Please describe your practice according to your research and inspirations.

My artistic work is the inquiry into technological processes and their relation to the constant shift of the contemporary condition as I perceive it at any given time, from a personal perspective, that recursively is also getting distorted through this practice. A dry presentation of technological progress is totally uninteresting though if the latter does not come into dialog with materiality, dimensionality, historicity vis-a-vis artistic development and my own biography. My research involves experimentation and can take various forms; from computer simulations, computational design and research of (massive) photographic archives to experiments with chemical substances, minerals and living matter. In the process of making a new work I usually approach it and visualise it as a multilayered entity. Each layer has its own open-ended purpose and it has to be fulfilled—conceptually or materially— in a satisfactory way depending on the nature of the work. I don’t believe much in inspiration in the traditional sense. If there is something that inspires me, it is the work of other artists, researchers or writers who utilise and think about computational methods, combined—almost in equal parts—with materiality. There is also the notion that inspiration comes through the work itself; the more you dig into something the more interesting it becomes and new aspects unfold. I concede to this but I believe more in the mechanism of imagination and its deliberate manipulation as well as approaching the same task from as many different perspectives as possible, always with the goal to surprise yourself.

How do you balance ecology and technology in your installations?

I could give you more than one answer here. Ecology and technology form a dialectical relationship par excellence. The word ecology derives from the Greek word oikos meaning house. In The Three Ecologies book, Felix Guattari argues that oikos is the place where relationships form. Ecology is about relations and no matter how I approach it, I see a technoscientific layer in it. I spend a lot of time with technology but when I observe or look closer to natural processes or living matter I am always astonished at the degree that human-driven innovation borrows from natural processes through biomimetics and nature-inspired algorithms. So many natural processes are visual manifestations of what could be described as algorithmic processes. In my practice I amplify the ecological practice by infusing natural materials with technological ones. This is where dialectic relationships form; these relations being themselves the work. Technology alone in my works is balanced by creating a direct dialog with art historical references, narrative and my personal biography. But I have shown works that have been intentionally presented out of balance on their technological part. Ecology is balanced in my practice by presenting natural materials processed through advanced technological processes and concepts that make sense in the present.