Making, producing and doing business in the image culture

On this website, I show the connection between my work as maker, curator and cultural entrepreneur. I live in an enclave and balance on the cusp; between design and art, culture and commerce, analogue and digital, and between making and producing. I like to position myself as researcher into the image culture, not academically, but rather from a practical situation as maker and curator.

The relevance of image culture

We are still only at the start of the digital era that will initiate a new culture of knowledge and communication. More multi-faceted, more transparent, more accessible. Today’s world of visual communication is constantly shifting and is characterised by accelerating technological developments. This has consequences for the position of art and design. The changing role of art and design in society has still not been sufficiently studied. By placing the phenomenon of image culture high on the agenda, we are making a start. Image has become a leading principle in our society and yet we remain relatively illiterate in reading images.

My work deals with the relationship and interaction I see between text and image. This is something that has fascinated me for years and which now, thanks to the developments in communication technology, is becoming increasingly current and much more normal. We live in the image culture, but when we think of an image we quickly conjure up a photo or a painting and a relationship is made with art. But art is only a small part of what I call today’s image culture. Image culture is not a discipline, but it does have its own dynamic. I think that in a hundred years art and design will have a much greater impact in society than it has had thus far, except we no longer call it art and design.

I am an image person

That’s what they told me as a child and rapidly this came to mean that I wasn’t any good with text. You had text people for that. They were two worlds divorced from each other. In my youth, I would regularly stumble by accident into literary circles. In those years, the text people taught me that an image person was a totally different being. Image people work from their feelings, have no need to talk, to write and to think. And when I was twelve, I would sit at the table with those intellectuals from literary circles, racked with nerves when they asked me a question. Instead of thinking up a suitable remark to put the intelligentsia in its place, I would gulp at my lemonade which would then explode through my nostrils and spray in the direction of those seated around the table. That was the extent of my contribution to intellectual debate. From then on, I have always been fully aware of the chasm between image people and text people.

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