I have been asked to create an AR artwork for the climate museum addressing climate issues.

With the AR artwork, I aim to express the challenges posed by the climate crisis. Challenges that humanity can ultimately overcome if the right choices are made in time. These challenges can be seen as opportunities – opportunities for a clean environment, a better balance with natural resources, and justice for indigenous populations.

The climate crisis is also a crisis of the exploitation system. A deep layer of our history and system is based on an exploitation system, exploiting both nature and people.

Those who benefit from this system resist change, which is why the necessary energy transition is taking too long. Now that the consequences are being felt firsthand, there is some shift noticeable, but is it timely and sufficient?

My artwork expresses the necessary revolution that is needed – a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, from competition to collaboration, from greed to satisfaction, from selfishness to the joy of life on a livable planet.

Why an AR artwork?

With AR, you see a virtual world projected onto the ‘real’ world. AR allows you to create vast worlds that would not be possible otherwise: images can move, be larger than life, and impossible worlds can be created.

AR also enables a visitor to view the artwork in multiple locations: on the street or in the comfort of their own home.

You can load the artwork here:

https://ar.klimaatmuseum.nl/

Credits:

Art and AR development: Maarten van der Glas
Production: Laura van Rutten / Klimaat Museum

TRANS ECOLOGY was part of “Klimaat op staat”

Artist page @ Klimaat Museum

De Vrolijkheid (The Happiness) is an organisation that gives art workshops for kids in asylum centers in The Netherlands. It was a great honour for me as a multi media artist to be given this complex task. I designed, made a technical plan, and programmed the game, from 2021 – 2024. Additional programming was done by: Lindsey Schaap (back end, and svelte code), Eelke Feenstra (svelte code, UI improvements). UI concepts and icons by design studio Harris Blondman. In-game graphics are made by Max Holicki, and are not open source.

In the 3D game world children can explore art works and make their own.

The children can draw, make stopmotion animations and compose music. The children can also make their own avatar and personal space. To me it was important that selecting an avatar was not done with pre made templates but that the children can express their own unfiltered creativity.

I tried my best to design the app to be as simple as possible. Harris Blondman Studio designed the icons and cleaned up the design. Eelke Feenstra later refined the UI/ UX.

By 2024 about 700 children have made use of ARTWORLD and many touching and surprising art works have been made.

I am very excited to have been granted the opportunity to work on this project. I have worked with De Vrolijkheid before on a videomapping for a small museum project.

ARTWORLD is a multi user game, so players see and can interact with each other.

ARTWORLD is open source and hosted on Github

Documentation on Github

ARTWORLD project page on De Vrolijkheid website.

ARTWORLD blog:

Starting work on ARTWORLD

Technical Paper for ARTWORLD

GREETING FROM THE GOETHE-INSTITUT

Links

Catalog

Behind the scenes

Light art: Maarten van der Glas

The Floor is Lava was a theatrical exhibition in which artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen populated Marres with sculptures and molded portraits of people in everyday environments. Made from different materials, clay, cloth, wood, the figures had expressive faces, but are otherwise sketchily composed with stick legs, half torso’s and loosely hanging pieces of cloth. The faces seemed mask-like, unrelated to the bodies that support them. They lean against a wall, sit on makeshift chairs, queue at a ticket office, or wait on a platform for a train to arrive at the station.They were actors in search of a play, as much as they were compositions of identity, that fictional moment of stasis in a world that is constantly on the move. The artists played with the idea that people always play a role, different in every situation, with specific character traits and body language.

The title derived from a children’s game in which on command the players immediately have to get their feet off the floor and freeze in a certain position, as if they have been turned into statues.The liquid floor in the game suggests the added meaning of a world that is beyond our control, of shared values that are dissipating, and a future that has become uncertain. The figures inhabit the stage that is left when all that is solid has melted into air. In the cahier all the works on display in the exhibition are further explained.

In a Training the Senses session that took place during the exhibition, the artist duo introduced the audience to the performance How can we know the dancer from the dance? they made earlier. The presentation provided a short training for participants to go outside and make their own detailed observations of theatrical events in everyday life.

SANDER BREURE & WITTE VAN HULZEN

Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen both live and work in Amsterdam. Breure graduated from the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, and Van Hulzen graduated from ArtEZ in Arnhem. Their multidisciplinary work is based on research about body language and its interpretation. They are represented by tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION ON GESTURES OF DOING NOTHING

Next to the exhibition, the joined publication named On Gestures of Doing Nothing made by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen came out on 4 August 2019. On Gestures of Doing Nothing documents a performance staged by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen. The performance took place on April 15 and 16, 2019, in their exhibition The Floor is Lava in Marres. It consisted of eleven performers presenting a series of gestures. The performance – along with the exhibition itself – was photographed by Petra Stavast. This publication was conceived and developed in collaboration with art historian and curator Arnisa Zeqo. The book is published in English.

PRIX DE ROME

In international jury selected Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen together with 3 other artists for the shortlist of Prix de Rome 2019. They received a working budget an were given the opportunity to create new work. The work was exhibited at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the fall of 2019.

Press

• De Volkskrant
• BBK
• De Limburger (1)
• Mister Motley
• Metropolis M
• De Limburger (2)
• e-flux
• Het Parool