I’m overstimulated.
I’m overstimulated by sound.
Sound that becomes noise.
Noise of people, of traffic, of bad acoustics.
I’m overstimulated by the world.

More more more
I’m seeing a world where we are stuck in a cycle of wanting everything better, faster and more. Not because we need it, just because it is there. Did you ever think 4G was slow or only after 5G was an option? This more-more-more cycles is making us desensitised to the information and visual overload which is creating even more stimulus to keep your attention. For my ADHD brain this has caused an extremely overstimulating world. How can I live in this overstimulated world without getting overstimulated?

Solution or problem
In search for an answer, I used the AI to come up with solutions beyond noise-cancelling headphones. I want to cancel the noise, but not the sound. I want to be open to social interaction, but not open to the overstimulation. During the process, the AI gave me many-many-many solutions. The amount of unlimited possibilities, created in seconds and the perfectness of every execution was overstimulating  by itself. Making me wonder if I am creating because it is necessary or just because I can.

In my interactive installation I visualize a tsunami of  overstimulation. The images show the solutions to sound overstimulation, yet is such manner, it becomes the problem itself.


shown at ArtEZ FINALS exhibition 2024

AN4-STASi4 is a new type of computer that risks drowning itself through its use. It raises awareness of your data consumption by pumping water into a tank in front of the screen every time the computer storage is used. Without proper data management, eventually, the water level will become critical, overflowing onto the electronics and destroying the device itself. This extreme interaction proposal aims to counter the common perception of data storage as something ephemeral, limitless, and without consequence in a very direct and tangible way.

We started this project by researching on-demand services. These types of services offer content instantly whenever needed or wanted. This type of relationship between consumer and product changes our understanding of availability, accessibility, and ownership. We used hoarding as a metaphor to further explore these values. What, for example, is the difference between collecting and hoarding? And why is one perceived as positive and the other as negative?

Hoarding is when someone has an obsessive difficulty in throwing things away because of a strong perceived need to save or own items. Because this behavior can generate emotional, social, and health risks, it is clinically described as a mental disorder. Within physical space, hoarding is uncommon and perceived as something bad. In contrast, we found that it is very common to hoard in digital space and that it is also not (yet) seen as something problematic. Just think about all the photos on your phone, or all the tabs that are still open in your browser.

Digital space makes it very easy to hoard because storage space is easily accessible, abundant, and cheap. And because the behavior can take place within an invisible cloud or on a private device, it isn’t easily apparent from the outside. Therefore, it seems to be without consequence. However, although digital hoarding doesn’t pose any direct physical danger, it can still cause emotional and even social stress. On top of that, the power consumption of data storage can generate indirect dangers through its harm on the planet.

We wanted to highlight the possible dangers of our digital hoarding behavior by creating an interface that would give a tangible representation of it and that would return some of the dangers associated with hoarding in physical space.

2020

selected for Dutch Design Week 2021

shown at Museum Arnhem during Media Art Festival Arnhem 2024

Our society is built on many overlapping systems, determining who you are before you even know it. In the 19th century, Francis Galton, a British eugenicist, tried to distinguish criminals from non-criminals by their facial features. Even though the research failed to be successful, his attempt was not the last. AI works based on provided datasets, recreates already existing patterns, and enhances them for us to observe. I have trained my AI model on a dataset of mugshots and generated new ones. Young, happy, and innocent, yet already labeled guilty.

I started from the history of recognizing criminals by their facial features and how a long time ago they thought that by the size of your forehead, your nose, and the distance between your eyes you can recognize a criminal. I trained an AI with a dataset of mugshots of criminals in America and asked to generate new people. These (non-exciting) people I turned into kids and labeled them as inmates of the future. You can view these on the website inmatesofthefuture.com and each time generate a new kid/future inmate.

2020

‘From a machine point of view, this is the new haute couture. An AI can look like a human, can speak like a human, can think like a human. But what it cannot do is propagate. What makes a human special is the ability to do that, so that is what an AI will highlight as sexual selection, which is the same for humans as our natural selection.’

My research into beauty in humans led me from the time before technology, where natural selection defined our view of beauty, to the time where technology changed our view to sexual selection with the help of independence of propagation like birth control or egg freezing. Asking the question “what if the machine decides for the human”, I trained my AI on a haute couture dataset and made two designs into physical pieces. These I displayed in an etalage installation, showing a video in the back of how the AI looks at the world, classifying everything as fertile and sexually attractive.

2021

"Just one pixel is nothing, while multiple pixels can be anything. I was interested in just that one pixel and getting past it only being a combination of RGB or a technical object. I gave the pixel physicality by making it into a lightbox. I placed this object into natural surroundings, taking the pixel out of the screen and placing it in places it has never been. With a series of photos, a video, and the physical object, I gave the one pixel a place in the non-digital world.

2021

Shown during the assignment exhibition in June 2021