Research Catalogue

Een artistiek onderzoek naar contact, verbinding en gemeenschappelijke grond.

50 A3 drawings black and coloured markers, including: 3 A3 collages on paper with newspaper cutouts and printed photos. 12 A4 drawings on paper with coloured markers, glued on A3 paper + 1 A3 with black ballpoint pen and markers, glued on A3 paper. 13 A3 drawings on paper with black marker, and red, pale blue, gold, pink and orange markers +1 A3 two-sided. 17 A3 drawings on paper with coloured markers. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover with red nail polish. 1 text drawing on sketchbook cover inside. 1 drawing on sketchbook cover back inside with black, orange and gold markers. 22 A4 drawings with ballpoint pen. 62 pocket sketchbook black marker and ballpoint pen drawings. Some of the above is preparatory work for 4 large prints and 13 paintings. The 12 A4 glued on A3 are preparatory work for a collage on panel. I made the art between 2023-2024, from the perspective of the observer. Most of the research material came out of crime and fraud reports. I started writing the blog afterwards, since the summer of 2024. I adopted the visual vocabulary of the graphic novel, which I partly studied and read a lot about, looking at different graphic artists' work, when I was attending classes at the University of Malmo, Sweden, in 2012, to familiarise myself with elements of game design. Much of this work is, amongst other, about children: how they love, amongst other. I wanted to emphasise that element, by intentionally applying stylistic elements from children's drawings, in a naive and loose architectural composition, using heavily the black marker and stick figures. Adopting this visual approach, I also wanted to evoke a comically sharp, but intimate twist, as commentary, in the British tradition of political satire, to the otherwise dark subject matter. Finally, this artistic style refers to the populist character of actors. The text is written like trip-hop songs: two of the pseudonyms I gave are the artistic names of musicians of colour from the British band "Massive Attack", formed in Bristol. Otherwise, it is loosely structured in a manner inspired by television series. I used heavily popular culture signifiers, names of fictional characters from film, television, music and painting, as reference to actual individuals. Parts of the analysis is inspired by Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's example of mathematical calculation. I used plenty of popular and less popular literary and philosophical references, for the visual art and in the writing. Saul Aaron Kripke was the inventor of the possible worlds philosophical hypothesis, which was seminal for philosophers working in the area of contemporary analytic metaphysics, including the theory of counterparts and the theory of names. He died in 2022. Lauren Berlant was a cultural theorist and gender studies scholar. She died in 2021. The exposition displays loosely and in lay terms vocabulary as rhetorical devices from analytic metaphysics, as well as gender and romance studies; for instance, I use the word "unactualised" to refer to individuals, who are real and concrete, who exist independently of my mind, however they were not "actualised" in my so-called personal life and dating practices: for that, I would have to select them, in order for them to be "instantiated" in my dating. The exposition is underpinned by an underlying neo-Marxist interpretation that, in my view, is relevant not just to economists and political philosophers, but also to people working in different sectors of our modern economies of advanced capitalism, such as banking and cybersecurity. In the style of art, as painting, I was inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat's drawings and paintings, which are laden with input from popular media sources, like jazz music and television, recorded in an automatic and naive drawing manner, turned into abstracted paintings. For "M" ('Ramadan', 'Julien', "Mr X"), Filip ('Philip'), and Brandon ('Magna') - August, September, and October 2024. For "Daddy G" ('Isaac'), 'Eric' ("Her Man"), 'Prudence' ("'Rachel''s Beau", or "Her Man's alter-ego"), 'Moussa', 'Gaetan', 'Mohammed' ('Onzedouze'), 'Hermando', and 'Nesseem' - December 2024, January 2025, May, June, August and September 2025. Four men of colour and seven white men - or, more accurately, four and six, or six and four. Who were also targeted, directly and indirectly. Who are not politicians, except for a current one and a former one, but are doing something political, so they must take good care of what they do. See also exposition "The Loot", under 'Art and Activism Exposed as Research Blog'.

