My Work in Four Themes
This is an overview of work that has been created or is in progress in the fields of light design, scenography and multimedia.
I have organized the work into four themes, although there is inevitably some overlap between the themes.
Themes in My Work
- Environ/Man
- Environ/Man 0.5
- Pretty How Town
- Children of the Earth
- Hexagons
- Synchrome
- Synchronicity
- Eelste Meyma’s Mausoleum
- Colour Sound Signal
- Tehillim Illuminated
- Sulphur, Wax & Sugar
- Anamorphology
- Would You Wonder Off
- Wygiswysee (what you get is what you see)
- Spatial Cinema
- The Family Reunion
- Now The Stew How Saw
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Theme 1.
Environ/Man
Man is the (self-appointed) steward of the globe and at the same time dependent on nature and its resources. His insatiable hunger for economic growth and expanding power creates a paradox between this stewardship and the exhaustion of the planet’s reserves and resources.
The theme investigates similarities between the human body and landscapes. It provides an integrated multimedia experience for visitors to the installations.
Below are five projects that belong to this theme. Clicking on the title above will take you to a collection of entries about this theme. Clicking on any of the project titles below will show the different entries on this website relevant to that specific project.
Multimedia installation with live music and performances, life-sized objects, video and sound. The installation can be placed in a theatre or a multifunctional venue. Local professional artists, amateurs or students will collaborate in experiments with space, image and sound. This work is in progress.
Click here to see the “aftermovie” of the first try-out in November 2015.
- Pretty How Town
Installation, occasionally with live performances, based on a poem by e.e. cummings. Space, shape, speech, sound, images.
A series of photomontages combining human bodies with landscapes and cityscapes, water, skies, leaves. Click on the title above to see some examples. The images can be printed at approximately 35 by 50 centimetres, exhibited and sold.
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A series of graphics, combining geometric shapes and photographic images. These images can also be printed, exhibited and sold.
A tent made of three or four big semi-transparent projection screens, in the middle one or two Chinese poles about six metres high, on which my son Benjamin will perform; projections of abstract and edited live imagery. Plans in progress.
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Theme 2.
Synchronicity
The challenge is to allow visitors/participants to experience art through several senses, and to surprise them with rich sensory stimulation.
Synchronicity and synergy of sound/music and imagery/colour; similarities, mutual enhancement, multi-sensory experiences.
Eelste Meyma’s Mausoleum is
Epitaph for Eelste Meyma
Composition: Anke Brouwer
for soprano, tenor, violin, recorder, lute and chimes.
(2014)
played by Super Librum, ensemble for medieval music
and
Eelste’s Crypt
Images by Carel fhm Kuitenbrouwer
(2016)
- Coloursoundsignal
Coloursoundsignal (Kleurengeluidsignaal) is a composite word made up of colour, sound and signal that was invented by H. N. Werkman, a Dutch printer and graphic artist (1882-1945). I chose it as the title of a work for choir, symphony orchestra, soundscape and video, created in collaboration with Anke Brouwer and commissioned by Kamerfilharmonie Der Aa, Groningen, Netherlands.
Light show programmed for the LED walls of the concert hall Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ in Amsterdam to accompany the performance of Steve Reich’s pivotal piece Tehillim (Psalms), from 1981. In collaboration with Steve Reich, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, Frank Daalder, Clive Rundell.
Sulphur, Wax & Sugar, a spatial light/music/sound spectacle in the concert hall Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ in Amsterdam. Collaboration with composers Anke Brouwer and Martijn Padding, ASKO|Schönberg Ensemble, Holland Festival, Muziekgebouw a/t IJ.
Theme 3.
Anamorphology
What you see is not always what you see. My videos and graphics contain layers and facilitate multiple interpretations. I extend this ‘principle’ of surprise and wonder into 3D-space. Objects are placed in space, the perspective is distorted, the viewer is seduced into imagining what is not there.
A walk through a park or wood along a trail of objects in anamorphic arrangements: geometric shapes, frames, planes with distorted perspective. In parts big and strong enough to carry visitors (children!).
The work is intended for public spaces that temporarily or permanently stage artworks, such as parks, buildings and festivals. In development, proposals available.
Words in space; anamorphosis with texts, lines, words, letters, calligraphy.
The idea of ‘looking beyond’, formulated poetically and presented spatially. About ten lines that I wrote myself, split up into parts, sometimes words, panels or signs on trees, branches, posts.
This work is also intended for a public or semi-public space, where people wander and wonder what the words mean, until they reach a spot from where it all comes clear — the puzzle fits. And yet it doesn’t quite.
I made several sketches for big pieces in a public space. This is one example — more can be found on the rest of my site.
Above: a dynamic typographic interpretation of cummings’ poem.
Pretty How Town (working title) is an installation based on the poem by e.e. cummings any one lived in a pretty how town. The video above is a first exploration. A spatial/environmental rendering is in preparation.
Cummings describes and analyses the petty lives of ordinary people poignantly and at the same time affectionately; he makes the ordinary special.
Collaboration with Ab Baars (clarinets/saxes/shakuhachis) and Martin Reints (poet/translator).
Project plan under construction, sketches available.
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Theme 4.
Spatial Cinema
Spatial Cinema deals with archetypical narratives such as the Western film or plays about family relations.
It involves space, performers, objects, video and sound. The settings are more or less those of a theatrical play, although the classic divisions between stage and auditorium and between audience and performers are also under investigation within this theme.
Semi-abstract, semi-narrative, atmospheric, metaphoric, symbolic.
- The Family Reunion
Old social patterns in nuclear families, originating in the childhood and puberty of the siblings and early ‘beginners’ parenthood, persist through the adult lives of the siblings and re-emerge in family gatherings. Or, conversely, family events are prompt the regeneration of feelings of unconditional love and affection.
What would the outcome be if my children, both active in the performing arts, come together in a creative process with their parents, both creative entrepreneurs?
Collaboration with Yinka Kuitenbrouwer, independent actor/theatre maker in Ghent,
Benjamin Kuitenbrouwer, alias Monki Business, Chinese Pole acrobat, and
Ange Wieberdink, producer, filmmaker.
Concepts and plans are in collaborative development.
Abstract music theatre piece (aka spatial film or abstract opera) in five acts, five musicians, five dancers. Objects, dynamic and spatial imagery, lights, video.
Loosely based on the great Western How The West Was Won.
Central theme: (Western) Man’s insatiable drive towards pioneering, exploitation and expansion; the paradoxical side of that drive: the destruction of virgin nature and the creation of scarcity and inequality, migration, conflicts.
Plans in development.
