Logo=Colour
We all know that the world will not be controlled, it’s an illusion to think that we can control the world. Despite our technological progress. We have to think about how we exercise our control. Or when not to. How do you fit this into a design? I choose to give control away. That is a deliberate act. In the act of giving up control, there is a certain connotation of loosing it. In my design I give the control away. But to who, or what? Do I deliver it to the user's clutches, a formula? I’ll give an example. For the Quarantine Series, a former art space in Amsterdam, I could design the visual identity. I was searching for something other than a traditional logo. It was to be a dynamic logo, something that is recognisable yet always different. The logo became a colour. No shape, just colour. And not just one colour, but one that changes every day. The colour is defined by a chaotic algorithm, in which yesterday's colour forms the input for today's. By giving up control over the design to a formula, I had to except that it would form colours which I would never choose. Too many shades of pink for instance. But just that result in the system provoked new creative decisions. Sometimes the program for the art space was set to a date which had the ‘right’ colour. On www.quarantine.nl you can see the colours from 08-04-03 until today.

Variable clouds
In my project www.sky-catcher.nl the appearance of the website is not set by a computer algorithm, but by the way the sky looks at that moment. On the roof of De Balie in Amsterdam I have installed a camera that takes a picture of the sky every five minutes above the Museum Square. The photos are automatically uploaded and form the background for the site every five minutes. The website therefore changes continuously – under the influence of the weather, the cloud formations, the cycle of both day and night and artificial light. Furthermore the colour of the text adjusts itself to the colour of the sky. All photos remain on the site. This has created enormous archives with approximately 200,000 images of the sky which can be selected by date. The images of the sky of one day can be played as an animation. Furthermore there is a poster which consists of 17,000 images of the sky of one year. On which there are two white-blue organic figures set on the dark background of night-time pictures. In these shapes you can see the difference between day and night return, the length of the days during summertime and winter and the position on the moon. In the Museum De Paviljoens the whole archives are printed on a wall (about 30 m long x 5 m high).

Emergent designs
Before I give control away, I must develop a system that will take over the decisions of design. I make decisions on which factors will influence the design, but also what kind of rules and properties this system will follow. In my creative process I’d like to think in terms of organisms. Our world consists of countless organisms, systems that become more complex: from multi-celled organisms to society and culture. These organisms function separately from each other, but are also dependant on each other; they influence, form patterns and search for internal order in each other. One can also see that visual patterns return from nature to economy and culture. Also spontaneous new patterns appear to form a complex system; emergent. The organism shows behaviour that is neither consistent with A or B, but more the interaction between A and B. My designs also show emergent behaviour: programmatic codes behind my design are given a set of simple rules so that these rules can react with each other. The design surprising me with new properties that I did not include into the code myself. The design starts to lead its own live.

Tactile Experience
The website I made for the Sandberg Institute, where I also studied, www.sandberg.nl shows emergent behaviour. The website consists of a matrix-grid with equal squares. When you move the mouse cursor over the matrix it appears that you can alternate the lines. They evade your cursor according to specific rules (mass-spring-forces) and work in such way that you see the matrix as elastic and flexible. You’re playing with the ever changing behaviour of the matrix. It suggests a tactile experience. Another example in which the design leads it’s own life, was a paper catalogue for an arts festival. Throughout the official catalogue, with all its artists and their work, there is the story about the development of the catalogue. The history of the making is literally in between the editor's text and images of the festival. Because of this mix of two different sorts of text, the layout seems irregular, organic. Sometimes the text about the process rules out the other, while other pages remain blank and sober. This way the official text of the catalogue and the text about the evolution of the process merge, sometimes with some friction

Link to this project:
poly-luna.com/algorithms-as-airbrush