You could read earlier about ‘TRANSISTHOR’, the art project in which two artists from LUCA School of Arts will get to work in the oPEN Lab project area in Genk. In this project, two large installations consisting of panels with printed solar cells will be built in 2024, forming large visual artworks.
These solar panel installations will be placed at a nice, yet to be determined, location in Nieuw Texas and at the community centre in Garden City Waterschei. They will provide renewable energy for the neighbourhood. In a positive energy neighbourhood, which generates more energy than it consumes, every kWh produced is welcome. So, it is nice to know that even art can contribute to this!
What images will be on the walls is not yet fixed. To this end, Niek Kosten, Kristof Vrancken and Cami Laureyssens of LUCA School of Arts will first bring the neighbourhood residents of Nieuw Texas together and, under guidance, create beautiful images step by step for the artwork in their neighbourhood. They will do so in a series of three workshops.
The first workshop took place on Saturday 18th of November at the local community centre. The artists asked the neighbourhood residents to reflect on the past and present energy in the neighbourhood using beautiful archive images of New Texas and contemporary stock images. To get visual answers to the question “What will energy look like in the future in New Texas?” they turned to artificial intelligence. Future images with drones delivering meals to homes, a football stadium full of solar panels and wind turbines, self-driving neighbourhood buses and flying cars were generated by the software.
The next workshops (on Saturday 2nd and 16th of December) will work further on the outcome of the first session to eventually come up with an image that will decorate the solar panel wall in the neighbourhood.
Be sure to keep an eye on the Transisthor website for more news on this art project!
