Conference: The Universe is Bigger Than…

Ayoung Kim — Artist and System Thinker

Ayoung Kim is an artist whose work moves between video, performance, game simulation and speculative storytelling. Constructing complex fictional worlds, she investigates logistics, mobility, labour, technological systems and nonlinear experiences of time. Her solo exhibition Delivery Dancer: Time Curves forms a central point of departure for the programme and for the development of a new tabletop game with MA Contextual Design students at Design Academy Eindhoven and Paskamer.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein — Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy and core faculty in women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars, and dark matter. She is also a researcher of Black feminist science, technology, and society studies. She was a co-convener of Dark Matter: Cosmic Probes in the 2021 Snowmass particle physics community planning process and a member of the National Academies Elementary Particles: Progress and Promise particle physics decadal committee from 2022-2024. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein is currently a member of the Department of Energy High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. She is also the creator of the Cite Black Women+ in Physics and Astronomy Bibliography.

Vladan Joler — System Thinker, Researcher and Professor of New Media

Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends critical design, data investigations, counter-cartography, investigative journalism, writing, data visualization, and numerous other disciplines. He explores and visualizes different technical and social aspects of algorithmic transparency, digital labour exploitation, invisible infrastructures and many other contemporary phenomena in the intersection between technology and society. His work has been exhibited in more than a hundred international exhibitions. His work is included in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A Museum, the Design Museum in London, the Ars Electronica Center, and the Rijksmuseum. In 2018, in cooperation with Kate Crawford, he published Anatomy of an AI System, a large-scale map and long-form essay investigating the human labor, data and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo device. A previous study of his, entitled Facebook Algorithmic Factory, included deep forensic investigations and visual mapping of the algorithmic processes and forms of exploitation behind the largest social network. His most recent large-scale work, Calculating Empires, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale 2025.

Maia Kenney — Independent Curator, Writer and Design Academy Eindhoven Tutor

Maia Kenney is an independent writer and curator whose practice questions conventional models of curatorial authority and explores how cultural institutions can accommodate multiple perspectives and forms of participation. For this project, she works with first-year MA Contextual Design students to translate Ayoung Kim’s methodologies and artistic, literary and historical research interests into a tabletop game rooted in the context of Eindhoven.

Defne Ayas — Director, Van Abbemuseum

Defne Ayas is a curator and cultural leader whose practice centres on contemporary artistic production, experimental institutional models and the evolving civic role of cultural institutions. As Director of the Van Abbemuseum, she initiated System Thinkers, embedding artists and artistic intelligence within the museum’s longer-term institutional thinking, public engagement and relationship with Eindhoven.

Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide — Senior Curator, Van Abbemuseum

Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is Senior Curator at the Van Abbemuseum and curator of Collection as Cosmos. Her curatorial work engages questions of collections, knowledge production and the ways institutions can rethink inherited structures of chronology, classification and cultural value.

Abril Cisneros Ramírez — Assistant Curator, Van Abbemuseum

Abril Cisneros Ramírez is Assistant Curator at the Van Abbemuseum and part of the curatorial team developing System Thinkers and Collection as Cosmos. Her work contributes to the museum’s ongoing exploration of artistic research, institutional experimentation and new approaches to its collection and public programmes.

Maziar Afrassiabi — Curator, Van Abbemuseum

Maziar Afrassiabi is a curator whose work aims to facilitate new connections between artists and non-artists from diverse backgrounds and traditions. This fosters peer-to-peer organizational models for art production and presentation. Currently at the Van Abbemuseum, his focus is on city engagement. Previously, he was the director and founder of Rib art space in Rotterdam.

Lineo Segoete — Writer, Arts Researcher and Cultural Producer

Lineo Segoete is a cultural worker operating at the intersection of artistic research-practice and cultural production, based in Lesotho. She co-directed and co-founded Ba re e ne re literary arts (2013-2023), co-convened the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (2016 - 2024) and is the current Managing-director and Curator at Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art (LoCA), Zambia, since August 2024. At LoCA she is exploring institutional building as both a pedagogical process and an expression of radical care and emotional infrastructure within contemporary art practice. She holds an MA in Contemporary Curatorial Practice and is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at Wits university.

Rangoato Hlasane — Artist, Educator and Cultural Organiser

Rangoato Hlasane’s praxis is a concern and commitment to the search for and collective experiments in the co-creation of meaningful impact at the intersection of cultural work and socio-spatial justice. His praxis is best manifested in co-founding Keleketla! Library, Johannesburg (est. 2008). His artistic research and practice is an interdiscursive intervention into Indigenous Knowledge Systems, as seen through the lens of African Popular Culture and Black Public Humanities, exploring black sonics through oralities, auralities, collective-self publishing moving images and musicking. He was a lecturer in Fine Art at Wits School of Arts, Johannesburg (2013-2024) currently assistant professor of Contemporary Art / Global South at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC)

The Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) is a network of artists, educators, researchers and cultural practitioners working across the African continent to critically rethink arts education and its histories. Through collaborative research, publishing, pedagogical experiments and public programmes, the network develops approaches to knowledge production grounded in local histories and practices while challenging inherited Eurocentric frameworks of art and education.

About Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer: Time Curves

Ayoung Kim’s solo exhibition Delivery Dancer: Time Curves explores the accelerating systems of logistics, labour and technology that increasingly organise contemporary life. Through cinematic world-building, game logic and speculative storytelling, Kim follows delivery drivers moving through parallel realities and unstable timelines, where optimisation and gamified labour are simultaneously enabled and resisted. Questions of individual agency, collective action and nonlinear time run throughout the exhibition. As part of her role as a Van Abbemuseum System Thinker, Kim extends these ideas beyond the exhibition through a new tabletop game developed with MA Contextual Design students at Design Academy Eindhoven and Paskamer. Taking Eindhoven’s culture of innovation and its technological and industrial history as a point of departure, the game unfolds across ancient, premodern and techno-contemporary temporalities.

About Collection as Cosmos

Collection as Cosmos reimagines the Van Abbemuseum’s collection beyond a single linear chronology, approaching it instead as a constellation of works, histories and relationships unfolding across different experiences of time. Taking inspiration from the idea of the kosmos as order, arrangement and universe, works are brought together like clusters of stars rather than positioned along a conventional timeline of art history. The presentation confronts the temporal structures inherited from modernity through four interconnected artistic practices and anchors: Regenerative, Unchronological, Public and Cosmic Times. Developed through artistic and collective research, including contributions from the Johannesburg working group of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC), artist and death researcher G, Ima-Abasi Okon and Nolan Oswald Dennis, the project asks how a museum collection might hold multiple histories, rhythms and systems of knowledge at once.

System Thinkers

Launching in June 2026 alongside the reopening of the Van Abbemuseum’s collection building, System Thinkers is a long-term initiative that embeds artists directly within the museum’s thinking and operations, inviting them to act as co-authors of its institutional culture, public engagement, education, mediation and civic imagination. The inaugural System Thinkers are Ayoung Kim, john gerrard, Ayumi Paul, Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler and the Eindhoven-based network ADEZIV. Working across artistic practice, research and institutional experimentation, they engage with interconnected social, technological and ecological systems—from AI, extraction and logistics to accessibility, ritual, listening and regenerative practices. Rather than positioning artists at the end of a commissioning process, System Thinkers brings artistic intelligence into the museum’s core structures and long-term thinking, developing exhibitions, commissions, research, public forums, game scores, collective practices and new models of civic learning that extend from the museum into Eindhoven and its wider infrastructures.