After three editions in Europe and Canada, which have helped federate a solid French-speaking ecosystem around immersion and fostered the development of numerous international co-productions, NUMIX LAB will hold its 4th edition in Brussels and Amsterdam from December 4 to 8, 2023. 150 renowned cultural venues, creative studios, distributors, property managers, local authorities and institutional partners from some fifteen French-speaking and non-French-speaking European, North American and Mediterranean countries will be attending (participants from the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Ontario, the USA and Morocco have already registered).
This fourth edition, co-produced by Xn Québec and {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES]is produced in partnership with Brussels Major Events (BME), and with the support of the French Ministry of Culture, the CNC, the European Union – Unframed collection project, and the City of Montreal., governments of Quebec and Canada, the Canada Media Fund, the Délégation générale du Québec à Bruxelles, the French Embassy in Belgium and créative NL.
To register and view the full program, click HERE.
1. What’s on the agenda for this 4th edition?
This year’s theme is hybridity at the heart of creation. It will highlight new forms of creation that hybridize practices and technologies, as well as new venues working to intensify their programming in order to open up to wider, more diverse audiences.
In recent years, driven by public and private funding, a rich creative ecosystem (design studios, audiovisual producers, mapping companies, etc.) and significant technological advances, immersive experiences have multiplied and diversified both in terms of storytelling models and formats. Thanks to the success of some of these productions, as well as the rise of players and solutions dedicated to distribution and exploitation, they are increasingly welcomed in a variety of venues: industrial wastelands, convention centers, shopping malls, converted heritage sites, public spaces, museums, etc.
Faced with this proliferation of formats, venues and target audience diversity, the immersive cultural sector is becoming more professional and is strengthening its position in two areas: the specialization of professions, on the one hand, and the need to move towards greater hybridity in creation, exploitation and distribution practices, on the other.
Day 1 (Monday, December 4) – Sightseeing (Brussels)
On this first day, participants will be invited to discover the Brussels branch of the Centre Pompidou (scheduled to open in 2024) and an immersive art exhibition adjacent to the KANAL -Centre Pompidou site currently under construction. The visit will also provide an opportunity to host a highlight on the cultural cooperation currently underway between France and Belgium.
Day 2 (Tuesday, December 5 – Brussels) – Hybridity of locations and business models.
This second day will focus on the hybridity of locations and business models. The various talks and visits planned for the day will highlight the ways in which certain immersive artistic proposals contribute to :
- Create large-scale events that encourage residents to reclaim public space and raise its profile. Feedback from Brussels Major Events and a visit to Plaisirs d’hiver during the day will illustrate what is being done in this area in Brussels.
- Revitalize, revitalize and intensify the uses of various sites, even to the point of transforming their destination: urban wastelands, places of worship, convention centers, etc. The example of the transformation of an abandoned urban space into an artistic and creative venue will be shared with the Bentway teams in Toronto. Viparis will present the immersive and cultural projects hosted and developed in some of the 12 venues in the French capital that were initially dedicated to business tourism and are now artistic and cultural destinations for the general public. Another international project, Milan’s MEET Digital Culture Center , will discuss how to create a cultural venue dedicated to digital.
- Develop new ways of reaching out to the public. Like, for example, the Bruegel Box at the Royal Museums of Brussels.
Day 3 (Wednesday, December 6 – Brussels) – Hybridity of creation and production
This second day will showcase different models for the creation, production and distribution of immersive projects. Various highlights will punctuate the day:
- Presentation of an ambitious immersive project at an emblematic heritage site. Cultival, producer of the immersive show Aura Invalides, created with Moment Factory and the Musée de l’Armée, will look back at the conditions of conception and operation over several years of this immersive experience offered at night in the heart of the dome of the Invalides. Particularly innovative projects completed this year will also be presented throughout NUMIX LAB by the Musée d’Orsay and the Cité du Vin in Bordeaux, for example.
- A panel dedicated to the production and dissemination of immersive experiences. This panel will highlight the hybrid logics currently at work in terms of production and distribution of works online (with a presentation by the German creative agency Ikonospace), in cultural venues (with a presentation byUbisoft), in public spaces (with the Canadian public art agency Wireframe) or in heritage sites (with a presentation by Fever and their show Eonarium Genesis).
