[spectre] Alex Adriaansens (1953-2018)

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Alex Adriaansens, artist, curator and long-time director of the 
Rotterdam-based V2_Organisation, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, passed 
away yesterday, 30 December 2018, after several years of struggling with 
cancer. For over thirty-five years, Alex was active in the field of art 
and technology, as an initiator, an organiser, and as an advisor. His 
influence on many of us was enormous. He projected an amazing, 
passionate engagement with art and with the ways in which new 
technologies impact society. Perhaps even more importantly, he was one 
of the most gentle, friendly and optimistic people I can think of. This 
optimism, coupled with a clear vision and a strong sense of urgency for 
what needs to be done, fuelled his work and put the V2_ Organisation, 
and many of the projects that Alex was involved in, among the most 
influential initiatives in new media art since the 1980s. Now he leaves 
behind his wife, Angelica, and will be missed immensely by many others, 
as a friend and colleague, mentor, and as one of the guiding spirits of 
a whole international scene.

Alex Adriaansens was born in 1953 (on Valentine's Day) and studied at 
the art academy in Den Bosch from 1972 to 1976. In 1981, he, together 
with Joke Brouwer and a whole group of artists and activists, set up the 
artist collective "V2" which became, in 1986, the V2_Organisation, 
Institute for the Unstable Media. The organisation grew and moved to 
Rotterdam in 1994, developing a regular program of exhibition, 
performance, festival, workshop and publication activities, which it 
continues after Alex, due to his declining health, passed on the 
directorship to Michel van Dartel last summer.

In the course of more than three decades, many of the now hotly debated 
topics of digital culture – from interactivity and virtual reality, to 
social media and artificial intelligence – were pioneered in 
exhibitions, conferences and book publications by V2_, under the 
directorship of Alex Adriaansens and Joke Brouwer. Alex was not an 
egocentric leader, but a deeply social, collaborative animal who, rather 
than insisting on this or that, stimulated things to evolve and to 
happen. This turned all the projects he was involved in into permeable 
platforms in which he would collaborate to achieve the best possible 
results, piloting ideas and concepts which would often reach the 
mainstream media and art circles only years later. The 1987 "Manifesto 
for the Unstable Media" remains a crucial document of the critical 
avantgarde spirit that infused the early years, insisting on the 
necessity to engage the new electronic and digital technologies both 
aesthetically and politically.

For Alex, whatever the situation was, there was no other way than to go 
on, to imagine the next step, to push ahead. In this moment of loss and 
sadness, there is nothing better to do in his spirit. Pause, mourn, and 
press on.

Andreas Broeckmann


(There will probably be a funerary service on 7 January 2019 at 11:00 
hrs in Rotterdam.)