News

Showcase Shapeshifters: Dance x A.I. at VONK Festival - Picture by Paulus van Dorsten

What happens when a street dancer meets an algorithm and both decide to improvise? Or when the worlds of game development and fashion intertwine?

In 2025, Piece of Code has been a playground where young makers didn’t just learn about technology, they used it to tell stories, build identities, and perform new futures. Looking back, we’re proud of the programmes that pushed creative expression and cross-disciplinary learning into fresh territory. Reflecting on the process, our partner Andrea van Zoomeren from youth centre Movactor shared how inspiring it was to witness such a diverse group of young people come together, each contributing their own perspective, interests, and talents. Let’s have a look through this year’s journey.

ShapeShifters: where bodies, code and identities transform

We kicked off the year with ShapeShifters, our winter school where young creatives got into a pressure cooker, to tune in and ask: what is technology doing to us, and how can we shape society with the use of technology? During one intense week, we turned our programme into a studio-lab: part classroom, part rehearsal room, part experiment. Young creatives and art school students moved between workshops and conversations, testing ideas in real time and learning from each other as they went.

Two tracks ran side by side. In the AI x Hip Hop Dance trajectory, led by artist and maker Cris Mollee, dancer and Freedom city founder Raymond Ramdihal and dancer Jeffrey Jackson, movement became data and data became movement. The dancers brought explosive energy, the kind that makes a room instantly feel alive, and that energy fueled bold experiments with Stable Diffusion, where choreography sparked imagery and imagery pushed the next step. On the other side, artist collective KlokPack6 flipped the script in a different way: through e-waste repurposing workshops, they explored how discarded electronics could be reactivated as raw material, at the intersection of fashion and self-expression, and as a starting point for a wide range of new functions, forms, and creative applications.

Everything came together in a final showcase at VOGELFREI Playground, hosted by Joris Roovers: not a polished “end product”, but a snapshot of a week of risk-taking, remixing, and world-building.

Credits: Paulus van Dorsten

Results of ShapeShifters are Regenerated

After the winter school, the results were developed into a new participatory youth programme, in collaboration with youth centre Movactor and Theater de KOM. The team set up two trajectories: meeting the world of fashion and the world of dance. A recruitment campaign at diversity of high schools in Nieuwegein led to the participation of 10 new hybrid tech dancers and 5 virtual fashion designers. A definite highlight of these collaborations was featured at VONK festival. The magical atmosphere was perfect to host experimentations of young dancers in connection with an A.I. installation under the guidance of artist Cris Mollee. She shared with us the reflections on the experience: “What I’m most proud of is that all the ideas came from the young people. Together we explored what was possible, but the concepts came from them. Interactive generative AI became a starting point for improvisation, and improvisation became the engine of the final performance.”

What’s Next: Grounding Together

The seeds have been planted. Together with this newly built community of young creatives in Nieuwegein, we’ll co-develop a programme in 2026 focused on game development and hardware hacking, exploring how young makers can actively shape the systems they usually only consume.

At the same time, Cris Mollee’s AI installation will be reimagined as an interactive theatre experience for primary education, helping children understand how AI constructs unreal worlds, and how to question them. In parallel, together with Rein van der Woerd, we’ll intersect the worlds of hardware hacking and permacomputing, developing a hands-on course in which young developers build their own low-tech solar server and design for a decentralised, smaller web.

Would you like for your school or creative institution to host radical crossovers and expand the imagination of your students? Contact us via: mvdl@creativecodingutrecht.nl.