Projects SI 28

The following is a collection of the projects conceived for the main event of Special Issue 28, that took place at Ubik, Rotterdam on 19^th November 2025.

Writing Machine Ensemble

Participants: Robin, Ema, Daan

Description

With the Writing Machine Ensemble, rhythm and repetition will be experienced in a radically new form. Explorations in Potential Musicality is a musical journey through the sonic qualities of printers—with a strong emphasis on improvisation, yet promising dramatic intensity.

Co-founded by its current members, is an international group of experimental musicians from around the XPUB Studio. Independent and idealistic, they focus on blending the role of 'instrument' and 'musician' in an assemblage of artistic creation, striving to find the essential musical quality in tools of writing.

Media

Performance with dot matrix printer, pen plotter, typewriters.

Gesture Machine

Participants: Valentin

Currently working on:

Experimenting with open source motion capture datasets in touchdesigner.

Description

N. Katherine Hayles’ Cognitive Assemblages: People and technology made by people performing cognitive functions together. Only certain technologies considered as cognitive machines: The ones are capable of interpreting information of its own environment and act on the changes of the environment therefore changing its own context which creates meaning.

Volumetric Regimes are the industries that keep the technology 3D representation in a close circulation, iterating the same technology over and over again.

As a designer and amateur animator I take the position to make a cognitive animation table and attempting to explore free software provided by the above-mentioned industry through the lenses of Hayles’ Cognitive Assemblages.

more info

Media

Hologram, stop-motion armature, human body

Keywords: gesture, non-verbal communication, body language, animation, stop-motion

-> Input -> Output ->

Input: hand gestures
Output: stop-motion animation

A story in a story in a story

Participants: Youjung Barbs Kiki

Description

"A story in a story in a story" invites you into an interactive narrative that lets you explore, gather and plot. Wander around in the virtual environment, pick up what you resonate with and that is what you take with you at the end of the day and becomes a tiny part of you.

Medium/Media

terminal, python, pen plotter, text adventure, fiction, paper & ink

The Calm Machine

Participants: Lea & Sibyl

Description

The Calm Machine is a quiet and cozy island in the buzzing and bustling of this event. Hidden away from the other stations, it provides privacy and a moment of peace. Come in, sit down, touch, listen and observe. We then invite you to go for a psychogeographic walk. Walking is a form of reading. Through the act of walking, you interpret and rewrite the city. You are a gear in the mechanics of the Calm Machine—by interacting, you make it come to life! Connect with your senses and surroundings, and perhaps generate a new sensation.

Medium/Media

touchdesigner, touchboard, sound, desk lamp

Marginalia

Participants: Luca

Currently working on:

Scripting pipeline to convert texts to graphs; Editorial research on specific textual archives

Description

Writing does something when published. Since the invention of text, it has functioned to flatten out a plurality of worlds from history, performing domination, differentiation and justifying violence. Marginalia takes selected texts in different historical contexts, and transforms them in experimental annotations engraved in canonical books. The resulting visual language communicates semiotics of displacement and a cartography manufactured by hegemonic world views. As a performance, layers of text, speech and distortion presents a writing machine as sonic warfare.

Medium/Media:

Laser engraving on books, laser projection, live sound

Keywords: Territory, Cartography, Text, Colonialism

-> Input -> Output ->

text->cartography

Water Vessel: Dwelling in Temporality

Participants: Soda

Currently working on:

Exploring about this city and all the Europe

Description

This work begins with my personal experience of living in Rotterdam — a city that is structured and rhythmically defined by water. Surrounded by ponds, canals, and rainwater systems, I constantly sense a condition of floating dwelling: a way of living that feels both anchored and adrift, stable yet impermanent.

In response to this environment, I started collecting abandoned wooden materials around the city. These wooden materials came from the furniture and wooden waste thrown out by the people living here, construction sites, and branches sawn off by gardeners. This act of gathering is not only a process of reclaiming the city’s discarded fragments, but also a gesture of re-dwelling — an attempt to reconnect with the material traces of the place. Each piece of wood, marked by time, humidity, and human touch, carries the city’s sedimented memory. Its textures and scars speak of erosion, adaptation, and survival — revealing what I call the temporality of dwelling: the sense of being-in-time within unstable conditions.

Through joining, sanding, and bending these fragments, I assembled them into the form of a water vessel — a wooden pool suspended in midair. The vessel, as an object, embodies both containment and permeability. Water gives the vessel its meaning, yet constantly transforms its surface and temperature. Their coexistence suggests a reciprocal relationship between dwelling and being dwelled: to inhabit and to be shaped by what we inhabit.

For me, this vessel reflects the experience of living as an immigrant — of existing between lands, languages, and temporalities. In Rotterdam, a city of water and migration, this wooden container becomes a metaphor for temporary belonging, for the fragile balance between stability and drift. It is a space where time gathers, where the act of dwelling is never complete but always in the process of becoming.

Medium/Media

Wood Sculpture / Installation Keywords: Fluidity, Temporality of Dwelling, Nonlinear Memory, Liminality, Fragmentation

Love Machine

Participants: Phillip

Currently working on:

Picture storybook, comes with slides different images using AI and using my own word to tell the story of my characters such as Clara.

Description

I use AI to write my novel, and then I use AI again to create images for a picture storybook. The prompts are heavily supervised by me, so it is based on my own plot, story, and characters. It includes original storyline as well, and some scenes in the picture storybook are not in my original novel.