Mons 2015: A culture of technology

After years of preparations, Mons can finally showcase itself as a European Capital of Culture. Apart from its cultural heritage, the city in Hainaut will emphasise its identity as a contemporary centre of digital innovation. The existence of two very different worlds in Mons is summarised in its motto as cultural capital: “Where technology meets culture.”

Mons has made particular efforts to renovate its picturesque old town, but it has also been developing a modern hub of companies and organisations that have a leading role in the ICT sector. As such, Mons’s economy has succeeded in evolving from industry to a knowledge economy over the past decade. An area close to the station, where a large number of high-tech companies can be found, is known as the Digital Innovation Valley – its name inspired by Silicon Valley in California.

The new station, designed by the renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, should function as the link between the old and new areas of the city. Calatrava previously designed Liège’s station. Another famous architect, Daniel Libeskind, designed the innovative Mons International Congress Xperience (MICX), a modern centre for meetings, congresses and events equipped with the latest technology.

Mons has also been solidifying its reputation as a region that attracts investment from ICT giants such as Microsoft, Google and IBM. The Microsoft Innovation Centre, which opened in 2009 at the Digital Innovation Valley, encourages entrepreneurship and provides new software companies with business, financial and technological support, as well as focusing on e-health applications. Technology multinational Hewlett-Packard is one high-profile partner taking part in the project.

Encouraging both economic growth and technological innovation is the aim of not-for-profit organisation FuturoCité. This Mons-based company, previously named the Euro Green IT Centre, has focused on realising Smarter Cities projects since January 2013. It provides knowhow about mobility, security, energy, buildings and citizens’ wellbeing. The centre’s original project was initiated in January 2010 by the Walloon Region and major ICT companies like IBM and Cisco. Among the sponsors were Microsoft and mobile phone network Mobistar.

In 2007, Google invested €250 million in a new data centre in Saint Ghislain, west of Mons. The facility, which has been fully operational since September 2010, now serves Google users across Europe and around the world.

This was the first Google data centre to run entirely without refrigeration, instead using an advanced evaporative cooling system that uses water from a nearby industrial canal; it helps to keep the computers running at their highest efficiency and thereby reduces overall energy use. In April 2013, Google announced plans to invest an extra €300 million. It’s through these investments that the centre has become one of the most modern and efficient in the world.

However, Mons doesn’t only house the global powerhouses of the ICT world: smaller enterprises also thrive here. One of them is I-Movix, a worldwide leader in extreme slow motion for broadcast and an active player in the sporting events market. The camera manufacturer provided technology for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil to TV Globo – a huge network of more than 100 Brazilian TV stations. The I-Movix cameras are able to register up to 2,600 images a second in high definition and are said to use the best slow-motion technology in the world.

Another Digital Innovation Valley resident is Acapela, an enterprise that for 30 years has specialised in text-to-speech solutions and is now able to translate content into voices in up to 30 languages. According to Acapela’s website, “over a thousand companies around the world have already adopted Acapela high-quality voices to voice-empower their products and services, in very different markets”.

In terms of research, Mons houses the prestigious Insti­tute for New Media Art Tech­nol­ogy (Numediart), established by the University of Mons in 2007. According to its website, it has achieved international praise in “the field of sound, image, video, gestures and biosignals processing for applications where human-computer interaction aims to prompt emotion”.

Numediart provides educational training and research in the field of digital art technol­ogy and contributes to the development of new activities in the creative industries sector. There are roughly 70 researchers currently working at Numediart, from 10 departments of five University of Mons fac­ulties: applied sciences, science, architecture, psychology and education and economy.

Training researchers is the core task of TechnocITé, the competence centre for the Walloon region in ICT and digital media. Since 1999, TechnocITé has positioned itself as a pioneering knowledge, education and research centre for the ICT and creative industry sectors. The centre organises conferences, seminars and specialised training courses for digital media (image and sound creation) and management, web technologies, image publishing, application development and ICT networks.

This technological identity of Mons will have a big impact on the activities and projects held during its stint as Capital of Culture. Take, for example, the Mons Street reView project, which looks at the presence of Google in Mons. It’s named after Google’s Street View application, which lets internet users see ground-level images of streets, property, businesses and tourist attractions.

The French X/tnt Collective used the same technology for immersing digital cartography to create a surprising 10km virtual tour around the city. All along the route, viewers can discover surreal scenes involving the inhabitants of Mons. The recording days attracted the interest of many European media organisations, which enthusiastically reported on the innovative art project.

For the project Vice Versa – From Digital to Culture, part of the Transdigital Biennale of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Sound and Electronic Cultures (Transcultures), 10 pioneers of media arts are invited to Mons. In November, over the course of a week, the experienced artists will develop a new work with a young, upcoming artist. The results of this co-operation will be presented in a digital exhibition, with a symposium on the project held at the reopened Mundaneum centre.

Visitors to the Mundaneum are invited to the ambitious exhibition Mapping Knowledge: Understanding the World through Data. It takes visitors on an interactive tour to the core of the universe of information: from the pioneers of data visualisation to the contemporary artists who offer a new vision of the complexity of the world.

The Mundaneum also functions as the setting for Café Europa. This will be the ideal place to reflect on the many technological projects at Mons and the digital revolution at large. Café Europa is a combination of a 21st-century cafe, a training centre, a ‘fabrication laboratory’ and a video wall of screens connected to 10 European cities. It will invite its visitors to create their own ideas following technological trends such as the virtual ways in which ideas are shared and the digital opportunities that can redefine our social ties.

Photo credit: Street Review by Bram Goots; Café Europa

This article was first published in the Wab magazine winter 2014/2015