surprise me + art & exhibitions + daytime + only idm & experimental + only free
Nothing matched only free together, so I dropped that and kept the rest.
ADE picks
Deep Seeing Currents
Wed 21 · 09:00 · ARTIS Aquarium · Aquarium · Amsterdam
As you approach Deep Seeing Currents by Olafur Eliasson , you are slowly enveloped by darkness and the sounds of life underwater. Layers of oceanic cacophony – whale songs, rumbling of hydrothermal vents, and human-made noises, among others – surround you, while the vibrations can be felt throughout your entire body, emulating the experience of pressure in the deep sea. Above and around you, lights flash and seem to descend like the hypnotic circulation of marine snow, the organic and inorganic particles essential to life in the deep sea. The immersive sound of Deep seeing currents is brought to life by 4DSOUND . The exhibition is located inside the ARTIS Aquarium and can be visited with a valid ARTIS Park ticket. Tickets are available through the ARTIS website. Opening hours: Wed - Sun, 09:00 - 18.00
Charged by Jaco Schilp
Wed 21 · 10:00 · ADE Lab Village Westergas · Amsterdam
Every person who walks into Charged becomes exactly that. A cloud of light gathers around you, pulled in by your presence, and moves when you move. Some people you meet in it carry the same charge as you, and so push each other's energy away. Others carry the opposite, and your clouds fold into each other before either of you has decided to merge. As magnetic poles repel, opposites attract. The work is about how we change each other's environment simply by being in it, positively or negatively, whether we mean to or not. Charging and discharging as a way of interacting between persons. The more people step in, the more chaotic it becomes. With only a few, it settles into something calm and connected. The visuals in Charged were built with TouchDesigner, while its eye uses an open-source AI vision model called YOLO, which has become the standard way for a machine to find people in a camera image. Its own creator walked away from it in 2020 because he could no longer ignore its military and surveillance uses. In Charged, artist Jaco Schilp give it a different job: it doesn't know who you are, but only where you are and how you move. No record of the images is kept. Technology born for watching, reimagined as a tool for connection and play. Jaco Schilp explores how these systems can transform when placed in a different light. Charged is a public light installation in Westerpark. It can be visited for free at any time of day or night during ADE week.
Dreaming Babies: illi by Yoon Chung Han
Wed 21 · 10:00 · ADE Lab Village Westergas · Amsterdam
The artwork “ Dreaming Babies: illi ” presents 23 special hybrid human babies , each with a different chromosomal anomaly, sleeping and dreaming inside their own virtual incubator in space, weaving stories through their unique identities. This project explores new speculative human designs, addressing humanity’s desire to create a perfect being through genetic technologies. Each baby’s story, generated from genetic data, is created in collaboration with artificial intelligence. Visitors can interact with the sleeping babies in real time by inputting sound through a microphone. On the screens, audiences can observe how genetic anomalies are reimagined not as physical difficulties, but as representations of more unique and special forms of humanity. What exactly defines an embryo with “normal” genes, and should embryos with “abnormal” genes be discarded? This AI-based installation reinterprets the genome not as an object of pathology, but as a site of imagination and mythology. Each chromosome—often associated with genetic disorders or congenital conditions—is reborn as a baby character with a name, an alter ego and imagined being, endowed not with deficiency but with a poetic and abstract superpower. By naming and animating what is often silenced or hidden in the shadows of society, the work subverts the stigma surrounding disability, difference, and genetic variation. The installation proposes an alternative mythology—where anomaly becomes another self, and what is called “abnormal” is transformed into a source of creative power, multiplicity, and beauty. This work is commissioned by Seoul Foundation for ADE Arts and Culture. It is a free public installation in Westerpark, and can be visited for free at any time of day or night during ADE week.
Heliotrope by Heleen Blanken & Daniel de Bruin
Wed 21 · 10:00 · ADE Lab Village Westergas · Amsterdam
After being cancelled during ADE 2025 due to the adverse weather conditions, Heliotrope by Heleen Blanken & Daniel de Bruin is back at the ADE Lab Village in Westerpark during the ADE week 2026. Heliotrope is a kinetic installation inspired by the natural phenomenon in which plants orient their leaves and blossoms toward the sun. The work takes this principle as both a biological reference and a metaphor, exploring processes of energy reception, tropistic behaviour, the atomic movements inherent to living matter, and the pulsating rhythms embedded within the natural world. This idea is translated into a mirrored installation. The mechanically engineered installation moves its blades, diffusing light beams, and reflecting its surroundings in a chaotic and refracted image. It explores parallels between manufactured and organic movements and tries to liquefy the barriers. Heliotrope transforms from day into night and back again, evoking a state of perpetual motion. In doing so, it proposes an artificial organism, one that, like its botanical counterpart, responds to invisible flows of energy. Heliotrope is a public light installation in Westerpark. It can be visited for free at any time of day or night during ADE week.
