Recently in thoughts Category

Double click to play/stop. Scroll to scrub.

The other day I dreamt of grass coffins and had to do one.

I would like to have grass growing from the back of my feet. Inside anthuriums making use of the the two thirds of water in my body, eventually taking it over. I imagine mobile beings which reflect their own anatomy and in the process don't require mirrors.

These will soon become sculptures in resin, water and life.

Conversation is now everywhere as more and more people become 'users' of some technical device which allows them to converse, to formulate opinions, to project their desires onto the digital realm. Everyone's carrying a little mirror.

If you cross-section it, you will find a wonderful layer, painted twitter blue. Busy, loads of users opinionating, writing about going to the loo, about whatever takes their fancy. A layer of noise where sometimes one can discern some melodies. Necessary noise, just like the noise our bodies produce with the flowing of blood, or the crackling of joints.

Some users within this layer, depending on social status or historical behaviour, become social broadcasters and their opinions are followed by even more people.

Conversation can be filtered, it can be localised. Conversations surface issues and issues are then dealt with by a secondary layer: a political layer.
What if the conversation layer was already empowered by tools that turn opinions into real actions? We probably would not need to look at a reality of layers.

A few years back I started painting this thought process using a vertical class system metaphor. The reality however, is not vertical, but a 2D mesh of people with mirrors. The political layer (in green) needs to be part of the mesh.

In my latest pieces i have been tinkering with a giant digestive system. Stemming from Novak's liquid architecture where the 'user' creates the space simply by moving his body. Using the same line of thought, i have become fascinated by this idea of how food meanders through our bodies giving us shape and structure. What architecture have we provided food with, in order to get as much nourishment out of it as possible?...  

The newly redesigned Fact Mag website is coming out soon. These are just some thoughts that drove the rebranding. Fact is for the discerning, eternally unsatisfied eclectic music lover that needs blunt, honest music reporting. It's in your face, blunt, sharp. It's also one of the digital properties I oversee and that gives me most pleasure working with.

Everyday we step on a thousand chewing gums spat out by a thousand people. What if the chewing gums contained some of the essence of the people that spat them out? What if we could recreate the last words before the spiting?

The following screens are an aesthetic exercise undertook by me this past summer, which yielded a few large paintings, a few small objects and some thoughts. The enterprise is not yet finished but I wanted to share some pictures because I love them. Pink is momentarily my favourite colour.

The problem is simple, what kind of body should the mekwa have? It's a creature that takes your face and gets beamed from mobile to mobile, satisfying its apetite for surprise and adventure, fulfilling its owner's wishes.

A few months back I started observing the behaviour of some deep sea creatures. They inhabit a very large ocean that brings most of its nutrients in the form of a light drizzle of decaying matter. I have lived in london for a while now, I can relate to the slight drizzle and the very large ocean of opportunity.

Because of the darkness, the apparent lack of context that is usually provided by light, creatures have evolved to perform in fantastic new ways in order to attract mates or prey.
You can almost see houses of style at play as they empower people to perform in all sorts of colourful ways.

What if we were to play with an architecture of participation that at its core has desires/wishes. One that is not driven by what others have done, but by what others will do? This is the differentiating driving force behind Mekwa. "I want you to produce for me and I will produce for you". My thesis argues that if empowered with a structure that focuses on the near future (desires I wish fulfilled) as much as on the near past (what desires were recently fulfilled), users will question the assumed historical authority of their own identity and enter a realm that allows them to better shape it.