AiR - Artist in Residence
Marijn Bril
Marijn Bril is a media art curator and researcher. With an interest in digital culture in all its complexity and absurdity, she explores topics such as networked image culture, digital metaphors, and human labour and productivity in the face of technology. She reflects upon these predominantly through curated programs, publications, and interventions in the exhibition space.
Watch Me Work presents three fictional characters – based on interviews with workers – who respond to MyAnalytics’ wellbeing monitoring. After working hours, the characters repeatedly send MyAnalytics e-mail updates as they anxiously try to keep up with tasks - sometimes falling asleep, only to be woken up again by notifications. Tired, overwhelmed, and overworked, their mails give overly detailed reports, insights into their thoughts and moods, or reveal attempts at outsmarting their algorithmic boss. By emphasising the quantification of labour, Watch Me Work questions (meaningless) productivity at the expense of actually wellbeing. The project was realized in collaboration with Werktank/Leuven and Impakt/Utrecht.
go to: Watch Me Work
Privacy Salon takes a peculiar position rooted both in a vast network of privacy and data protection professional (CPDP) on the one hand and a large network of international artists (Privacytopia) on the other. Since 2020, Privacy Salon started inviting artists for a residency program (AiR). Unlike similar programs, this one is not limited in time nor space. It is rather an exchange of knowledge between the artists and selected organisations from the CPDP network. For an indefinite time, the artists are welcomed in the realm of companies, research groups or NGO's.
If you would like to receive more information about AiR, please send us an email at info@privacysalon.org
Jan Kempenaers
Jan Kempenaers (BE, 1968) lives and works in Antwerp. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. He has been affiliated with the KASK School of Arts in Ghent since 2006.
Since the mid-eighties, Kempenaers has been photographing urban & natural landscapes, architectures, as well as monuments. In 2012, he completed a PhD in the visual arts about the picturesque. His most recent book Belgian Colonial Monuments is published by Roma Publications.
During his residency at AiR/Privacytopia, Jan Kempenaers is looking at functional architecture for contemporary media and communication infrastructure, in particular data traffic. How does the virtual world translate spatially? He investigates how this infrastructure takes over public space, what the effects are on spatial planning and what the impact on the landscape is or will be.
Emmanuel Van der Auwera
Emmanuel Van der Auwera (°1982) is a Belgian visual artist who lives and works in Brussels. With his films, VideoSculptures, conceptual projects and spatial installations, Van der Auwera explores the use of conceptual and form filters in the production and dissemination of visual material in order to expose the simulation and framing of messages within our society.
At AiR/Privacytopia, Emmanuel Van der Auwera is collaborating with EDEN/Europol to research futuristic narratives in online and digital crime control.
photo (c) Jean-Pierre Stoop
In collaboration with EDEN/Europol:
Maarten Inghels
Maarten Inghels (b. 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet and writer who does not limit himself to paper. His novel The miracle of Belgium, about his experiences with the biggest con man in the world, was published in 2021.
Besides four collections of poetry, Inghels also published ‘The Invisible Route’, a map for the pedestrian to cross the city without being seen by camera’s. The map shows the extended network of camera’s in Antwerp and the last and only route to remain invisible in the controlled public space. The Invisible Route plays upon earlier motives of Maarten Inghels’s work: the friction between the public and the private and the art of disappearing.
During the AiR, Maarten Inghels now wants to design his own thieves code that provides information about the privacy of the inhabitant or more poetic and useless tales. Examples: windy street, here lives a rich man, they have a camera system, these are night people, she is a reader, this house believes in science, dangerous cat, etcetera. The artist collects this information by peeking inside (‘this person has a lot of books’) or talking to the inhabitants (‘this person welcomes strangers’). He marks the code with temporary ink on the street or house and he publishes a dictionary for his thieves code.
With this art work, Inghels can make the private public through observing the city. For an outsider this thieves code is enigmatic, but who owns the dictionary can read the city in a different way. In preparation of this work, Inghels wants to research the fake news status of thieves code, the use of Rotwelsch through history ands the (accidental) marks that make a city.
photo (c) Joris Casaer
Effi & Amir
Effi & Amir are artists-filmmaker working as a duo since 1999. They were born in Israel and have been living in Brussels since 2005. Studied fine arts at the Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem and The Sandberg Institut, Amsterdam and taught themselves, much later, how to make films. Their work, which employs audiovisual media, performance and participatory strategies, is located in the blurry area between documentary and fiction, and is dealing with construction mechanisms – of identity, of history and of the artwork itself.
Effi & Amir’s work was recently awarded the Moving Image Prize at Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin 2022 and they are laureates of the Scam’s 2021 “Prix de parcours” for audiovisual documentary work.
During the AiR (in collaboration with Werktank/Leuven and Impakt/Utrecht), Effi & Amir start an artistic research called VOICEMORE, looking into the possibility of voice as multiplicity. As opposed to the singularity of the voice as attached to a unique identity, with this project they explore the potential of voice beyond identity. This is not about neutrality or anonymity which are terms that are characterized by re- duction, or removal of features, but rather about abundance, or overflow as a strategy. Artificial voices are often designed to fit predefined types, be it by gender, by region, by profession or other categories. Attempts to avoid these pre-existing and sometimes uncomfortable categories brought some inspiring developments, such as the Accent-less American Voice, or Q, the Genderless Voice. Both use the logic of reduction, of removing the characteristics associated with this or that category.
But what if we opted for the more, for the “both” instead of the “either or”?
What if, instead of exclude, we try to super-include?
Copy Planet/Andy Wauman
Copy Planet is a cosmic system born during the pandemic. Conceived by an intimate group of people made up and led by artist Andy Wauman, the multimedia artist Pablo Salafurka, together with tech wizard and game developer Jonathan Pugh, and artist, educator & curator James Ly.
The focus of the project is to produce fruitful collaborations with new media artists, designers, animators and sound designers to create high quality digital art that challenges current ontological categories of established ideas relating to digital and contemporary art.
While also proposing an urgency for the contemplation for a new spirituality through the fiction of “Being an agent for the Universe”. The project proposes new protocols for understanding one’s place in the universe. By establishing a radically inclusive, post-secular faith. Represented by the artists and their planting of poetical language into the virtual realm of the digital and the internet.
And as part of the collaborative aspect of the project, a big percentage of the profits will go towards affiliated charities in Indonesia that offers free education, towards underprivileged children.
Words by James Ly
Alexey Shlyk & Ben Van den Berghe
Alexey Shlyk & Ben Van den Berghe developed a modular system to build, adapt with photographic images, break down and reinvent model spaces. This hands-on methodology facilitates their research on the relationship between image and space. They capture their photographic and architectural experiments with scaled exhibition spaces and then edit and use these recordings in the final exhibition. The result is a continuous reinterpretation, which stimulates strong sensory perceptions.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is an independent supervisory authority whose primary objective is to monitor and ensure that European institutions and bodies respect the right to privacy and data protection when they process personal data and develop new policies.
In 2022, the artist duo has been invited by EDPS to reflect on issues of data protection and privacy and create an artistic dialogue to result in a number of site-specific installations in its headquarters in Brussels.
Artist website:
in collaboration with: