'Less progress!" shouts the festival. DEAF finds the future a bit scary this time.

We are all a little afraid of losing control. So we are reluctant to like 'Europe', we are frightened by the unprecedented world powers lurking in our mobile communication devices and we think the public transport chip card is an onion, while every day we are motivated to want newer, better, higher, more.

Fear of the progress trap, it is called. In proper English, 'The Progress Trap'. Voila the title of the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, which kicked off at The New Institute in Rotterdam on Wednesday 21 May.

So it's about how all this progress can also be addictive. That you eat yourself up all over new gadgets, fill up on slightly narcotic vistas, and then feel a slight headache coming on and get nauseous. The hangover. Our zeitgeist.

From headaches and nausea was  in real life nothing to notice, by the way, at the opening event. An entire New Institute full of nerds and hipsters (m/f) threw themselves rather uninhibitedly into the main exhibition. In the concrete expo hall, they crowded around the two loving robot hands touching random visitors, and the small room was packed to the brim with two small children reading The Communist Manifesto to their grandmother who had lived through it all.

Piece de resistance were the 3D helmets you could put on, for a lifelike Out-of-body experience: walking behind yourself. Technology that only a few years ago was only possible with giant devices and computers.

For the naysayers, there were installations of melting cityscapes and a photo exhibition about people who had thrown away their iPhones, turning them into 19^ecentury farm workers. In a horror cabinet, a shack had been recreated of a 'prepper', someone preparing for life after Armageddon destroyed us. There was someone inside. I didn't dare go in.

I myself was particularly pleasantly surprised by Nam June Paik's work, which beams out at you as you enter. Paik, one of the founders of modern video art, fabricated a work he called 'The Internet Dweller' 20 years ago. It evokes memories of how I myself watched the internet as it squeaked and crackled into my world via a phone line and a 9.6K modem.

How different the future always is anyway, once you walk around in it yourself.