Alex Adriaansens: 1953–2018

Alex Adriaansens, artist, curator and longtime director of the Rotterdam-based V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, passed away 30 December 2018 after several years of struggling with cancer. For over 35 years, Alex was active in the field of art and technology as an initiator, an organizer and an advisor. His influence on many of us was enormous. He projected an amazing, passionate engagement with art and with the ways in which new technologies impact society. Perhaps even more importantly, he was one of the most gentle, friendly and optimistic people I can think of. This radical optimism, coupled with a clear vision and a strong sense of urgency for what needs to be done, fueled his work and placed the V2_ organization, and many of the projects that Alex was involved in, among the most influential initiatives in new media art since the 1980s. Now he leaves behind his wife, Angelica, and will also be missed immensely by many others as a friend and colleague, a mentor and one of the guiding spirits of an entire international scene.

Alex Adriaansens was born in 1953 (on Valentine’s Day) and studied at the art academy in Den Bosch from 1972 to 1976. In 1981, he, together with Joke Brouwer and a group of artists and activists, set up the artist collective V2, which became, in 1986, the V2_Institute for the Unstable Media. The organization grew and moved to Rotterdam in 1994, developing a regular program of exhibition, performance, festival, workshop and publication activities, which it now continues after Alex, due to his declining health, passed on the directorship to Michel van Dartel last summer.

Over the course of more than three decades, many of the now hotly debated topics of digital culture—from interactivity and virtual reality to social media and artificial intelligence—were pioneered in exhibitions, conferences and book publications by V2_, under the directorship of Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer. Alex was not an egocentric leader but a deeply social, collaborative animal who, rather than insisting on this or that, stimulated things to evolve and to happen. He managed to create a mental space for free thinking and experimenting that not only could he use himself but that could also give such latitude and independence of thought to others. This turned all the projects he was involved in into permeable platforms in which he would collaborate to achieve the best possible results, piloting ideas and concepts that would often reach the mainstream media and art circles only years later. The 1987 “Manifesto for the Unstable Media” remains a crucial document of the critical avant-garde spirit that infused the early years, insisting on the necessity to engage the new electronic and digital technologies, with their inherent instability, accidents and chaos, both aesthetically and politically.

Alex Adriaansens had a mystical side, although I don't know whether he believed in something like an afterlife. What he did seem to believe in was a sort of anima of things, an animatedness of systems, including hybrid and technical systems. In that sense he most definitely lives on in the projects that he initiated and participated in, and in the people whom he inspired . . . and he lives on in the destruction and construction, in the instability and chaos that were celebrated in the Manifesto and which Alex helped us to learn to love.

For Alex, whatever the situation was, there was no other way than to go on, to imagine the next step, to push ahead. In this moment of loss and sadness, there is nothing better for us to do in his spirit. Pause, mourn and press on.