Awakenings
A constructivist world for the ADE 2026 announcement. Statics and motion, built as one system.
An open brief, a hard date, and a stage already standing.
Awakenings is the benchmark for techno in the Netherlands, and its ADE show is the flagship night of the year. For the 2026 edition the agency handed over the art direction of the event campaign. The brief was open, the trust was already there, and the date was not moving.
The ask: build the visual world for the announcement. A set of statics for the campaign, motion for the reveal, all of it holding together across every format the festival touches. The starting point was the stage design that already existed for the show.
A stage design that read like a Van Doesburg painting.
Walking through the stage design, the connection clicked. The rig was all planes, beams and hard angles, geometry doing the work of decoration. It read like constructivism pushed into three dimensions.
Two names anchored the research. Theo van Doesburg, whose contra constructions set architecture floating free of gravity. Ivo Pannaggi, whose paintings give machines a kind of theatre. That vocabulary already lived inside the stage. The job became translating it into the festival's visual language.
The fit is not decorative. Techno is structural music: repetition, tension, release. Constructivism gives that a body. Hard geometry, industrial weight, nothing ornamental.
Constructivism, reworked around the landmark.
The Awakenings landmark is the non negotiable. It is the most recognizable asset the festival owns, and every move has to bend back to it.
Working close with the client, the constructivist geometry was reshaped around the mark until the two read as one object. Planes extend its edges, beams pick up its angles. The logo stops being a flat sign and becomes a monument you could walk around.
One monument, dense smoke, a single acid yellow light.
The statics treat that monument as a physical thing on a real stage. Dense smoke, one hard backlight, and the festival's acid yellow doing all the colour work. Light behaves the way it does in the main room. It is the material the world is built from.
Every image is a different position in the same space. An aerial view over the full construction, frontal portraits of the monument, low angles, close details. Different crops, one place. That is what makes the set read as a world instead of a collection of renders.
The world shows itself in passes, not poses.
The announcement film sets the grammar. The camera drifts through the smoke, forms resolve out of the dark, and the landmark arrives last, lit from behind like the headliner it is.
From there the system spreads across formats. A horizontal aerial pass for screens and web, a vertical cut for stories and phones. Same world, different windows into it.
Traditional research, with an AI machine on a leash.
The workflow mixed classical visual research with Weavy AI for fast iteration on statics and motion. The tool never decides. It gets handed a world that is already set, references, materials, light behaviour, the reworked geometry, and it iterates inside those walls.
Most of the work sat in the prompting. Building the brief the machine reads, layering reference on reference, correcting drift, throwing away everything that steps outside the world. Generation is cheap. Judgement is the craft.
The payoff is speed without losing authorship. A set of assets that all read as one thing, made fast enough to genuinely explore, refine, and still hit the date.
The last deliverable was not an asset. It was the machine that makes them.
The announcement was only the opening. Behind it sat 31 acts, each one needing its own poster in two formats, with names, dates and rooms that kept moving until the week of the show. Done by hand that is a week of production and a second week of version control.
So the deliverable changed. The world was already a system: one duotone, one smoke field, one lockup, one type hierarchy. I built the client a generator that applies it. A press photo goes in and the same six moves run every time, whatever the photo is. A full body, a chest up portrait, a duo. They all come out belonging to the same night.
- 01 CutoutSubject lifted
- 02 GradeDuotone to acid
- 03 FieldSmoke rebuilt
- 04 LockupMark set
- 05 TypeName, date, room
- 06 ExportBoth formats
The client runs it themselves. A lineup change at noon is a finished asset five minutes later, still inside the world. That is the part that landed. Not that a machine made the images, but that their own team could make them, at any hour, without anyone having to ask whether it was still on brand.