“Secu­ri­ty is both a feel­ing and a real­i­ty, and they’re dif­fer­ent. You can feel secure even though you’re not, and you can be secure even though you don’t feel it.”

—  Bruce Schneier

An instal­la­tion about feel­ing secure even though you’re not, and being secure even though you don’t feel it. In Smile! You’re on CCTV the vis­i­tor enters a room with sev­er­al hid­den IP cam­eras and one cen­tral video sur­veil­lance mon­i­tor placed on a desk. On sev­er­al sticky notes placed on the walls and the floor, the vis­i­tor can read quotes on the sub­ject of pri­va­cy, CCTV, secu­ri­ty, safe­ty and the rise of the ‘pol­i­tics of fear’. The video mon­i­tor shows sev­er­al (delayed) video streams of the cam­eras cap­tur­ing the image of the vis­i­tor. Because of this delay, the vis­i­tor can watch him­self on the mon­i­tor walk­ing around the room, while he was read­ing these quotes. 

(Un)Aimed is a mul­ti­chan­nel, inter­ac­tive sound instal­la­tion. It con­sists of sev­er­al rotat­ing par­a­bol­ic speak­ers. These speak­ers pro­duce extreme­ly nar­row beams of sound that appear very near to the vis­i­tor, when stand­ing in such a beam (and almost silent when stand­ing out­side of it). Because the speak­ers turn around and the walls of the room func­tion like ‘acoustic mir­rors’, it appears as if there are an innu­mer­able amount of sound­sources, there­by cre­at­ing a strange ‘acoustic image’ of the room.

The instal­la­tion reacts on the pres­ence of peo­ple in the room; if more peo­ple are enter­ing the room, the instal­la­tion will become more active and will sound more omi­nous. If there’s nobody in the room, the instal­la­tion will become almost silent. Inspi­ra­tion for this project comes from old and new mil­i­tary tech­nol­o­gy and engi­neer­ing, like radar, sonar and fortress­es.

This project was exhib­it­ed on loca­tion in an old fortress, part of ‘De Hol­landse Water­lin­ie’, a series of water based defences. Built and used from 1629 until 1940, it was planned to pro­tect the eco­nom­ic heart­land of the Dutch Repub­lic with a line of flood­ed land pro­tect­ed by fortress­es.

Ontled­ing Van Het Filmis­che is a per­for­mance / light instal­la­tion. In this per­for­mance, a mechan­i­cal light con­struc­tion is built and care­ful­ly test­ed, with the ulti­mate goal of cre­at­ing one ‘cin­e­mat­ic’ moment. This project is an ode to the pio­neers of cin­e­ma: all the artists, priests, alchemists and sci­en­tists that pas­sion­ate­ly worked on the inven­tion of the cin­e­mat­ic appa­ra­tus, an appa­ra­tus that laid the base for our con­tem­po­rary visu­al cul­ture.

With this project, i grad­u­at­ed from the Inter­fac­ul­ty Sound and Image (now ArtScience Inter­fac­ul­ty). It was sort of a roundup of all the ideas i had dur­ing my study. In a way, this project is also a self por­trait: in total dark­ness, the per­former is turn­ing a big steer­ing wheel. This caus­es two mov­ing lights to light a series of hang­ing cut out sil­hou­ettes. The stro­bo­scop­ic effect gives the illu­sion of a per­son turn­ing around a big steer­ing wheel…

Secret Places was a per­for­mance instal­la­tion by Forced Enter­tain­ment with 13 per­form­ers of the Rot­ter­dam and The Hague Art Acad­e­mies. In this 4 hours last­ing per­for­mance, the per­form­ers were sit­ting next to each oth­er with their eyes closed, telling each oth­er sto­ries from mem­o­ry.

“Sur­round­ed by 1000 snap­shots of the city 13 per­form­ers embark upon a marathon of mem­o­ry. Hun­dreds of sto­ries are told, for­got­ten places are re-dis­cov­ered and frag­ments of rem­i­nis­cence are whis­pered in the half-light. You are invit­ed to eaves­drop.”

This project was the result of a three week work­shop by Forced Enter­tain­ment from Sheffield, UK. I was one of the par­tic­i­pants / per­form­ers. In the weeks pre­ced­ing the per­for­mance, we took thou­sands of pho­tos of all kinds of places in Rot­ter­dam. These pho­tos were placed on the exhi­bi­tion floor, all with a lit­tle note chalked next to it: ‘A Good Place for.…”.