How do you describe your own art practice?
I work across all the possible disciplines in order to express the many colours of our everyday world. The beauty of indifference exercised by the intangible phenomena of light and sound has directed me to acoustical concepts, subjected to recent technology, computer programs and sound systems. My interest in interactivity led me to explore the relationship between image and sound through methods of sonification. My love for experimental music encouraged me to use chance-operations in photography, computer-controlled devices in moving visual media and to use chance-images «blueprints» to feed sound generating devices.
What was your first experience with art?
My father in his artist studio making sculptures and me and my brother watching him.
What is your greatest source of inspiration?
My main source of inspiration is the study of chance-operations in weather conditions, data streams, traffic, the movement of people, etc. … which seem to control our reality.
What do you need in order to create your work?
Constant change and plenty of room for possibilities.
What are you working on at the moment?
This year my album project “365 Coincidences” will be completed. It is a visual project about social media for which I use friends’ birthdays to choose 366 images “Tone Slides” to be numbered according to the days of the year. I have been involved in this project for years now, but since Facebook the number of friends to whose dates of birth I have access has drastically multiplied. It has become a daily ritual to choose a form and a colour based on the data people make public on their Facebook page.
The “Tone Slides” are random images with the light and shadow play of objects I preserve on blueprint paper. Each blueprint is scanned each time anew, with a maximum of 24. I create replicas on demand for special occasions. The complete series becomes an album in which the beauty (of indifference) hides in the somewhat odd modus operandi of the social media, which also partly puzzles me.
Readers who would like to receive on their Facebook page a chance-image on their birthday can befriend me on Facebook.
In November I participate in the Annual Meeting of IKG, the International Artists Forum that will take place this year in Linz, Austria. The IKG is a network with meanwhile 235 members in many countries aiming for continuous cooperation across borders. The IKG nowadays reflects the possibility of an open-minded term of culture, based on understanding and respect.
What work or artist has most recently surprised you?
I am most of all surprised by the diversity and collectivity used nowadays by artists to make their work public. I like it very much. A work that I saw again this year and am touched by is Grün Gelb by the German artist Rolf Julius (1939-2011). His daughter Maija, who takes care to keep his work alive since his passing, presented it during Klinkende Stad in Kortrijk.
