Slightly over a year ago, we kicked of Open Culture Tech 2.0. The second round of the project meant new artists in residencies, new workshops and new tools. In the previous report, we outlined the progress of the project over the first 6 months, introducing the selected artists, media coverage and more. But of course a lot has happened since! In this report, we’ll dive right into the latest developments.

 

Liveshows of the residents

 

Open Culture Tech provides space for six musicians to develop their own technology-driven concepts in collaboration with our tech partners. Following the development of their innovative immersive concepts, the residents show and share their work during live concerts throughout the Netherlands. Two of those recently took place:

 

Might Delete Later

Might Delete Later developed a traveling interactive installation with tech partner Wij Doen Dingen. Voicemail stories of people in the audience get transformed into visual, physical, and musical expressions at festivals, concerts, and in public spaces. Might Delete Later has showcased the results of her residency during ESNS 2026 in Groningen, where the interactive installation premiered between January 14 - 17.

 

Rafaele Andrade

Together with tech partner Superposition, Rafaele Andrade created a performance centered on the physical presence of the audience, where heartbeat, breathing, and brainwaves are translated in real time into light and sound. On March 11 at Cinetol Amsterdam, Rafaele Andrade presented the final result during a live performance.

 

Coming Soon

The other four residents have made a lot of progress since the previous report and will showcase their results during liveshows soon:

• Mathilde Nobel - Cinetol Amsterdam April 2 

• Jeroen Ermens - Muziekgebouw Eindhoven May 22

• RBDjan - Cinetol Amsterdam May 23

• Mihir Raina - De Helling Utrecht May 30.

 

 

Audience Survey

 

One of the main goals of the Open Culture Tech project is to enrich the audience experience by offering audiovisual innovations and new live interaction tools, allowing for artists and audiences to interact. In order to measure the impact of the technologies used during the performances, a qualitative audience survey has been developed. At each live performance, the Open Culture Tech team is present to collect feedback from the audience through in-person interviews. The results of the liveshows from Might Delete Later and Rafaele Andrade look very promising already! At the upcoming liveshows, we will question the audience further. At the end of the project, all survey results will be summarised, interpreted and published in a report.

 

 

Open Call: Testing the toolkit

 

Open Culture Tech 1.0 (2022 - 2024) resulted in a total of three open source tech tools ready to be used by musicians in the sector. As part of the current iteration of Open Culture Tech we hosted an open call that welcomes residents to experiment and test with this toolkit. In this residency, we invited three artists to collaborate with us in developing new creative concepts using our existing toolkit. Artists could specifically choose to work with our AI tool, AR tool, or Avatar tool. The three artists selected for the residency are:

 

LASHAAAWN

LASHAAAWN (They/Them She/Her) self proclaimed Amsterdam’s Sweetheart is a drag performance artist. A fantasy world builder who in her work critically and comedically reflects on themes such as queerness, colonialism and The Real Housewives of Atlanta™.

 

Inspired by epic fantasy game culture she will use the Open Culture Tech Avatar Mixer to envision God as a typical Surinamese auntie. This to celebrate Surinamese culture, black women (in positions of power and authority) as well as to provide comedic relief. 

 

BASJE

BASJE is the stage persona of Bas Mastboom, a Dutch queer and non-binary performance maker working at the intersection of pop, cabaret, music theatre and multimedia. Their work is musical, hilarious, self-critical and lightly absurdist, blending sharp social commentary with glitter, vulnerability and self-mockery. Trained originally in architecture at TU Delft, BASJE creates performances that explore identity, perfection, queerness and the tension between human messiness and digital fantasy, including the new theatre-pop project PopGPT.

 

During the residency, BASJE will use Open Culture Tech’s Avatar Mixer to further develop PopGPT, a live performance in which they share the stage with a digital double. The central artistic question is: what happens when the audience helps shape not only the avatar’s look and personality, but also the outcome of the story itself?

 

NDA/

NDA/ is the Rotterdam-based audiovisual duo of media artist Niki Scheijen and coder-musician Den Ree. Their debut A/V performance Machine Music fuses live-coded music and real-time visuals into an energetic, genre-blending live act ranging from hyperpop to techno and breakbeat, telling the story of technology's lifecycle. The result is a live audiovisual set that moves both mind and body.

