STRP is 10 days of hybrid art, music, and technology for curious people. It takes place from 1-10 March at the Klokgebouw building in Eindhoven. The 2013 edition focuses on the contemporary relationship between human and machine, which is becoming progressively tighter thanks to our smartphones, social media, and smarter implants. This theme is explored in the City of Cyborgs, the specially built mini-universe for the renowned international artists of this edition. STRP offers a collection of exciting art on the edge between life and technology – often praised, but not yet seen in the Netherlands. STRP brings groundbreaking electronic music, from danceable, over noise, to mind wandering ambient. STRP also offers performances which touch upon the most abstract sciences or which bring a whole new, intimate stage experience. And much more.

Man and machine now go hand in hand. Often useful, sometimes completely useless: welcome to the New Machine Age.

Ryoji Ikeda (STRP 8-9 March)

Superposition is a project by Ryoji Ikeda, Japan’s leading visual artist and composer of electronic music, in which he explores the conceptual world of quantum theory. The project focuses on how we understand nature on the atomic level. It’s his biggest project ever and it’s the first time he uses human performers. Superposition is a spectacular combination of real-time content feeds, digital soundscapes and 21 synchronised video screens. The project is inspired by mathematical concepts from quantum mechanics and its intuitive and exciting music immerses the audience in the grey area between 1 and 0, where uncertainty and probability exist alongside of each other.

Ikeda is considered an ultra-minimalist who believes in the idea that sound and vision form a single stimulus to the senses, instead of separate ones. Therefore, he tries to deconstruct what we see and what we hear. Superposition is a mix of art and technology, which takes the audience on a trip to the indescribable structures which form the rule of all life. The principle of “superposition” is a difficult concept which tries to capture the nature and behaviour of matter and force on the subatomic level: as long as we don’t know where a certain particle is located at a certain moment in time, it is located in all possible states simultaneously. This is Ikeda’s point of departure which he gratefully uses to re-arrange images, sound, human behaviour, mathematical concepts, physics, and coincidence.

Ikeda brings Superposition to STRP on 8th and 9th March 2013.