Stalactite is an installation made for visual section of festival Tweetakt at Fort Ruigenhoek.
Ugo Dehaes is originally a choreographer, he makes people dance. Nowadays he mainly searches for ways to make objects move. So he is a choreographer of non-living objects. Or artist. Just depends on how you look at it.
When Ugo came to check out the fort, the underground and dank atmosphere reminded him of a cave where stalactites grow on the ceiling. A stalactite is a strange thing. It is formed by moving material: water seeping through a rock wall, where it loosens and takes small pieces of mineral with it. When this material solidifies, it forms a hard, immovable cone.
Ugo is creating a special stalactite for Tweetakt using components from Makeblock, a Raspberry Pi, a MegaPi and Nodejs. In Stalactite, the hard mass comes back to life, the water becomes liquid again and the sculpture can move freely. An extraordinary choreography.