Lodewijk Heylen

Lodewijk Heylen (PXL and UHasselt) works as a contextual artist in urban space, creating in situ installations, long-term organisational and research projects and artistic interventions. With his work, he attempts to depict and capture the complexity of human existence.

The Minecraft Ecologies experiment was conducted at CIAP over a period of 14 weeks, as an attempt to expose the limits and possibilities of a self-organising system using the popular video game Minecraft. During the opening hours of the exhibition, several computers were made available to play Minecraft. Through a shared server, everyone could contribute to this alternative world. Each player was asked to communicate with the other players via a chat room. These conversations were then automatically converted to text and broadcast in real-time in the exhibition. Finally, all conversations were compiled in a logbook.