The Egg by Touki Delphine
Wed 21 · 10:00 · ADE Lab Village Westergas · Amsterdam
Part of ADE Arts & Culture, co-curated with Amsterdam Light Festival. Amsterdam-based Touki Delphine is a boundary-pushing collective of musicians, performers, and visual artists. They are making waves both nationally and internationally with monumental light and sound installations, built from recycled materials: taillights in FIREBIRD , turn signal relays in RELAY , wiring in TRANSMISSION , windshield washer fluid reservoirs and their pump motors in DRIFTING . Their latest work, SUPERDRUM , is constructed from second-hand drums, wooden branches, and car door lock mechanisms. Through their work, they create musical poetic encounters between humans and machines. Inspired by natural systems, the climate crisis and the idea of nature as a living whole, they imagine a future in which people, nature and technology collaborate rather than compete, and where waste can be transformed into something meaningful, alive and beautiful. That vision feels more urgent than ever. In a time of ecological exhaustion, technological alienation and social fragmentation, they believe there is a growing need for physical, sensory and collective experiences. Through their work, they explore how technology can not only distance us, but also reconnect us, creating poetic encounters between humans and machines. The Egg is a public light installation in Westerpark . It was co-curated with Amsterdam Light Festival , marking a first collaboration between the two organisations that brings together electronic music and light art. It can be visited for free at any time of day or night during ADE week. It will appear in the city again coming winter for the fifteenth edition of Amsterdam Light Festival. More information: amsterdamlightfestival.com
The Nature of Remembering
Wed 21 · 12:00 · W139 · Amsterdam
Initiated by artist Lawil Karama in conversation with historian Megan Hoetger , The Nature of Remembering is a group exhibition featuring multimedia research projects that move between interrogation of normative memory politics and co-experimentation with environmental and more-than-human bodies. The exhibition title carries in it two meanings: on the one hand, nature is evoked, drawing focus to actants, actors, and animacies beyond and beside the human, who witness, participate in, index, recollect, foretell, and haunt historical time. On the other hand, the idiomatic expression "the nature of" is taken up as a provocation, pushing against pervasive ideological and violently enforced notions of remembering and of commemorating. Running through all projects is a commitment to practices of frictioning: engaging technologies against their colonial grain, and lingering in the affectively, ancestrally, archivally, and forensically intertwined conditions of lived experience and knowledge production. Collectively, the works ask: Who, or what, enframes and enlivens acts of remembering violence, which have been rendered invisible, unspeakable, and unthinkable? The exhibition features work by Samuel Baidoo, Michèle Boulogne, Laura Fong Prosper and Tin Wilke, Lawil Karama, Aram Lee, Komtouch Napattaloong, Bart Seng Wen Long, and Kaisa Saarinen. W139 is open Wednesday to Sunday, from 12:00 until 18:00. Entry €5-, Students €3-. Tickets at the door. Explore more ADE Arts & Culture events at W139 here .
Swan Lake Remixed for ADE - Extra show
Wed 21 · 17:45 · Gashouder · Amsterdam
Due to the high demand for tickets, an additional Swan Lake Remixed for ADE show has been added. Classic ballet, hip-hop dance, electronic music and digital art come together. For the opening of 30 years of ADE, the Dutch National Ballet, ISH Dance Collective, Amsterdam Dance Event and Gashouder bring their worlds together around one of the most iconic ballets ever created. The story of Swan Lake revolves around desire, freedom and the tension between light and darkness. Swan Lake Remixed for ADE brings these themes into the present day. Because questions of identity, freedom and boundaries are more relevant than ever. Dancers from the Dutch National Ballet and the Junior Company share the stage with performers from ISH Dance Collective and guest dancers from a variety of dance worlds. Together, they bring ballet and urban dance into dialogue, creating a performance in which tradition and innovation reinforce one another.
Deep Seeing Currents
Thu 22 · 09:00 · ARTIS Aquarium · Aquarium · Amsterdam