Animal Club

Animal Club connects creatives, ecologists, biologists, artists, philosophers and other experts with professionals from the club scene to generate new concepts and develop new business models for a sustainable and biodiverse future of clubbing and culture.

Presentation, Workshop, Panel & Party Animal Club, Co-Hosted by VibeLab @ Amsterdam Dance Event, SEXYLAND World, 1 Noordwal, 1021 PX Amsterdam, 20 October 2022

Interspecies
Club

Animal Club investigate the future of clubbing at the crossroads of technological innovation and the pressing urgency of biodiversity loss. It focuses on sustainable future club cultures, fostering and stewarding interspecies co-existence. What will club spaces look like when they are designed as interspecies habitats for human, plant, and animal life?

And how will the ongoing digital transformation be exploited for new artistic practices in interspecies clubs which allows humans to notice and co-create with more-than-human life?

Animal Club creates spaces of radical imagination. We will explore how technology, mobility and creative practice can help clubs to assimilate within their neighborhood and biosphere, and how this will give birth to new forms of pleasure.

Concept

What will club spaces look like when they are designed as interspecies habitats for human, plant, and animal life? And how will the ongoing digital transformation be exploited for new artistic practices in interspecies clubs which allows humans to notice and co-create with more-than-human life?
Animal Club creates a space of radical imagination. We will explore how technology and creative practice can help clubs to assimilate within their neighborhood and biosphere, and how this will give birth to new forms of pleasure.

Animal Club speculates about future clubs as interspecies spaces hosting practices that incorporate the interdependence of people, animals, and plants. Treating clubs as interspecies habitats encourages consideration of the needs of other species in club habitats, creating ecosystems that consider rhythm, coexistence and abundance.

A hybrid approach that lies at the core of the workshop allows the technological to be considered in the context of the biological. For us humans, technologies can help to notice, observe, and collaborate with our biosphere in crisis.

Animal Club raises following questions: How will club spaces look like in an interspecies future? And how will the ongoing digital transformation be exploited for new artistic practices in clubs which allow humans to notice and collaborate with more-than-human life?

Animal Club creates a space of imagination that is decoupled from clubs’ everyday concerns, with loops of speculation that feedback into existing clubbing practices and their most urgent claims and demands.

Animal Club – connects creatives, ecologists, biologists, artists, philosophers and other experts with professionals from the club scene to generate new concepts, radical practices, and futuristic business models for more-than-human events. Clubs are addressed as environments for creating kinship, fostering co-habitation by expanding, and branching out into multi-species clubs!

Animal Club explores and speculates on imaginative clubbing practices that could help us better perceive, understand, empathize, and interact with our complex and endangered habitats. This would help to transcend the superficial anthropocentric view (us humans being the central and most important species in the universe), which is the root of the problems created by human activity in the ecosphere, redefining leisure and entertainment. Making the entanglements, and interdependencies perceivable through collective multi-modal experiences could support a more intense, empathetic emotional bond to our environment. It would also provide for a richer experience (of our worlds) in clubs. The workshop develops scenarios on a multiplicity of scales – the nano-, the medium-, the macro-level – as well as the scaleless:

Animal Club addresses the spatial aspects of clubs in their physical embeddings as multispecies environments that host multiple habitats and cater also to non-human needs. It interrogates the sustainability of clubbing culture and invites discussions on how clubbing can become a landscape that fosters more empathetic relationships to our environment.

Animal Club also speculates on combined hybrid tools for clubbing, enhancing perception of our complex worlds by integrating digital suggestions and inputs accounting for other-than-human narratives. Such remote digitally supported technologies enable non-invasive, hands-off co-experiences of leisure.

This could improve ecological consciousness through sonic and visual representations of eco-physiological data and through mappings and amplifications of, for instance, endangered species or with drought-induced stress sounds of plants, thus making environmental crises experienceable directly acoustically.

Remote technologies could not only merely convey what an “Ecosystem” clubbing looks, feels, sounds like, but allow for sounds, images and suggestions to be integrated and re-interpreted in evocative “Hybrid Dance Scapes” for humans, too, by e.g. projecting live-captured images, overlaying recorded pictures of dances of insects or birds, using sounds sampled from whales or crickets.

Animal Club addresses the time-related aspects, especially those related to nighttime, to nocturnal life and landscapes, as a reserve for human and non-human ‘wildlife’. How does the everyday morph at night, and how does this affect beings’ relationship with such otherwise all-too-known landscapes? What’s to be preserved, in the undercurrent of nighttime encounters and stories?

And night is not only a space of interspecies conflicts but also a theater of multispecies performances, for example, with the songs of the nightingale or of the robin redhead singing at night attracted by the artificial light or the dances of the bats, creating an acoustic and visual experience space.

The workshops also offers the space to explore through music sets other timely aspects as of the concept of tempo and frequency, and how trees and plants are situated and grow along a radically longer-term tempo compared to humans and other animals.

Animal Club contemplates ways to expand and enrich perception by mirroring and projecting how animals perceive the surrounding environment through their senses. How does our perception change, when we’re truly able to see through each other’s eyes, and hear through each other’s ears?