- A visit to architect André Waterkeyn’s masterpiece : the Atomium (660,000 visitors by 2022). This visit will be an opportunity to share the site’s strategy for developing new collaborations, projects and cultural programming around the arts and digital creativity. A digital arts exhibition, Restart, which marks this strategy, will also be discovered on this occasion.
Day 4 and 5 (Thursday, December 7 and Friday, December 8 – Brussels / Amsterdam) – Hybridity of formats and technologies
The last part of NUMIX LAB will be dedicated to the hybridity of formats and technologies, and to meeting other European creative ecosystems that will complete the discovery of Belgian cultural venues, players and studios.
A panel will therefore be dedicated to the innovation brought about by the increasingly prevalent technological and artistic hybridity of both formats and technologies. Examples will be discussed at the crossroads of live performance and technology (in connection with the projects of the Canadian company Ex Machina by Robert Lepage), between collective cultural experience and virtual immersion (with the presentation of collective virtual reality projects by the Spanish company UniVRse such as Dali Cybernetic presented in Barcelona, Berlin and Brussels), between memory and Web 3 (Developing an innovation center to create hybrid and trandisciplinary creativity logics: the example of DigiArt – Samia Chelbi from 3D Netinfo).
In addition to all the meetings and exchanges planned with the Belgian ecosystem, a presentation of Europe’s largest cluster in terms of cultural and creative industries will be given by Cologne’sEIT Culture&Creativity.
Some of the NUMIX LAB participants will then travel to Amsterdam to discover Amsterdam-based creative studios (such as Canadian agency Thinkwell and a group of major players in the Dutch creative ecosystem represented by Creative NL during a networking session with the delegation). This will be followed by a series of visits and meetings at cultural venues: Amaze, Van Gogh Museum, NEMO, NxtMuseum, Rijksmuseum.
2. A few words about NUMIX LAB, a travelling international event dedicated to creativity and digital immersion.
NUMIX LAB is an annual international event designed to accelerate networking and encourage cooperation, co-productions and the circulation of digital works and expertise within the French-speaking world (Belgium, Switzerland, France, Maghreb, Canada, etc.). It is co-produced by Xn Québec and {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES].
NUMIX LAB is a hybrid community that fosters cross-fertilization between public and private players. With this event, our aim is to federate a community around digital creativity in order to facilitate collaborations between the cultural, audiovisual and technological sectors. It’s a way of initiating meetings and collaborations between three types of players:
- Creative professionals (studios, artists and audiovisual producers);
- Cultural venues (museums, art centers, public venues);
- Public and private financial partners (foundations, national and regional funds).
NUMIX LAB is a state of the art at the crossroads of a multiplicity of digital expressions. These professionals bring together all the new forms of writing and all the formats of digital works: mapping, digital arts, online tours, mixed realities, augmented realities, virtual realities, sound immersions… For us, technology is at the service of narrative and not the other way round. That’s why NUMIX LAB also brings together a diversity of narrative formats, from cultural and heritage mediation to live performance.
We have already built three editions by adjusting the programming to the issues, concerns and concrete realities experienced by the various players in digital creation – from production to distribution:
Each edition offers a variety of formats for discovery, exchange and encounters. Each edition is organized around a unique itinerary, specific to the host city. During their stay, participants take the time to discover innovative cultural venues, to inspire one another, and to forge links and new approaches. Three formats punctuate the days of each edition:
- Creators’ pitches: to enable participants to share their experiences, passions and challenges in a fast-changing environment. We also organize buyers’ pitches, enabling creative studios to better understand the needs of the cultural venues and institutions present.
- Organized B2B business meetings: Meetings between creators, producers, institutions and cultural venues to identify opportunities and create international collaborations. Upstream efforts by the {CORRESPONDANCES DIGITALES] and Xn Québec teams aim to create relevant matches and meetings, as well as networking opportunities targeted to participants’ interests and objectives.
Site visits and moments of inspiration : Discover the local cultural ecosystem by visiting museums, heritage sites, arts centers, etc. with their teams. Moments of inspiration and discussion to share concrete avenues of collaboration through feedback.
Inspired and enriched by these previous editions, our next trip to Belgium and the Netherlands will enable us to continue observing cultural developments and building a dynamic cultural and creative industry. To register for the 4th edition and consult the program in detail, go to HERE.
