29 October 2026, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
Organised by the INTERMATTER and THINKING TOOLS research groups with Sarah Lugthart, Helen Bledsoe, Alexandra Dementieva, and Emmanuel Van der Auwera
What does it mean to be present in a world where bodies, images, voices and identities can appear without physically being there?
Digital technologies increasingly complicate the distinction between presence and absence. A person can persist as data, an image can act upon us without referring to something that is physically present, and artificial systems can speak, generate and respond without occupying a body of their own. At the same time, technologies can render people, histories and infrastructures invisible, determining what enters our field of attention and what remains outside it.
Beyond Binary II invites artists, thinkers, and researchers whose practice approaches presence and absence not as opposites, but as entangled conditions. Presence always contains forms of absence, just as what is absent can continue to exert influence, produce meaning or demand attention. Between material and virtual, human and machine, visibility and invisibility, presence becomes relational rather than fixed.
Through artistic and technological perspectives, Beyond Binary II explores these unstable boundaries. How do technologies reshape what it means to appear, disappear, remain or be remembered? And what new forms of presence emerge when we move beyond the assumption that something must simply be either here or not here?
, the interactive installation by Frankie Anh Le on view at the Lange Zaal, makes the seminar’s theme tangible by showing how presence is not a fixed state, but something that continuously reshapes the space, boundaries, and conditions shared with others.
Practical
- 29 October 2026, 13:30 - 17:00
- Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
- Language: English
- Registration link coming soon
This symposium is part of Art x Research x City -ARIA's month for Research in the Arts- and research festival