Animal Club also speculates about hatching ‘next’ natures that merge the technological and the biological, developing new hybrid species and Artificial Life tools to understand and manage human and non-human populations and crowds.

Animal Club draws on the history of clubbing culture, from the raves as “Temporary Autonomous Zones”, free zones of land, time, and imagination, to mobile clubs adapting to the ever-changing urban environments, to clubs rooted in and relating to their surroundings. It takes these developments from autonomy to cohabitation further by embedding them in a broader habitat towards healthy interspecies co-existence, solidarity, and care. As such, clubs emerge as an environment for creating kinship, and they do so by expanding, and branching out into a multi-species club.

Artificial Intelligence

Animal Club uses innovative Artificial Intelligence to generate future visions enabling a groundbreaking method for creating concepts.
Thomas Haferlach, CEO and Caroline Barrueco, CPO of pollinations.ai provided this Artificial Intelligence method for instant visual concepts generated by the input of participants during Animal Club workshop.

AI generated image by Thomash Haferlach @ pollinations.ai

Program

Co-Hosted by VibeLab
Presentation & Workshop, Panel & Party
@ Amsterdam Dance Event & SEXYLAND World
Amsterdam
16.00-24.00, 20 October 2022

Moderators

Prof. Elizabeth Sikiaridi, Prof. Frans Vogelaar, Hybrid Space Lab

Organizers

VibeLab and Hybrid Space Lab are inviting experts of the tech industry, urban development, investors as well as nightlife stakeholders for Club Futures first workshop Animal Club which is held during  Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) at SEXYLAND World in Amsterdam on 20th October 2022 from 16.00-24.00.

Amsterdam Dance Event

Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) is one of the most upfront, influential and educational gathering for electronic music and its industry. With its conference, festival and educational breeding ground, ADE is able to create not only the biggest yearly industry tent-pole moment, but also a solid foundation for future generations of electronic music professionals. The event attracts across its multidisciplinary program; for five days and nights.

SEXYLAND World

SEXYLAND World is a cul­tural club­house for cre­ative life with con­tin­u­ous pro­gram­ming in Am­s­ter­dam.
A place where free space and shared own­er­ship have been taken to a higher level by giv­ing dif­fer­ent cul­tural, cre­ative and so­cial ini­tia­tives their own space un­der the same roof.

Participants

Elin Ahlstrand, Neuroscientist & Neurotechnologist, Leiden, the Netherlands
Isabella André,
Global Content Manager, Pernod Ricard, Paris
Gerbrand Bas,
Industrial Designer, Secretary of the Federation Dutch Creative Industries, Amsterdam

Robbe van Bogaert, Founder at Eventsure and Nightlife & Events, Antwerpen, Belgium
Maarten Brouwer, Media Entrepreneur, The Netherlands
Axel Chalon, Developer @ Parity Technologies, Paris
Teodoro D’Amato,
Global On-Trade Brand Project Manager, Pernod Ricard, Paris
Matt Dicks,
Executive Director Music & Talent, MDLBEAST LLC, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Geert van Itallie
, Managing Director, Paradiso, Amsterdam

Thomas Haferlach, Chief Executive Officer, Pollinations, Berlin
Dimitar Hristov
Palmira Joao, United Kingdom
Eric Kluitenberg, Media Theoretician, University of the Arts @ Royal Academy of Art & Royal Conservatoire, The Hague
Lex LaFoy, Rapper, Writer, Radio Producer and Presenter and Creative Project Manager, Durban, South Africa
Hervé Laengel, Concept and Customer Experience Developer, Ingka Group
Mathias Lehner, Architect, Amsterdam
Viktorra Lotocka
Farhan Malik, Workplace Experience Manager, TZ Connect, Berlin
Nicola Morea
Nico Mulder, Marketing Strategist & Consultant, Amsterdam
Siem Nozza, Communication Coach & Concept Developer, Amsterdam Dance Event, Amsterdam
Joy Powell
Yasmine Rasool, XP Head of Programming, MDLBEAST LLC
Cara Reimann, Architect, Berlin
Santosh Rao, Policy Researcher, Uber, Amsterdam
Laurentine Pels Rijcken, Operational Director, Paradiso, Amsterdam
Pia Steinhardt, Interior Designer, Founder pinkful, Berlin
Alister Tuck-Sherman, Consulting manager, The (RE)SET Company, Amsterdam
Dolunay Uludag, People & Talent Intern, Riverflex, Amsterdam
Charlotte Ville, Creative Concept Manager, Ingka Group
Piet Vollaard, Architect & Architectural Critic, The Natural City &  City in the Making, Delft, The Netherlands
Dr. Robert Wendrich, Industrial Designer, Founder & Researcher Rawshaping Technology RBSO, The Netherlands
Thijs de Zeeuw, Landscape Architect, Founder of the Nature Optimist, Amsterdam
Jacobine de Zwaan, Senior Advisor Climate Neutral & Smart Cities, Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO), the Netherlands

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