Also this week...

T-MINUS 100 DAYS

📍 Antwerp, Belgium | 📅 24 - 26 September

Operating outside the conventions of the creative conference circuit, Us By Night is a festival where design, music and image culture intersect through direct, immersive experiences. At its heart is the Nightmarket, a dense, multi-sensory environment that prioritises participation over observation, bringing together installations, performances and interventions from various disciplines. The programme for the upcoming edition has been expanded to include a large-scale wheatpasting wall, a portrait studio, live large-format printing, curated screenings and interactive digital graffiti. Meanwhile, the Antwerp Poster Festival will introduce a scaffold structure on the Main Stage that will serve as a vertical exhibition and spatial intervention. Production updates include a new Stadium Stage with a focus on high-fidelity sound, as well as a continued shift towards more fluid musical programming where SO ME will be returning for a DJ set. Are you ready for it?

Europe 2031 reads like a warning shot wrapped in policy prose: if Europe keeps treating AI as a future discussion, it will soon become a dependent market with a refined vocabulary and very little leverage. The piece is sharpest when it exposes the gap between grand sovereignty talk and the blunt reality of compute, capital, and industrial capacity.

What makes it land is not the doom, but the diagnosis. Europe’s real problem is not that it lacks intelligence; it’s that it keeps moving like a region that still believes good intentions can substitute for infrastructure, and regulation can stand in for power.

The more unsettling reading is that the continent may already be choosing decline by hesitation. While the US and China turn AI into a contest of scale, Europe risks becoming the place that debates the rules after the game is already decided.

The prescription is sensible, almost painfully so: invest, coordinate, build, and stop outsourcing strategic imagination to slogans. But the subtext is harsher — if Europe wants an AI future, it will have to stop narrating one and start funding it.

DATALAND is the world's first museum of AI arts and digital ecosystem, where human imagination meets the creative potential of machines. Last Saturday, DATALAND opened its doors with the exhibition “Machine Dreams: Rainforest” by artist Refik Anadol, and will open to the public until 31 January 2027.

Catch you at the next front row,
Thomas

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