#2026

Still Unstable: 45 Years of V2_ – Introduction V2_ began in 1981 in ’s-Hertogenbosch, as an artists’ initiative with more conviction than resources. Its founders were drawn to the kinds of things most of the art world at the time was not: electronic media, industrial sound, machines that misbehaved. In 1987 they condensed that interest into the Manifesto for the Unstable Media, later reprinted in the Dutch daily newspaper De Volkskrant. Its central claim was as simple as it was contrarian: instability is inherent to these media. Where industry promised control and perfection, V2_ proposed the opposite – that glitches, interferences and breakdowns were not failures to be engineered away but the places where electronic culture became interesting, and honest. The decades that followed at V2_ read like a seismograph of technological culture. From industrial music and early electronic performance to cybernetics and tactical media, from artistic experiments with networks and telecommunication to interactive installations, software cultures and today’s debates on artificial intelligence, V2_ produced, presented, published and archived it all through every wave – usually before the wave had a name. Generations of artists passed through, as residents and rebels, as students who became teachers, as makers whose prototypes broke on opening night and whose ideas outlived the machines they were built on. Festivals such as the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF) made the institution’s name known in the field internationally; books, manifestos and posters – many designed by cofounder Joke Brouwer – carried it into libraries and studios around the world. Since 1994, V2_ has made its home in Rotterdam, and it is difficult to imagine a better city for it. Follow the river out of the center and you pass container terminals, refineries, wind farms and tanks containing strategic oil reserves – the material world that words like “cloud” politely conceal. Here, the fossil past, green promises and digital logistics overlap in plain sight. An institution that spends its days asking what technology does to society could hardly be better placed. Forty-five years on, the Manifesto’s diagnosis has reversed its polarity. Instability once defined the media V2_ was interested in; today it defines the world. Artificial intelligence is reorganizing labor and language, platform monopolies are fragmenting public debate, extractive supply chains run from mines to data centers, and the climate itself has become the largest unstable system of all. The technologies that organize our realities increasingly operate beyond democratic imagination – faster than legislation, larger than any single public. This is the situation in which media art finds itself today. The questions artists in this field have been asking for decades – about machine perception, data, networks and power – have become everyone’s questions. What was long treated as a specialist niche now sits at the center of public life. This fact lends artistic practice a new urgency: it can open the black boxes, make infrastructures perceptible, slow perception down to the speed of thought, and reclaim the imagination from systems built to predict it. The works in the exhibition and accompanying program do exactly that. They trace AI back to the labor it depends on, imaging systems back to what they cannot see, and digital culture back to the mines, cables and disappearing landscapes it is built on. Spaces where this can happen – independently, critically, in public – have become civic infrastructure. Technology is not destiny, but it takes places like this to remember it. This anniversary event honors the many people who made four and a half decades of this work possible: the artists who soldered, coded, broke things and rebuilt them; the theorists, designers and technicians; the former and current members of the V2_ team who displayed such dedication over the years; the volunteers and audiences who kept showing up; and the partners and funders, in this city and far beyond, among them the municipality of Rotterdam and the Creative Industries Fund NL, whose structural support keeps experimentation alive. To all of you: thank you! And we remember with gratitude our cofounder and longtime director Alex Adriaansens, whose ideas about what an art institution can be continue to shape this one. In light of the above, Still Unstable, the exhibition and program with which we mark this moment, looks resolutely at the present. From September 24 to October 18, the exhibition gathers seven artistic practices that examine the hidden systems of contemporary technology – machine vision, AI labor, extraction, ecological memory, algorithmic prediction – and open space for other imaginaries. A special presentation showcases some of the outstanding art and design featured on flyers, posters and books in every period of V2_’s history. Across three days, the Unstable Talks move from the histories of media art through the tools of artistic practice to the futures now taking shape. And V2_ Live returns to one of the institution’s oldest loves – experimental music and sound, played loud and late. The 1987 Manifesto committed its authors to striving for constant change. As we read it now, what strikes us is its accuracy – and its unfinished business. The best way to honor a history like V2_’s is to continue it, together with the artists, thinkers and audiences of the next generation – to keep the questions open, the doors open, and the media unstable. Welcome to Still Unstable. Welcome to the next 45 years! Fabian Saavedra Lara Director, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media