Projects SI 28

Writing Machine Ensemble

Participants: Ema, Daan, Robin, (Thijs?)

Description

Writing Machine Ensemble

Explorations in Potential Musicality

With the Writing Machine Ensemble, rythm 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.

Writing Machine Ensemble

The Writing Machine Ensemble, co-founded by it's 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. Since its debut in September 2025, the ensemble has performed once on WORM Radio, for the 5th edition of XPUB's Special Issue Radio show, where the group's unique live scoring method was born.

Members

Emanuele Arrigoni, Daan Princen, Robin de Haan,Thijs van Loenhout, Monica Olympia, Erika Model, N.E.C. (Dottie) Parson, Taxan X.Y. Plotter

Medium/Media

Performance (not naming the printers as medium is part of the concept)

(or, if possible, change formatting to that of a concert announcement, so no mention of medium)

Conversations with the curators

Keywords: Technical Assemblage, Live Scoring, Scores, Notation, Sound, Performance, Writing Machines, tools shape practice practice shape tool

-> Input -> Output ->

INPUT: Finger movements that originate symbols and letters onto electronic devices.

OUTPUT[S]: the same input text BUT on long continuous sheets of paper, thanks to the use of ink that is both being sprayed onto the paper thanks to the marvellous technical engineering of a head that moves horizontally, and imprinted, thanks to the mechanical movements of engraved metal rods hitting the paper. --> This sums up into Printing, and those types of printing techniques produces noises. --> Together, noises and symbols on paper, leads people to wander into stuff called semiotics, thoughts and imagination through the use of interpretation.

Gesture Machine

Participants: Valentin

Currently working on:

Experimentin with opensource motion capture datasets. Full body and hand gesture animation in blender as point clouds.

Description

Volumetric Regimes are the industries that keep the technology 3D representation in a close circulation, iterating the same technology over and over again, keeping the illusion of endless possible usage and slowly sedimenting itno many fields of application. As a designer and amature animator I take the position to explore the above mentioned industry provided softwares attempting to make stop-motion animation processes a more intuitive and less time consuming method. The project has different aspects that touches upon motion capture (mocap), augmented reality, and inverse kinematics in a form of an animation table.

more info

Medium/Media

hologram, stop-motion armature, human body

Conversations with the curators

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

-> Input -> Output ->

Input: keywords or trigger words to trigger point cloud animation (gestures)
Output: a holographic visual of these animated gestues (in a point cloud form)

A story in a story in a story

Participants: Youjung Barbs Kiki

Currently working on:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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

| Conversations with the curators

Keywords:

The Calm Machine

Participants:

Sibyl Zheng & Lea Binsfeld

Currently working on:

We want to make a cozy corner in the space of UBIK to rest and relax. It includes an interactive light and sound installation, that invites the audience to be more aware of their senses and surroundings. A "walking algorithm" printed on postcards then takes the visitors on a walk, to further connect with the immediate space around them. A narrative text guides them through the whole machine, trying to invoke a feeling of calmness and belonging as well as reflective thoughts on the experience of the whole event.

Etherpad

Miro board

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

• installation (light & sound)
• walking instructions printed on postcards

Conversations with the curators

Conversations with the curators

Keywords:

Marginalia | Textual Cartography

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:

Printed Media & Laser Projection

| Conversations with the curators

Keywords: Territory, Cartography, Text, Colonialism

-> Input -> Output ->

text->cartography

Water Vessel: Dwelling in Temporality

Participants: Soda

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 mid-air. 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

Sculpture / Installation

| Conversations with the curators

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.

Medium/Media

| Conversations with the curators

Keywords:

The Metathinking Metamachine

Participants: Tommi

Currently working on:

• From Zettelkasten to obsessing over personal knowledge management
• Software escatology

Description

Since the very moment I started XPUB, I have been (over)thinking, possibly obsessing, about the making of Pöuli, and of the (currently very incomplete) website for the Special Issue 28. Wholly absorbed by my tooling hyperfocus, I lost track of time. All collective conversations passed through me. Before I could realize it, people were forming groups and started working on their project for the main event at Ubik.

So Tommi, what are you going to do?
Ehm… … … … …
 …I will build The Metathinking Metamachine!

I genuinely had no idea about what that meant. In my head, I could not picture anything beyond the face of Niklas Luhmann, the inventor of the prodigious Zettelkasten system.

The intention was to address the theme of the 28^th special issue in relation to my own obsessions:

• A Metamachine: a machine about machines, a software made to solve problems, and interact with, other software.
• Metathinking: the process of thinking about thinking, better explained in the linked article.

At that point, conceptualizing, preparing, and enacting anything that would actually do something useful, or produce a meaningful outcome was unfeasible and idealistic. So what then?

Thanks to Manetta’s and Marloes’ guidance and suggestions, I decided to base everything on irony and satire.

I was kindly allowed to light some tiny candles during the performance, to enhance the ironic spiritual factor.

The one thing I was sure of was that I intended on focusing on a pseudo-spiritual and grotesque setting. I based all the performance on a spiritual seance to connect with the Gods of Tooling. Furthermore, while sharing my anxiety and my doubts about the performance with Martina and Claudio, I got to the conclusion that the whole performance should have been fun: I got very excited of performing some sort of nerd stand-up comedy.

Albeit the path leading to the performance has been extremely stressful because I was terribly confused and overwhelmed by the novelty of my first Special Issue and its many inputs, I am incredibly proud of it, for a series of reasons.

• It was my first performance. I never realised that I would actually define myself as an artist and this performance marked a watershed moment in my self-identification as one. Actually, the way I comfortably call myself is pseudo-artist.
• Even though I learned it the hard way, I deeply understood the collaborative nature of XPUB. I have been doing many projects with others, but I did not commit to any collective project to develop with others. I found out that I must actively pursue an intertwining of practices with my fellow students.

Medium/Media

Installation made by a series of drawers for archives + monologue on tools hyperfocus.

| Conversations with the curators

Keywords: Metathinking, Knowledge management, tools shape practices shape tools…