Heleen Sintobin & María Boto Ordóñez
Ecology of Colour

In a languid summer, 27-year-old Taeko leaves the concrete bustle of Tokyo behind and travels to the countryside in search of peace and nostalgia. On the farm, she is carried away by the simple rhythms of rural life, and fragments of her childhood emerge - the dreams, infatuations and small disappointments of her younger self. In Only Yesterday, director Isao Takahata weaves a subtle and philosophical portrait of coming of age and the ephemerality of childlike innocence. The film unfolds as a tender meditation on who we were and who we want to be, with a rhythm that breathes like a warm summer breeze.

As always, Studio Ghibli's animation manages to reveal the beauty of the everyday in a world of colour. Matching the films affection for vanishing traditions is its fascination with Beni, a technique for distilling colour from the bright orange Safflower plant. The unique shade of green produced through this method is of great cultural importance in Japan and can be found in a resembling ceremonial and everyday applications. Before the film we will discuss this special colour method and its symbolic power through a short make-up tutorial.

This film is introduced by colour scientist Maria Boto Ordonez. Before the screening, we will watch the short film Beni (2016, Sasaki Maiko).

In collaboration with the Ecology of Colour research project at KASK & Conservatorium and Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Pigments are everywhere. From paints to cosmetics and clothes, from everyday objects to your food and drinks, they literally add colour to life. Unfortunately, the pigment and dye industry is one of the most polluting industries in the world. In the search for natural alternatives, Laboratorium – the biolab for art, design and biotechnology at KASK & Conservatorium in Ghent – went a long way. Here, melanin proved to be a fascinating track. In Z33, researchers, designers and artists present show their results for the first time.

Melanin is found in our skin and determines our colour. But what few people know is that the pigment is also found in animals and has a very wide range of tones. Think of the wings of a butterfly or peacock feathers. Because of the structure in the wings on which light refracts, you can observe different colour tones. Can these natural solutions help us in the search for less polluting dyes? Several designers and artists got to work with this structural colour and are showing their work for the first time.

From petri dish to design

Amandine David & Heleen Sintobin, together with scientist María Boto Ordoñez, led the research project at KASK & Conservatory and found inspiration for their work in nature.

1548 Pennae is a plumage of ceramic plates bearing the new colour melanin. Up close, you can see how each piece bears the structure of a turkey feather. This is no accidental find, but a tribute to an ancient Mayan tradition, where the turkey played an important role.

How does melanin behave on paper? You will see that discover this in Entomo Colours, a series of origami beetles based on endangered or extinct species in Flanders. Where a traditional insect collection dwells on the past, this collection tells says something about biodiversity today. Finally, with Coral Colours, they bring to life the impact of climate change on the underwater world.

Jewels on the wall

This is the best way to describe Ridges 1, 2 and 3 by Bram Vanderbeke. His aluminium wall sculptures show rhythmic lines and catch the light. As you move, the intensity of the colour changes, creating a play between the shape and its reflection. For her part, Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens is showing Future Forms of Beauty, where she manipulates transparent ribbed glass with a thin layer of synthetic melanin. One of the only ones in this expo, she She’s one of the only ones in this expo to already applies apply the this technique in her art. Finland’s Tiina Pyykkinen subverts traditional painting with Disguised Messages. Her mirrored panels are a play of revealing and concealing, where shadows of trees shine through.

Geometric connectedness

A floating kite adorns the exhibition space. The colours on its surface range from blue and purple, to orange and yellow. For this, Dimitris Theocharis was inspired by the colours of a flying flock of starlings. He based the shape on a kite from 1907 by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

No hard peelings

Humour and alienation go hand in hand with Dutch fashion designer Marlou Breuls. Where her rubber artwork approaches a cuddly human skin, the metallic blue-green colour enhances a strange feeling. The head pins she uses to hang it give it a sinister discomfort, as if looking at a skinned human skin. The headpins she uses to hang it give it a sinister unease, as if you were looking at flayed human skin.

Participating artists and designers: Amandine David, Ann Veronica Janssens, Bram Vanderbeke, Dimitris Theocharis, Heleen Sintobin, Marlou Breuls, Tiina Pyykkinen

Curator: Annelies Thoelen

Scenography: Woman Cave Collective

Laboratory, the biolab for art, design and biotechnology at KASK & Conservatory specialises in sustainable colour production. The research project Ecology of Colour develops a palette of structural colour thanks to nanotechnology. Based on synthetic melanin, a colour film is being developed to be applied to paper, metal, ceramics, glass, etc.

The research project Ecology of Colour is financed by the HOGENT Arts Research Fund.

Every summer, green algae cover the beaches of Brittany.
Every morning, human workers and backhoe loaders clean it.

The accumulation of algae on Breton coasts is generated by industrial farming that reject big quantities of nitrates in soils and rivers. The cleaning of beaches, done daily during summer, reduces the risk hydrogen sulphide poisoning created by the decomposition of algae. Cleaning algae becomes also a way to make questions disappear from the landscapes.Instead of treating solely visible symptoms, how could this pollution be stopped? How can we reinvent the relation between our agricultural model and our environment?”

From 10th of June till 14th of June Laboratorium will show its most recent collaboration with Amandine David. You can find the small expo at the Glazen Gang on campus Bijloke. 

Walk on the Wild Side of Technology – Past, Present & Future

During Flanders Technology & Innovation Ghent, visit the Winter Circus on 16 & 17 March for a unique blend of history, technology, art and wonder. The Expo features work by researchers at KASK & Conservatorium Valery Vermeulen, María Boto Ordoñez & Elias Heuninck.

Valery Vermeulen

• Making Music Using Data Stemming from Deep Space

Valery Vermeulen is a Belgian electronic musician, new media artist, researcher at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Antwerp and guest professor at KASK & Conservatorium. In 2001 and 2013, respectively, he obtained a PhD in pure mathematics in the field of algebraic group theory at the University of Ghent and a Master of Arts in music production at the city’s Royal Conservatory.

As an artist, his work covers a broad range of disciplines including algorithmic music composition, (generative) sound synthesis, affective computing, artificial intelligence, biofeedback & psychophysiology, creative evolutionary systems design, astrophysics, theoretical physics, econometrics and data sonification.

In 2021, he released the ‘black hole album’Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001, which received an honorary mention at the S+T+Arts Prize – Ars Electronica. For The Expo by ArcelorMittal, Vermeulen will showcase his data-driven Mikromedas project, in which compositions are created using data stemming from deep space and astrophysical simulation models. On a conceptual level, it deliberately balances on the edge where scientific knowledge ends and a speculative vision of reality starts to emerge.

María Boto Ordoñez & Elias Heuninck

• Mixing Transdisciplinary Research with Complex, Surprising and Disorienting Art

María Boto Ordóñez is a food scientist by training – she specialises in microbiology and did her PhD at the University of Barcelona. However, wanting to share her knowledge with a wider audience, she switched from academia to the art world, where she does transdisciplinary researchon sustainable colour materials.

Elias Heuninck, in turn, studied media art at KASK and draws inspiration from the aesthetics of scientific images. He works with a range of media – though film is ubiquitous in his art – and often uses home-made sensors and machines to explore landscapes.

He says he likes computers and machines for their accuracy and repetitive nature. Heuninck too generally keeps the processes simple and transparent, which is by no means to say that the outcome cannot actually be very complex, surprising and disorienting.