 

During their residency, they will use the Open Culture Tech AR Synth to experiment with a new interactive layer to their live show. Using augmented reality on their phone, the audience can explore the story and themes behind the performance and share the experience beyond the physical event.​

 

The tech residencies kicked off at the end of February and will continue to June 2026.

 

 

Workshops

 

Parallel to the residencies we continued our workshop series, consisting of two different types:  AI workshops and IX workshops. The series consists of monthly sessions of about two hours each, focusing on a different theme every edition. In this report, we like to highlight a few of them.

 

• Conceptual Sonification with Nicole Chufi
  
  In September 2025, we hosted audiovisual artist Nicole Chufi for a hands-on workshop exploring "speculative sound worlds" at The Sphere, NDSM, in Amsterdam. Nicole, who works at the intersection of sound, visuals, technology, and storytelling, brought a unique approach: reverse engineering the approach to sound by incorporating conceptual visual queues for sonification, while treating AI tools as an "alien collaborator", generating unique samples that can help create an alternative sample library. The session drew a diverse group—from spoken word artists with little music production experience to amateur DJs and interaction designers. Back by popular demand, we hosted the same workshop as an online session in December. Read more

 

• Transiting the Latent Space: Exploring Variational Audio Autoencoders with Linalab
  
  In October 2025, we hosted Barcelona-based musician, educator, and live coder Lina Bautista for a hands-on workshop exploring variational audio auto encoders at DOOR Open Space in Amsterdam. Her approach treats AI as a craft technique - designing tools for expression rather than replacement. This philosophy shaped the entire workshop: rather than treating AI as a black box that generates finished tracks from text prompts, Lina guided participants through the inner workings of neural audio synthesis, showing how to manipulate sound at a fundamental level. Read more 

 

• AI for Music Creation at MusicNEXT
  
  At MusicNext, a conference on AI in the music industry organised by Buma Stemra in December 2025, the project led a session on AI for music creation, aimed at music professionals curious about what these tools can mean for their practice. The session combined practical exploration with an open and honest conversation about what AI can and cannot do, and what it means to engage with it thoughtfully as a maker. Offering this kind of grounded, non-commercial space for knowledge sharing and open questioning reflects how the project seeks to strengthen musical practice from the ground up.

 

• IX Workshop at Media College Amsterdam
  
  In January 2026, Thunderboom hosted a workshop at the Media College Amsterdam, where students and makers worked hands-on with accessible techniques for creating immersive live shows. Central to the session was building an augmented reality experience, not as a technical goal in itself, but as a way to show makers that advanced stage technology can be within reach. The workshop deliberately targeted a new generation of musicians and creators who want to take the reins of their own live performance, without depending on expensive or closed systems.

 

• All Aboard the Hype Train at ESNS 2026
  
  Also in January 2026, the project was represented at Eurosonic Noorderslag (ESNS), one of Europe's leading showcase festivals for the music industry. As part of the conference programme, the project contributed to the panel 'All Aboard the Hype Train', which took a critical look at the hype surrounding AI in music. Grounded in the belief that technological development must go hand in hand with conscious choices about how and by whom that technology is used, the project brought the musician and their artistic autonomy to the centre of that conversation.

 

 

One-on-one coaching

 

Beyond the public-facing workshops and conference sessions, the project also worked directly with individual artists through one-on-one coaching and collaborative brainstorming sessions. Artists including Lashaaawn, Basje, Noa Rae, Halina Rice, Robin Coops, Jack Abraham, Sally Sisay, Abner Preis and Mark IJzerman were supported in exploring how emerging technology could strengthen their artistic practice and live performance concepts. These sessions ranged from early-stage conversations about artistic vision and the role technology might play in it, to more hands-on exploration of specific tools and open source possibilities. By meeting artists where they are, whether just beginning to engage with new technology or looking to take a concrete next step, the project aimed to lower the threshold and make these developments genuinely accessible to a diverse group of working musicians.

 

 

Next up

 

Open Culture Tech 2.0 officially runs until June 30, 2026, so there are just a couple of months left! In the upcoming months, we very much look forward to sharing with you:

• The recaps of all live shows from the artists in residencies

• The results of the audience survey from the liveshows

• The development of the 3 recently started tech residents

• The open source toolkit with final tools to be used by the sector

• And of course we will organize a concluding event to share all our knowledge