Kikk is the yearly Festival of Digital & Creative Cultures, in Namur, Belgium. Two days a year, this picturesque city comes to life to receive and accommodate creatives from all around the globe. At the conference, there's a number of shared values between speakers. They all try to bring something inspiring to the room. Most succeed, others don’t. Especially in the latter category, some can’t seem to avoid cliché slides like ‘Trust your gut feeling’ and ‘To lead change, be the change’, often dooming their credibility from the start. Then there are the good stories, those that you leave with and think about on your way back home.
Going to Kikk often means meeting the weird and the insolite. Its organisers consistently invite original creators each year who share their stories to the amazement of most. 2018 didn’t fall short of that. When entering the scene, you are welcomed into a movielike theatre with a hand-painted ceiling and golden artefacts all around, setting the mood for something special: friendly people, very good organisation and, wait for it, it is completely free of charge.
DOMINIC WILCOX
Dominic, inventor and technologist with an enviable sense of humour, from Sunderland in the UK, is responsible for a number of remarkable creations. ‘The Little Inventors’ is probably the most relevant, a project which goal is to stimulate and inspire children to become the inventors of the future. In 2015, he invited 400 young creators to draw any invention they would like. The best ideas were then built by talented craftsman and the final pieces exhibited in a museum in Sunderland. The idea was so successful that the project still runs today at
littleinventors.org, where children can upload drawings and the most applauded get to be created by devoted makers.
Dominic didn’t stop there, in 2016 he went on to create the ‘
World’s First Art Exhibition for Dogs’ As the name suggests, one where our dear canine friends could wander around and appreciate art commissioned and chosen especially for them, together with lots of other good pieces worth glancing on his website.
DBLG
DBLG’s talk is a cocktail of classic British humour and a showcase of great work. Grant Gilbert brings a message he calls ‘Creativity Sometimes’ – vague at first but somewhat meaningful by the end of the talk. He shares the process of a variety of projects where, on all occasions, creatives disconnect from the screen in order to solve design challenges. For
Channel 4’s rebranding, a British public-service television broadcaster, they started by reproducing the elements of the current logo in wood. Those were used to toss around and explore new ideas with the whole team, a way of work hard to achieve when attached to a screen moving shapes around.
This process of going from digital to physical and back repeats itself on most of their projects. They go from a simple yet hypnotising stop motion of a
bear walking up some stairs, to the branding of the
BFI London Film Festival, this one also started with a very physical approach leading up to the digital assets generated in the end. Creativity often means, in Gilbert’s own words – ‘having to break things apart before reassembling them’.
KATE DAWKINS
Founder of her very own studio, Kate masters grand scale projection design and techniques. She worked on the main act of the
2012 London Olympic Games opening ceremony.
At Kikk, she brings in an honest and transparent view of how her creative processes work. First by showing jaw-dropping footage of her latest work, then by giving a real impression on what happens behind the scenes. Kate expressed how products hide lots of sweat and tears, but also honestly speaks about projects where she had no clue about what she was doing, only to strive forth and succeed. Often viewers have the impression that such amazing acts are done by experts, but they are generally put together by ambitious creatives, combined with a sequence of happy accidents and a jar of lucky coincidences.