Metahaven's work spans film, design, installation and writing. Founded in Amsterdam in 2007 by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, the collective focuses on poetry in its cinematic, visual, literary and cognitive dimensions. Blending research with experimental aesthetics, they work with jacquard textiles and embroideries, treating them as film stills and thought experiments.

Daniel van der Velden will be in conversation with Giulia Colletti on Wednesday, 26 May, at 18.30 at Scenario Pubblico in Catania (map), Daniel van der Velden talks with Giulia Colletti. 

The event is organized within the framework of Master CVAD and NIMI Project.

Metahaven has used poetry to form a linkage between art and science, like in the film work “Capture”, or as a way to question the mapping between language and feeling, like in “The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)”, based on a poetry collection by Eugene Ostashevsky. Metahaven recently co-authored “Latent Spacecraft: Brains, GANs, Finnegans” with Nina Beguš, Gašper Beguš, and Riccardo Petrini. This project combines an exploration of the unobserved vector space of neural network language models with a reinterpretation of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” Metahaven have presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia, Kyiv; e-flux, New York, and State of Concept Athens, among others. They have participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; the Gwangju Biennale; the Sharjah Biennial; Ghost: 2561, Bangkok, and many others. Their films have been screened at IFFR, Docs Against Gravity, CPH:DOX, the Museo Reina Sofía, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Their work is in several international museum and private collections, including the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Sharjah Art Foundation, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Victoria & Albert Museum, M HKA, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at DAE.

The event is part of the NIMI Project — La Nuova Intelligenza del Made in Italy — funded by the European Union Next Generation EU (NGEU) for the internationalisation of AFAM Higher Education Institutions, under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) Mission 4, Component 1, Investment 3.4, Sub-Investment T5. CUP: H37G24000080001.