Cym

This hub tells you more about me.

This page will give you information about me, my projects and my videos. Enjoy!

Writing a text about yourself seems to be the thing that always comes in the last place. There are always so many other things to do... I started this hub already a year ago and I noticed that I still didn't publish it. So I decided that it is time now to put it online.

Instead of writing a long text about myself, I will post some links to my different websites. Inbetween I will show you some of my video works.

This is quite an old video already. I was asked to make a one-minute video for an art project in a village called Topolo in Italy. At that time, I didn't have a video camera. So I made a movie out of the many photos that I took while my son and me visited the small village Topolo in Italy.

I used the sound of rain to connect the images together, to make them into a movie. The people in Topolo who organized the project, liked my video very much. The video was later included on a special DVD about the one-minutes project.

One of my favourite projects is the project 'No Men's Land'. In this project I am transforming photos of real life situations into abstract compositions, made with only HTML and CSS.

The photos that I used for this project were all made by me on European borders. I made photos especially on the borders that used to divide Europe in East and West. After selecting the photos I transformed them into HTML-tables, which gives the compositions a very special and unique atmosphere and rhythm.

You can visit the online web project at: http://nomensland.eu/2007/

Click on one of the squares with a number on the map to get started. After that, click on 'view source' to see the original photo behind the abstract composition.

Enjoy!

Here is another video which is made with the same technic as the one with the little boy in the rain in Italy. Again it is exactly one minute. And again it is made out of a series of photos. This time I used a sound sample of a drip of rain, just one water drop, to connect the images.

The video shows a walk I made in Amsterdam from the Stedelijk Museum (which was temporarily hosted at the former post building near the Central Station at that time) and Children's Science Museum Nemo. In the video I am crossing the bridge that connects the two buildings.

The project that I am best known for, is my recycling art. I create new products from old materials from the supermarket. I focus especially on reusing packages from every day supermarket products, the things that we throw away every day, without even thinking about it.

I have a graphical background and I have always been fascinated by the designs of every day products in the supermarket. I my recycling art I am giving a second life to the high quality package materials that we use every day in our kitchen.

In this project I try to make people aware of all the materials which we throw away every day. Recognizing some of the well-known packages and looking at them in a different way is another important aspect of this project.

You can see my recycling art at: http://recycling-arts.com/

For many years I was wandering around Europe. In 2003 my son and me were invited to be the artists in residence in a small gallery in Graz, Austria. My son was still very small at that time. During one afternoon there was an incredible summer storm.

During our stay at the gallery I had borrowed a film camera from the gallery. This video is one of the two short videos which I made during our residency in Graz that summer. Again it is a video in the rain. I am somehow fascinated by rain I guess...

I've done many more art projects besides virtual borders and recycled art. Other projects that I have done include virtual spaces which I have created, workshops that I have organized and hundred thousands of photos that I have taken.

One thing that connects all my projects, is that I am always trying to look at things from different perspectives. I always want to look at things from different points of view. And through my work I hope that other people also start to look at things in a different way.

You can find an overview of my work at my website: http://cym.net/projects/

It is 2010 now and I am still fascinated by rain. The video below shows my son on Queen's Day in the Netherlands. He is 7 years old in this video. And he is playing on his flute in the rain. It was raining all morning, but he was playing non-stop for almost 3 hours.

During this time he earned a lot more money than me trying to sell my recycled wallets and notebooks. Nobody wanted to buy anything in the rain, but people were very happy to give their money to a brave young boy playing in the rain.