Intermatter explores the evolving dynamics between humans and digital technology through artistic research. Digital systems are designed to feel intuitive, even invisible. Yet the decisions behind them, and their effects on perception, agency, and interaction, are deeply complex. Intermatter investigates precisely this tension by examining how technologies mediate, shape, and sometimes obscure human experience.
The artists in this research group focus on the aesthetics, politics, and poetics of interaction. This involves not only how interfaces work, but how they choreograph behaviour, direct attention, and carry assumptions about computational autonomy and authorship. The name Intermatter reflects this orientation. It highlights what unfolds between humans and machines — the processes that redirect or intensify experience — while underscoring that nothing digital is ever truly immaterial. Data, algorithms, and code depend on physical infrastructures, energy, and material resources. This layered materiality is our field of investigation: a domain in which the digital can be exposed, reconfigured, and critically engaged.
Within this perspective, Intermatter analyses the pseudo-agency of technological systems — the impression of intention or sensibility that arises not from autonomous action, but from interdependent technical, social, and material networks. By questioning projected agency, it reveals how so-called “intelligent” systems embed particular assumptions and construct a sense of operative force through their architectures and algorithms. The research group’s thinking is informed by approaches that challenge human centred viewpoints and foreground the entanglement of humans, technologies, and matter. These frameworks help to understand digital infrastructures and data ecologies as diffuse formations that often operate beyond direct perception.
Within the contemporary visual arts, artists increasingly work with algorithmic processes, immersive environments, and infrastructural systems as both material and conceptual elements. Through artistic research, critical theory, speculative design, and transdisciplinary collaboration, Intermatter builds on these developments to create spaces that challenge audiences to reconsider their relationship with technology and cultivate a more reflective, imaginative, and materially attuned engagement with digital culture.
Contact:
Kristof Timmerman - kristof.timmerman@ap.be
Thomas Crombez - thomas.crombez@ap.be
Maxlab evolved into Intermatter
After ten years of experimentation in the rapidly evolving field of digital technologies and their interaction with the arts, a thorough reflection on the future direction of the research group became necessary. Maxlab’s legacy formed a strong foundation for a renewed vision. In 2026, the group was renamed Intermatter and is now well positioned to advance this updated vision and sustain its relevance in an evolving artistic and scientific landscape.
(image: NEO SEER (2024) – Mathias Mu, in collaboration with Marnix Van Soom, picture by Lina Van Hulle)