Projects
"The relation of work and play is the source of style and beauty"
- Malcolm Mcluhan
research | A lot of my work deals with nature: plants, insects, creatures, behavior, evolution. To me there is nothing more fascinating. I adore the small details that seemingly fall outside of the general system. Research and analysis are an integral part of my artistic frame. If it takes millions of years to evolve a beautiful flower, there is nothing wrong with three weeks of research before developing a visual concept. I tend to examine each assignment thoroughly. Then I slice it up into comprehensible pieces and create artwork for each of these pieces. The result is a library of building blocks: not one single panoramic composition, but a graphic set of flowers, leaves, stems, spores, legs, wings, eyes. Things I can recombine again and again into new compositions. |
reuse
| Engineers and scientists are often fond of my work. Because the modular illustrations are based on research and can be reused in other projects. My work is not just about creating one piece of art. My work is about evolution, reusability, recombination. |
| create | Here is a short overview of ongoing projects and experiments I am involved with. Most of the stuff I graduated with is now being reused in the gaming industry. |
 | My graduation project at Sint Lukas Brussels in 2003. This is when I first started designing "modular objects", graphic building blocks that can be recombined into new compositions. |
 | Latifolia was a collaborative project with Sofie Boon in which we were looking for an experimental way of interacting between text and image - meaning that the images couldn’t repeat what was written in the text. |
 | Graphic Cellular Domestication A system of graphic cells that adapt and evolve throughout their creation-process. The only thing that is fixed are the starting rules. |
 | GCD > Evolution Experiments into Artificial Life. The cells from Graphic Cellular Domestication are used here to create random digital creatures that compete each other in a rudimentary "survival of the fittest"-style game.
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 | Latifolia > After Dark In this experiment the individual components that made up my Latifolia flowers were decomposed and then reconstructed using programming code. New and totally random flowers sprang into existence. The resulting compositions are currently used as headers for the NodeBox websites: nodebox | research | development. |
 | Latifolia > Superfolia Compositions from Latifolia with grass grown on their surface. A typical plant has over three hundred thousand curves. |
 | A component library of insect parts. The start of my work for Creatures. |
 | This project started out as a simple CD booklet design for one of the musical artists involved in Creatures, but rapidly evolved into a more complex project. How do we visualize sound, in real-time? What does "high-pitched" look like? What does a "repetitive tone" look like?
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 | Artropod > Creatures Creatures is an interactive project bordering between art, science and gaming, funded by the Flemish Audiovisual Fund (VAF). The game environment is based on the AI-principle of emergent behavior. |