Conflux Festival – Day 1

WORM is delighted to once again host Conflux! Conflux is a new festival exploring multisensory encounters, urgent ideas, contemporary art and experimental music.

Full line up details and ticket details here.

Conference @ WORM (Central Station)
As the worlds of man and machine become ever more integrated, questions about the origins of consciousness have become increasingly pertinent – especially with the advent of AI technologies filtering down to enhance (or disrupt?) our daily lives. How do interconnected silicon-based intelligences with access to planetary sensor networks compare to the deep-rooted fungal nervous systems of our forests? Can sentience arise in embodied machines provided with the right conditions, and how should we classify such a consciousness? If nonhuman consciousness is a given, is it built on nonhuman notions of perception and how does that inform its understanding of the world?

This year’s Conflux Festival dives deep into the human-machine dichotomy of man versus machine with a multifaceted program that examines humanity’s complex relationships with artificial systems. Through multisensory encounters with these various artificial systems – be it hardware, software or wetware – within the artistic frame of the Conflux Festival, new channels open that can help us better understand our rapidly evolving human-machine world. By examining the ethical and social implications of machine-human interactions implicit at every level of existence, from our technologically enhanced day to day experiences to the breakthroughs in science and tech that will inevitably affect us all, Conflux Festival provides a fertile gray space for conflicting arguments regarding control and cooperation, exploitation and empathy to move towards creative resolutions.

With special focus on the (non)human experience of consciousness within the inherently human modes of emotional and intellectual forms of expression presented at the Conflux Festival – the art, music and ideas that have been created with, or deeply consider, artificial "machine" systems – curiosity abounds, dichotomies dissolve, and boundaries become fluid or redefined altogether. Explore this realm of machine hallucinations and poetic swarm intelligences with your own living machine fully open to the extra-sensorial overloads and alternate portals of perception spontaneously opening and closing during these four days and nights in Rotterdam. Welcome to machine living for an expanded consciousness.

13:00 Jorrit Paaijmans
13:30 Dave Murray-Rust
14:30 Nicky Assmann
15:00 break
15:30 Joost Rekveld
16:30 Laura Tripaldi
17:30 Claire Williams

Club Night @ WORM (Central Station + Foyer)
After the neurological demands of the day, by night you’re invited to viscerally engage in the techno-driven sounds of Conflux Festival’s two club nights happening at POING and WORM across two dancefloors. Plunged into darkness and sensorially deprived by strobe and smoke, surrounded by other bodies ensnared in the ritualistic human-machine interactions of the dancefloor, here the unconscious processing can begin.

At WORM on Saturday, the playful leftfield house of rRoxymore meets electro, industrial and searing "Mensch-Maschine" techno with Oliver Ho DJing as Broken English Club alongside Rotterdam techno veteran Bas Mooy, with a special performance by explorative techno artist Rita Maomenos and visual collaborator Cem Altınöz presenting "rvrs", an audiovisual project responding to climate disaster, societal trauma and the role of music in an uncertain future. Plus local support from Afra, dirtydms and Vox supreme.

WORM Central Station
00:00 Rita Maomenos & Cem Altınöz present "rvrs"
01:30 Afra
03:00 Broken English Club
04:30 Bas Mooy

WORM Foyer
00:00 dirtydms
01:15 rRoxymore
02:45 Vox supreme