an institute specifically for VR art (laughs).

LŠ: In your days as the curator at V2, you focused on wearable technology. It would be great to hear of your interest in the field, whose work has specifically intrigued you, and why.

MvD: My interest in the topic started from my background as a scientist, where I had been very deeply involved in the relationship between body and surroundings and how that plays a crucial role in making sense of the world. Although we feel separate from the world around us, at least in a cognitive sense, we are very much entangled with it. That relationship can be mediated, particularly through technology that is worn on the body - it can make our relation to technology feel 'seamless', which is an ideal that has been explored in computer art for decades. The moment in my career when I started curating a lot of wearable tech work was also when we saw that the ideal had suddenly become possible. For a long time, computers were just machines in front of you. In the arts, there was always this dream of connecting to it in different ways, but the technology wasn't there, with a few notable exceptions.

In the early 2000s, that ideal of connecting in more embodied ways with technology suddenly became possible. In a few years, we moved from sticking clunky computers to our bodies to imagine what this could be like if they were actually "wearable" to seaming Arduino into a suit and having wireless sensors stitched into garments. My interest in the topic stemmed from this desire to explore other ways of becoming connected to technology and of expanding our mind by extending our bodies through technology.

*Anouk Wipprecht presents her work Pseudomorphs (2010), Test_Lab at ISEA2010, August 2010. Photo by David Jonas, courtesy of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.*

*Anouk Wipprecht: Pseudomorphs (2010). Tech-couture piece, a dress that can be customized to the wearer’s liking. Photo by David Jonas, courtesy of V2_Lab for the Unstable Media.*

LS: How can the difficulties of communicating in the field of wearable tech be addressed?

MvD: In terms of enhancing the audience experience, there's always the risk in our genre of evoking more fascination about technology than communicating the concept you want to bring across. You should always make sure that the concept stands out against the wonder about the technology used. That especially goes for wearable technology, which can already be very exciting to just put on.

At the same time, I found this dimension very interesting as a curator:in order to properly experience wearables, you have to wear them. Many have seen Hussein Chalayan's LED dresses, often called Readings or Airborne dresses. He even showed them on the models walking a catwalk, when they were just finished. However, these iconic dresses have been shown on mannequin dolls. Yet, everyone understands that this is not ideal. At V2_, I had the platform to invite members of the audience to walk around the streets or engage with each other while wearing such artworks, which led to some of my most memorable moments as curator of V2_.

LS: Finally, you have curated exhibitions and programs for various media art festivals and biennials, such as the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. What did you want to bring to this festival, and what new questions did you want to put forward in both cases?

MF: It's good first to mention that we pulled the plug on the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) after its last edition in 2014. For two reasons, we felt a big international biennial in that traditional sense was not so relevant anymore. In the meantime, we found different ways of connecting this global community of media art-minded people and organizations than having to fly all of them in and sit them in a room. On the other hand, we also saw that the local audience for this type of art grew exponentially, and we don't need to create these big festival moments anymore to reach the international audience we used to rely on.

At the same time, what we have concluded at V2_ multiple times over the past years since not organizing DEAF anymore is that we miss those bigger moments in our programming. Moments at which we address a topic not just in an evening or in a discussion or expert meeting, but in all of those forms connected together. Of course we still make thematic exhibitions, and we often activate them through a public program on related topics. Still, we want to go back to also having expert meetings with professional peers around subtopics covered in exhibitions. We're missing the professional international exchange that DEAF brought about, even though we are a part of many international consortia and networks. Regarding the topics DEAF covered, it depends on which edition you refer to. The two editions of DEAF that I've been involved in as a curator were The Power of Things in 2012 and The Innovation Trap in 2014. The Power of Things wanted to communicate that the objects and things around us have ‘agency'. They actively contribute to the state of our world, and their “power” should also be taken seriously in improving that state. This position at the time was gaining much attention in various scientific communities. We wanted to use DEAF as a platform to show that artists and designers, in particular, have a lot of knowledge about and experience in how materials ‘behave' and, on the basis of that knowledge and experience, can contribute to the challenges we face. “The Innovation Trap" reflected on the problems that innovations bring about. We tend to think innovation is good, as it solves our problems, yet we overlook that most innovations also bring about new issues. Just think about how we ‘solved' the limited availability of fossil resources with nuclear energy, which we all know will create much bigger problems in the future. If you look at innovations closely enough, almost all of them create new, often more significant, problems. We dedicated an edition of DEAF to reflect on this, as our domain is frequently invited, or even expected, to contribute to innovation. We felt the urge to show that a major contribution our domain can make to innovation is its capacity to critically reflect on what an innovation brings about, beyond the thing it is trying to “solve”.

in conversation: michel van dartel

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in conversation: michel van dartel

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in conversation: andrea bellini

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