Fake Fireside Forum or FFF - Fortississimo (musical term for "very very loud") is an ongoing lecture series tuned to the intensity of technological acceleration and its impact on contemporary artistic practice. Each edition gathers artists, students and researchers around an imagined fireplace: a space to explore softer expressions of technology.
Each lecture explores how technology and digital culture shapes perception, material, and meaning through interdisciplinary artistic discourse and collaboration.
In this spirit, we seek to harmonise art, research, science and technology while encouraging a critical engagement with contemporary techniques.
What happens when we slow down the tempo of progress and share agency, when form is co-defined through a dialogue between hand, material, and machine?
The forum invites you to join an evening of ongoing exchange, reflection and resonance, where we transmute the lab’s high-tech aura into an inviting place for discovery and community.
Our guests are Janne Schimmel and Thijs Jaeger, two artists who combine traditional craft and digital technology to explore how meaning and rituals are constructed in times of chaos, uncertainty, and technological acceleration. Their practices engage with digital cultures, myth, and materiality to approach technology as a site of empathy and transformation. Through installation, sculpture, moving image and video games, they create works that carry symbolic depth.
FFF is organized by Mixlab and Maxlab as part of Art and Research projects by Mathias Mu, Thomas Crombez and Kristof Timmerman.