Artists

Ditmar Bollaert is a collector and lanternist. He possesses an impressive collection, from which he draws to allow audiences to experience the authentic power of the magic lantern. In addition to his role as a lanternist, Ditmar taught photography at the Sint-Lucas Academy in Ghent. In 1988, he, along with his father Herman Bollaert and Annet Duller, co-founded the "Laterna Magica Galantee Show." For over 30 years, they have been presenting shows in both Europe and the United States, preserving the craft of the lanternist - a skill mastered by only a few. Authentic materials are used, including a nineteenth-century lantern and original hand-painted slides from that era. This unique group of lanternists gathered a team of collaborators engaged in various artistic disciplines, including theatre, puppetry, photography, film, and music.

For the Arts & Media Archaeology summer school, Ditmar Bollaert and his partner Els Prevenier are serving on the dramaturgy of Kurt Vanhoutte's lecture.

LUCA School of Arts - KU Leuven​

Guido Devadder is an artist and PhD researcher at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, where he also teaches at the Department of Audiovisual Arts. A fascination for the idiosyncrasies of obsolete visual media and abandoned modalities of creating and perceiving moving images is at the core of his research. Combining old and new, his work explores the materiality in contemporary moving image art and tries to formulate a meta-critique on the slippery concepts of reality and illusion through animation.

​University of South Australia

Deirdre Feeney is a cross-disciplinary artist and lecturer of Contemporary Art at The University of South Australia. Her research interests include the materiality of image making, media archaeology and the history of optics. Deirdre’s practice-based research collaborates across disciplines of physics and engineering to develop optical image systems. Her creative works are hybrid systems incorporating old and new technologies and technological ideas, from Renaissance natural magic to nineteenth-century optical mechanics. With a background in glass-making and the projected moving image, Deirdre uses materials such as glass and mirror to develop image systems that physically and emotionally engage the viewer.

​Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp

Kristof Timmerman is an artist and researcher working in the field of live, interactive digital environments and virtual reality. He has worked for several theatre companies, including the experimental CREW. In 2006, he founded the digital artist collective studio.POC with which he has since been creating theatre performances and installations. He chairs Maxlab, the research group on the interaction between art and digital technology at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He is currently working on his doctoral research "Sense of Wonder. Artistic portals between the real and the virtual" on the context of immersive experiences.

Sarah Vanagt makes documentaries, video installations and photos, in which she combines her interest for history with her interest for (the origins of) cinema. Her work includes films such as After Years of Walking (2003), Little Figures (2003), The Corridor (2010), Dust Breeding (2013), Every Tear (2018), Divinations (2019) and The Porters (2022) ; and video installations such as Les Mouchoirs de Kabila (2005), Power Cut (2007), Ash Tree (2007), The Wave (2012), Showfish (2016) and The Models (2024).

Floris Vanhoof combines homemade musical circuits and abandoned projection technologies for installations, expanded cinema performances, films and music releases. Translating one medium to the other to find how our perception operates and which new perspectives appear. 

Part of his practice is to carefully dose sounds and visuals. Considering how much to show or let hear and what to omit. Subtly overloading our perception so our imagination goes to work. Looking inside and outside. Creating small problems that put big ones into context.

_{Image: Mich Leemans}