Vantage Point

Vantage Point

If you would want to be really alone with your thoughts for a moment, would it be possible?

You could strip yourself from all electronic devices and walk towards the middle of a forest, but still… Are you really alone or could some other hiker or forest ranger suddenly pop up? In our Western part of the world it seems to be very hard to be really alone.

I asked myself what the ideal “being alone” device could be. My answer to this question is this mirror sphere. You can sit on the inside of the the sphere and see outwards through the glass. People on the outside can only see their own reflection.

 

Can there be value in having a moment to be alone with your thoughts? Don’t we often retreat towards digital entertainment when we feel sad or down? Maybe it is good to let the sadness that is part of life just overwhelm you from time to time. Emotions are designed by evolution to let us take action. Maybe a moment like this can get you out of a unsatisfying status quo.

 

In “Kunstletters” magazine, by Kunstwerkt

Vantage Point
100 x 84 cm, print on German etching paper, floating frame. Limited edition.

Here on display at “A Ves… You Know” in Galerija Kresija, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Vantage Point
100 x 84 cm, print on German etching paper, floating frame. Limited edition.

Blauwhaus

Blauwhaus

I made this artwork for the Blauwhaus project by Wim Wauman. It was printed on a large format and put on display against a wall in the center of Waasmunster.

“The print depicts the Blauwhaus castle as a house on stilts protruding above a network of paths and watercourses whose form refers to a mysterious symbol we encountered in the church of Roosenberg Abbey, a design by the somewhat mystical architect Dom Hans van der Laan.” – Wim Wauman in his “GetijdenBoek / Book of Tides – A Play With Arts and Crafts”

Form follows Fiction 5

Form follows Fiction 5

What will the future look like?

Artificial intelligence is already capable of flawlessly imitating a human voice to make a phone call to a restaurant for a reservation. The people involved have no idea they are talking to a machine. The algorithms in use are self-learning and function as a structure that is similar to the structure of the human brain.

How will this trend of rapidly changing technology evolve?

In 30 years, computer games have evolved from a few moving white dots to life-real massive multi-player online games. What will games look like in another 30 years? Suppose a virtual or augmented reality can be projected directly onto our eyes and we can live a part of our day in a virtual world.

Will the virtual and the real world be distinguishable from one another? Will we even be humans any more?

This is what this work is about. The space and time in which these structures are placed is undefined. The surrounding platform can be seen as a meta-level. How many levels of reality could there be? Can you have a virtual world within a virtual world? Will there be a clear border between fact and fiction in our world? Maybe we will live in a world where form follows fiction.