kurt d'haeseleer

Kurt d’Haeseleer is the artistic director of the Werktank, a production house for media art in Bierbeek, that has its roots in the former artist collective the Filmfabriek.
d’Haeseleer himself produced several videos and (interactive) installations, e.g. Scripted Emotions, Fossilization and S*CKMYP, which took part in international festivals and shows in Rotterdam, Tokyo, Montreal, Paris, Berlin,…
He also works regularly as a video designer for theatre, dance and opera and makes his own performances. He will create the videodesign for the Ring-cycle in the Scala of Guy Cassiers and worked with the likes of Ictus, Georges Aperghis, Transparant, Kollectif Barakha, Isabella Soupart, Jon Hassell, Annabel Schellekens, Joji Inc, TUK, Peter Verhelst, Köhn, and BL!NDMAN …
d’Haeseleer’s work focuses on the visualisation of the dynamic of information. He translates the all-encompassing presence of media into meta-images. Media presence is symbolized through layers of sticky pixel-textures, noise and interactivity. Special effects play an important role in his work that can best be described as a ‘pixel drama’ or ‘pixel soap’ and which can be found in the border zone between painting, video clips, cinema and performance. In his work the special effect is the message.
d’Haeseleer is well known for his extreme video manipulations. He manipulates images by forcing them to react to the parameters of other images. With this approach, he can only partly foresee how the image will appear. The result is a process that strongly ressembles developing analogue photographs, where it is always a surprise to see the result, or even alchemy, but that is in fact entirely digital.