HERE I AM,
IT CAN'T BE ANY OTHERWISE

I work in science and I work in art. Not only do these go very well together, but for me they must go together. In my first year at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, I kept those two worlds scrupulously separate. But my fellow students made short work of that. They were right, because being ‘anxious’ is not a recipe for success in life in general, and in science and art in particular. Of course, I was afraid that I would be seen as a scientist who ‘does a trick on the side’. But why, they asked me, would you so desperately shut down one of your deepest sources?

I don’t have to, and I don’t do that anymore. Because art and science mixed together are stronger than each separately, just as loose gravel and powdery cement together produce indestructible concrete, provided you take the trouble to add water. It’s not just a mixture, but a logical interplay of the artist and the scientist in me. As a scientist, I investigate the as yet unexplained phenomena in the Universe and try to understand the mechanisms behind them. As an artist, I also look for mechanisms, but those that act between a work of art and the viewer.

The similarity between art and science can be summed up in a single word: research. As far as science is concerned, this seems to be a truism, but it applies just as well to art. There is a simple test that allows you to distinguish real scientists and artists from mere makers: mix up all the works and ask a random person to put them in time order. You don't have to be an art or science historian to come up with a good approximation of the timeline of a real celebrity (Einstein, Picasso, Huygens, Goya, Lorentz, Mondrian). That's because their work kept changing as a result of their research.

But there is also an important difference between art and science: who will decide whether a work is good or not? In science, the Universe itself decides whether explanations and theories are correct (external consistency). In art, it is the artist, or her/his connoisseurs and environment, and/or society that decide. In this way, a work of art has an internal consistency, because of this criticism.

But not everything works, and so research is risky. Real research usually goes wrong, which is why science is sometimes compared to sports, and something similar can be said about art. In both, passion and precision are the driving forces.

I consciously make use of natural phenomena, add and exclude, give color and sound, create snapshots of what moves. In this way I bend the uncontrollable and seemingly accidental reality of the Universe to my will. The means are quite common in the visual arts, such as color, form, movement, and sound. But if it suits me, or if I find it necessary, I also work in classical techniques, just with chalk or oil paint, in a familiar way that my father once taught me.

What do I want to achieve with my art? Usually I try to awaken in the viewer the awareness of a mechanism. By this I do not mean a mechanism such as a cuckoo clock, but an event that evokes an equally flowing image in the mind of the viewer. In some of my installations (such as the landscape installation Huygens’s Principle) this is literally the case because the work causes movement and sounds. In the series of giclée prints that I have made in recent years, I try to play on the viewer's consciousness.

Usually we become aware of something by what happens: consciousness is formed by the passage of time. My giclée works are stationary, but are chosen in such a way that each image imperceptibly gives the viewer the idea that something is happening, that there is movement – compare this with a photograph of a cloud or waves, or Turner's later work. Each image is, as it were, a form frozen in time, in which the viewer involuntarily senses or guesses what will happen next. This is similar to the photographer's method: the snapshot of the shot before the ball disappears into the goal, or of a hand and a face a hundredth of a second before the blow hits.

The limitation I impose on my invented images is that they must comply with the 'laws of nature' that I invent. Sometimes these are my variations of what really exists, such as gravity, electromagnetism or hydrodynamics. My goal is to create an inescapable unity, a kind of inner cohesion that protects the work from too much order on the one hand, and too much chaos on the other. This is how I create natural phenomena in a non-existent universe. Although, 'non-existent': every work of art exists, even if it is made up. And that, in turn, is an exciting difference with scientific work.