People interested in artificial intelligence usually ask whether computers could become as intelligent and creative as humans. I decided to think about it the other way around: I'm interested in the extent to which the creative process of artists is algorithmic. It's not difficult to create something that will look like art; you just need to imitate an already existing genre or style. The challenge is to create something that will be able to trigger an art experience. In this visual essay, I'm studying where, in a spectrum of different kinds of experiences (jokes, magic tricks, pleasure from solving a mathematical or scientific problem), there are thrills triggered by art. All of these experiences depend on a sufficient amount of novelty. Therefore, the creators of experience triggers face the same problem: the impact of a joke, a magic trick, or an artwork tends to diminish when heard/seen repeatedly. The human brain has evolved in a way that it is able to distinguish repeating patterns, formulas, schemes, algorithms. Uncovering an algorithm causes pleasure. But once an algorithm is uncovered, it does not cause pleasure any more. To trigger an experience of the same intensity, we need a new trigger. In this work, I also address the question of why certain types of triggers wear off more slowly than others. The outcomes of this project are a book—a visual essay in which drawings and texts form one line of an argument—and a series of lecture-like events, in which I combine sincerity and directness of lectures, panel discussions, and guided tours with richer ways of expression typical for object theatre, performances, and magic shows.

This exposition is part of the series The Sonic Atelier – Conversations with Contemporary Composers and Producers, dedicated to exploring the evolving role of the composer in the twenty-first century. Through a Q&A format, the project investigates how contemporary creators inhabit hybrid identities at the intersection of composition, production, performance, and technology. This interview features Bryan Senti, American composer, violinist, and producer, whose work bridges classical tradition, Latin American heritage, and cinematic experimentation. His music, ranging from solo albums such as Manu to film scores and collaborative projects, combines impressionistic harmony, acoustic warmth, and electronic texture, shaping a distinct post-classical voice that is both intimate and expansive. In the conversation, Senti reflects on the integration of composition and production within the digital environment, the evolving relationship between notation and sound, and the ways in which tools like the DAW and immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos redefine musical form and spatial perception. He also discusses authorship in film music, the ethics of technology, and the need to preserve a human, performative presence in an increasingly algorithmic landscape. Senti’s reflections reveal a vision of music as a living craft, an art of listening, shaping, and reimagining sound, where composition becomes a dialogue between emotion, material, and space.

Abstract This exposition investigates musically framed silence by extracting and analyzing auditory data and proposing new analytical strategies to deepen engagement with silence as a compositional element. It reontologizes ambient sound as capable of bearing musical and narrative significance. The study centres on Cageance (accessible at https://cageance.webflow.io)¹, the author’s web-based international collaboration extending John Cage’s 4′33″, exploring how chance-generated environmental sound may function ecologically, musically, and narratively. Using a Cageance performance recorded in Portugal as a case study, the research applies a multimodal analytical framework combining Schaferian soundscape theory, conventional musical analysis (including Schenkerian reduction), and dramatic analysis. Visual mapping methods classify sounds into soundmarks, signals, keynotes, and ecological categories (biophony, geophony, anthrophony), while revealing emergent musical and dramaturgical properties within the soundscape. The study proposes new notational and analytical approaches for non-composed sound, positioning silence not as absence, but as a generative site for compositional and narrative inquiry. These findings contribute to ongoing discourse in sound studies, ecological musicology, and practice-as-research methodologies. ¹ The Cageance platform functions best on tablet or desktop devices; headphones are recommended.

By combining text and three video essays, this contribution presents a multimodal ethnography of loudspeakers in the Roma neighborhood of a Romanian village. It is based on video recordings, which were left out of the analysis and editing of my documentary films because of sound distortion. Revisiting my fieldnotes and the “ethnographic rubbish,” here I establish a critical study of my initial position – for 15 years I wasn’t paying attention to loudspeakers as an object of study in their own right – and I argue how these sounds have become auditory markers of the neighborhood since, at least, the beginning of the 2000s. The article thereby contributes to the fields of both anthropology and sound studies. It shows how the use of loudspeakers is made up of rivalry, interference, fame, fraternity, and familism. Moreover, the analysis shows how the lines between public and private spaces, and between oblique listening and noise cancellation are continually reconfigured in a community obsessed with mutual acquaintance.