Alex!
For years, years, at transmediale conferences and other (im)possible
occasions, I turned my head, there seated Alex... and Angelica!
He fought bravely, passionately through the curves of treatment,
standing tall.
at the year end, at the junction of a new year. the loss is tremendous
and heartbroken.
condolence.
sl
On 31.12.18 07:13, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
Alex Adriaansens, artist, curator and long-time director of the
Rotterdam-based V2_Organisation, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media,
passed away yesterday, 30 December 2018, after several years of
struggling with cancer. For over thirty-five years, Alex was active in
the field of art and technology, as an initiator, an organiser, and as
an advisor. His influence on many of us was enormous. He projected an
amazing, passionate engagement with art and with the ways in which new
technologies impact society. Perhaps even more importantly, he was one
of the most gentle, friendly and optimistic people I can think of.
This optimism, coupled with a clear vision and a strong sense of
urgency for what needs to be done, fuelled his work and put the V2_
Organisation, and many of the projects that Alex was involved in,
among the most influential initiatives in new media art since the
1980s. Now he leaves behind his wife, Angelica, and will be missed
immensely by many others, as a friend and colleague, mentor, and as
one of the guiding spirits of a whole international scene.
Alex Adriaansens was born in 1953 (on Valentine's Day) and studied at
the art academy in Den Bosch from 1972 to 1976. In 1981, he, together
with Joke Brouwer and a whole group of artists and activists, set up
the artist collective "V2" which became, in 1986, the V2_Organisation,
Institute for the Unstable Media. The organisation grew and moved to
Rotterdam in 1994, developing a regular program of exhibition,
performance, festival, workshop and publication activities, which it
continues after Alex, due to his declining health, passed on the
directorship to Michel van Dartel last summer.
In the course of more than three decades, many of the now hotly
debated topics of digital culture – from interactivity and virtual
reality, to social media and artificial intelligence – were pioneered
in exhibitions, conferences and book publications by V2_, under the
directorship of Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer. Alex was not an
egocentric leader, but a deeply social, collaborative animal who,
rather than insisting on this or that, stimulated things to evolve and
to happen. This turned all the projects he was involved in into
permeable platforms in which he would collaborate to achieve the best
possible results, piloting ideas and concepts which would often reach
the mainstream media and art circles only years later. The 1987
"Manifesto for the Unstable Media" remains a crucial document of the
critical avantgarde spirit that infused the early years, insisting on
the necessity to engage the new electronic and digital technologies
both aesthetically and politically.
For Alex, whatever the situation was, there was no other way than to
go on, to imagine the next step, to push ahead. In this moment of loss
and sadness, there is nothing better to do in his spirit. Pause,
mourn, and press on.
Andreas Broeckmann
(There will probably be a funerary service on 7 January 2019 at 11:00
hrs in Rotterdam.)
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