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For Next Level Festival in Dortmund, Creative Coding Utrecht (CCU) proposes a curated program of four projects that explore how digital art can foster new relationships between humans, technology, and the more-than-human world. Drawing from our ongoing research as a Zoöp, this program brings together immersive, participatory, and sensory experiences that invite audiences to feel, question, and reimagine their entanglement with living systems (biological as well as technical)

Walkshop by Niels Janssen

15/11/2025

How is Dortmund’s urban environment designed for non-human life? What species live alongside us, and what measures could make the city more welcoming—or not? These questions shape the Walkshop around the Dortmunder U, where participants explore the area as a shared ecosystem. In small groups, they use digital tools to collect data with their phones: capturing photos, videos, audio snippets, interviews, and observations of urban wildlife and their habitats. Each group then creates a “data story,” blending hard facts such as sightings, locations, or recordings with soft impressions, emotions, and ecological reflections. The Walkshop invites participants to reimagine the city as a co-inhabited space and to use digital storytelling as a means of making more-than-human perspectives visible.

Perplexity, laserwork by Ruben van de Ven

In train stations, shopping malls or city centres, camera surveillance has become omnipresent. Increasingly, such systems rely on AI-driven algorithms to identify supposedly “deviant behaviour.” But what does deviance mean when defined by algorithms? Perplexity explores this shift through a setup of surveillance camera, computer and laser projectors. The system continuously trains itself on the movements of people passing through the space, predicts their most likely paths and projects these as glowing traces right in front of
their feet. The logic is reversed: rather than detecting anomalies, normality is simulated. Deviation occurs when reality no longer matches prediction. Thus, the algorithm’s error becomes a measure of suspicion. Perplexity makes visible how routine movements shape the backdrop of public life against which anomalies stand out. By confronting visitors with the predictability of their own paths, the installation invites them to disrupt their routines and reflect on the relationship between watcher and watched. Presented at NEXT LEVEL,Perplexity offers an artistic reflection on surveillance, simulation and the hidden influence of algorithms on our everyday trajectories.

Webscape Navigation by Francesco Corvi (nesso) and Florencia Alonso (Flor de Fuego)

15/11/2025 19:45, Dortmunder U

“Webscape Navigation” by Francesco Corvi (nesso) and Flor de Fuego is a browser-based live coding performance that allows the internet to be experienced as a transdimensional space. Using a gamepad, the performers control a three-dimensional environment that visually and conceptually represents the web. This navigation becomes the core of the performance, transforming the act of surfing into a poetic movement through digital landscapes. HTML elements, UI components, and the live console flow into the aesthetics, exposing the technical layers of the internet. Debugging tools, normally invisible in the background, become an integral part of the artwork here. The transparency of live coding opens up new perspectives on the medium and shifts the audience’s perception: performance, medium, and audience enter into a newly defined dialogue. It is less about technical virtuosity, but more about experiencing a navigation that simultaneously exposes and poeticizes the digital space.

.drumcode by Timo Hoogland

15/11/2025 20:45, Dortmunder U