Practice and ideas

Manifest

My work moves between technology, art and society. These are some of the ideas that keep returning.

Technology

The digital world is no longer a separate world. It is where attention, culture, politics, friendship and money increasingly take place. Much of its underlying operating system is now controlled by a handful of overconfident boys with too much money and almost no democratic mandate. They decide what we see, what is allowed and where value can be extracted.

As a designer, none of this feels new. I have watched the enshittification of Adobe applications for over two decades. Software that was once made for people who cared about their tools increasingly became a subscription, a cloud service and a revenue stream.

The cloud is a wet dream for hyperscalers and shareholders. It is often a disaster for people with a passion for software, or a passion for almost anything beyond stock prices and profit.

Musk.OS

I call this layer Musk.OS. It is not one piece of software and it is not only Elon Musk. It is the rapidly expanding operating system of Big Tech, colonising a digital world that was already rich, strange, open and full of possibilities.

I love technology. And now this is getting out of hand for everyone. The Art Store is one small, working alternative.

Trust

Trust is a fundamental force in human interaction. Religion is trust. Love and friendship are trust. Economies are trust made operational.

Chaos

Reality is fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable. Truth is a provisional order within continuous chaos. Accepting chaos allows different, equally meaningful interpretations of reality to coexist.

Doubt

Doubt contains the duality of existence: something can appear true and untrue at the same time. Doubt drives both science and religion.

Conflict

Conflict is not a failure of democracy. A democracy without visible conflict has probably hidden it somewhere else. Inspired in part by Chantal Mouffe's agonistic pluralism, I am interested in keeping opponents from becoming enemies. The struggle should remain possible, visible and worth having.

The referee

A public authority should guard the rules, inspect the infrastructure and protect the players. It should be a reliable referee. It should not own every playing field, select every participant or take a percentage of every exchange.

AI

AI is society looking back at itself, badly compressed and confidently rearranged. Its mistakes, prejudices and possibilities do not come from somewhere else. They are made from us.

PHOOLS

These ideas come together in PHOOLS, the Philosophical Object Oriented Language System. Chaos, doubt and trust become building blocks for autonomous AI characters. It is philosophy made operational, and a hypothesis about human consciousness tested in a digital world.

Bureau Nauta

Bureau Nauta is the label under which I work as a digital artist, designer, innovator and new-media educator. The work connects technical experiments to questions of agency, ownership and public space.

Mark, a barefoot game character wearing a Meta T-shirt, standing in a dark void

PHOOLS ยท work in progress

Mark, homeless NPC in the void

Mark is the reincarnation of the original AI Mark, now homeless in a void environment. He is a game-ready avatar built by hand, and the first visible character in the next phase of PHOOLS.

His situation, behaviour and world are still being developed. This is where PHOOLS becomes more than a model or a text. It becomes the art part of the Art Store.

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