surprise me + only idm & experimental + art & exhibitions + only ambient + only thursday + at night
ADE picks
Charged by Jaco Schilp
Thu 22 · tba · 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.
Clubcult - Video Installation
Thu 22 · tba · ADE Lab Village Westergas · Amsterdam
In loving memory of Jelmar van Belle, who filmed these videos during the closing of De School and sadly passed away on 20 February 2026. In January 2024, the renowned Amsterdam nightclub De School closed its doors. For more than eight years, it offered the city a unique space where everyone could truly be themselves. Behind these doors, a world of expression, love, fashion, and identity emerged. Clubs like this are more than nightlife venues, they are breeding grounds for culture. The culture that forms around Amsterdam’s underground nightlife is shaped by people who cannot easily be defined. They often remain invisible to the outside world, partly due to the strict no-picture policy. Yet they are the ones who embody the color, creativity, and authenticity of the city. From this invisibility, CLUBCULT emerged as a creative collective who share the same passion for fashion, art & nightlife. During the final 66 hours of De School, Clubcult captured more than two hundred club visitors in temporary studios built within the walls of this iconic venue. The portrayed were scouted directly from the club; spontaneous, unfiltered, and completely themselves. The result is raw, intimate, poetic, and real. Alongside these videos, photographs were also taken in four photography studios. These images have been brought together in a 400-page photography book, available to order at johnnyblood.nl. The project premiered with an exhibition at Door Open Space during ADE 2025, and will be screend across Westerpark throughout ADE 2026. Credits: Creative direction: Maaike Bouwman JOHNNY BLOOD, Casting & Creative direction: Lizzy Bouwman, JOHNNY BLOOD Art Direction: Daan Kneppers Videographers: Jelmar van Belle, Dorith Mous Photographers: Barrie Hullegie, Lonneke van der Palen, Jorre Janssens, Tim Verhallen. Graphic Design & Art Direction book: Anne van Bokhoven Casting & Scout: Michiel van Maaren With special thanks to: Jochem Wertheimer, Leendert Sonnevelt, Nathan Kofi, Anne van der Weijden
Dreaming Babies: illi by Yoon Chung Han
Thu 22 · tba · 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
Thu 22 · tba · 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
Thu 22 · tba · 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 Art of Noise – Part One
Thu 22 · 18:00 · SPRMRKT · Amsterdam
For the first time, SPRMRKT joins ADE Arts & Culture, turning its 400 m² concept store and creative hub into a meeting point for fashion, photography and music. On Thursday 22 October, DJ, artist and photographer Dave Clarke is joined by Parisian fashion designer Isaac Sellam and Belgian fashion designer and DJ An Vandevorst to talk about the interaction between fashion, photography and music. Who and what inspires each of them? Where does the process start, and where will it finish? With An on the decks. The conversation is moderated by Jonas Zitter of KledingCast. Before or after the talk, visit Dave's exhibition Slam Bam! Must Click! : twelve monochrome portraits of artists, on view at SPRMRKT throughout ADE. Free entry. RSVP via the link.
Performance: Eloy Cruz del Prado - Working (Título)
Thu 22 · 18:30 · ROZENSTRAAT – a rose is a rose is a rose · Amsterdam
We start our ADE three-day performance program with Working (Título) | Cuddles are not enough, I need to be under your nails, sharing space with the dirt of your labor by Eloy Cruz del Prado . The performance points to a desire for intimacy that involves tenderness but goes beyond it. Through the sound of a waltz, a dance associated with coupling, but here danced with a hammer, and the words of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, in which desire, shame, and precarious living conditions are inseparable, the work treats affection and waged labor as entangled. The work asks how the material conditions in which we work and live shape the ways we love and care for others. What does intimacy look like when exhaustion and economic pressure are part of the relationship? Rather than separating love from work, the performance lets them share the same space, suggesting that care is never free of the conditions under which it is given. Explore more ADE Arts & Culture events at ROZENSTRAAT here .
Dome Concerts presents: CATCHING FLIES - visuals Julius Horsthuis
Thu 22 · 19:00 · ARTIS Planetarium · Amsterdam