Guy Van Belle

Gívan Belá (fka Guy Van Belle)

Born October 19th 1959, 10-12 pm. Sint-Amandsberg became part of Ghent (BE) 
and where the maternity hospital was, is now a well-kept lawn.

After studying Literature and linguistics at Ghent University (1981), he afterwards embarked on an artistic-cultural career with experimental music and art. With the group Stellingname, together with Herbert Van de Sompel and Philippe van Keymeulen, he was recording at the early IPEM studios, meeting innovative composers and musicians of that time. As an early computer, sound, and media artist he expanded this, teaming up with computer music pioneers, touring internationally with the digital band Young Farmers Claim Future. In 1989 he discovered Max at IRCAM on Miller Puckette's Next computer, got a quick introduction by Cort Lippe, and continued to record at the Steim studios Amsterdam throughout the 1990s. YFCF was invited to be part of the infamous Sonambiente exhibition in Berlin 1996, where the word Sound Art was coined, with an autonomous installation interacting with the audience through human language. From 2000 on, he toured internationally and explored collaborations in several technological artistic subfields: connected performances (with Prof. Akihira Kubota, Tama Art University and others /Society of Algorithm), autonomous bioartbots (with Gert Aertsen /mXhz), . He was curator of DEAF 2004 (Dutch Electronic Art Festival, Rotterdam), established a platform for internet performances at De Waag Amsterdam (2004-2005), published extensively about media and generative art, and participated in new media festivals with performances, workshops, lectures, establishing long-lasting partnerships and exchanges. (Amsterdam, Antwerpen, Athens, Rotterdam, Banska Bystrica, Barcelona, Belfast, Beograd, Berlin, Bratislava, Brno, Brussels, Bologna, Budapest, Bucharest, Catania, Den Hague, Edinburgh, Guijon, Hamburg, Iasi, Köln, Karlsruhe, Kosice, Krakow, Kyiv, Lisboa, London, Liverpool, Luxemburg, Ljubljana, Madrid, Minsk, Mons, Moscow, New York, Nantes, Novi Sad, Paris, Porto, Prague, Pula, Riga, Sao Paolo, Sofia, Stockholm, Tbilisi, Thessaloniki, Utrecht, Warszawa, Zagreb, etc...)

Between 2005 and 2015 he was artistic director of the ecologial-technological artspace OKNO in Brussels, for which he managed 2 longer term EU projects: TIK (Time inventors' kabinet, 2009-2012), ALOTOF (A laboratory on the open field, 2013-2015). Meantime he set up KRA (Kravín Rural Arts), a facility in the remote hills of Vysočina (CZ) where he invites international and local residents to work on an experimental eco-artistic-technological and social program within a new cultural view of a changed countryside today. In 2017 Documenta 14 commissioned a radio piece for their FM and internet art radio. Weather Reports became a 10-hour long piece, broadcast 7 times a day for 20 days, exploring current ideas from science, culture, and ecology into an elaborate composition and live soundscape. In 2018 he created 'Succour' a wireless, collaborative but displaced 6 hour performance for 7 multidisciplinary artists on the former airport Tempelhof in Berlin, as part of the sound art festival Dystopie, but set in the years 2059-2064.

Between 2013 and 2015 he wrote an ArtD "Backgrounds, materials, and emerging aesthetics for an Ecological Media Art" for the Academy of Banska Bystrica (SK).