i&a: What were you doing before you got into the space of art?

Jeroen: I was doing all sorts of research projects with algorithms before 2010. That’s when I worked on new research methodologies or new research approaches to, for example, social media monitoring for brands. I worked with algorithms to analyze how people were talking on Twitter (X) about brands. I used these to gather thousands of tweets about a topic that was interesting, but I got bored of doing it.

i&a: Even then you were looking for stories.

Jeroen: That’s true. I never looked at it that way. I was already solving with stories. How can we break this technology open in a sense and combine it with something else? I wanted to make it something that was inspiring and creative for me. That lead to my first official artwork. If you were on Twitter (X), you could go to a website, log in with your account, and then your profile picture would be built up out of your Twitter messages. A new way of portrait making, that would show your digital story, what you’ve done, what you’ve read, the algorithm of you. It was picked up by the media, and went viral.

i&a: How did this lead to your art being hung in the National Historic Museum in New Zealand?

Jeroen:  In the beginning of 2011 Christchurch was struck by an earthquake. The whole centre, everything except the church tower, collapsed. Someone from Christchurch contacted me, she has seen my Twitter (X) artworks online and asked if I could create an artwork about Christchurch, a remembrance about the earthquake, built out of tweets using a specific hashtag. So I created a piece, inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I sent it there digitally and they printed it and exhibited in the church. It was added to the national collection of National Historic Museum after that.

i&a: Do you ever get people saying AI can’t be art?

Jeroen: What is art? What is creativity? What is technology going to mean for human creativity? What makes us human? Is there anything human left if machines can create art? Is creativity something that makes us human, or not? These are the fascinating questions of our time. That’s really what keeps me creating these art pieces. The most interesting questions are questions like that. What makes us truly human? What human creativity is left? You can clearly say there is a link. Because I’m making a living and standing on stages all over the world talking about it. So clearly, there’s some kind of a link to human involvement in the space of the storytelling and technology.

i&a: When you’re standing on those stages what point do you want to drive home?

Jeroen: It’s really about breaking outside of existing boundaries. For me innovation is about technology that breaks out of conceptual boundaries. Can we fundamentally get to a new sort of art form with artificial intelligence? Fundamentally looking for more interesting ways of using technology. I call that unbounded thinking. You can react to things in life in two ways. The first is trying to keep things as they are, within existing structures. Or you can be unbound and explorative. Open to intuitive ideas, your feelings, ideas that break out of the existing, from intuition. Unbound.

i&a: What is your proudest piece of work and why?

Jeroen: Letters from Nature. It’s a really successful project. It’s still circulating. I always search for different layers in a piece. And that’s what combined it really well. It’s been able to trigger discussions all over the world and at all sorts of events. That’s what defines a good art project, that you can continuously find new meaning, new stories in it.

i&a: What surprised you most about your journey?

Jeroen: I discovered at one point that there was a newspaper in Saudi Arabia writing an article about me. Saying that I’ve been to Saudi Arabia, and I created a painting there, and that it just sold for 3.2 million dollars. My bank balance didn’t tell me the same story. I had never been to Saudi Arabia. First I thought I’m going to put a lawyer on it but then I decided to be unbound. Maybe the painting might be mine eventually in some kind of way. So that’s when I started to dive into this story with a journalist. We had to search for it in Saudi Arabia. Eventually I found it and signed the piece with my autograph. It’s about authenticity. It seems to be some kind of metaphor for AI. Art without us participating in it anymore. It’s about stories.

i&a: What is your personal purpose what drives you?

Jeroen: Finding new ways of thinking, about creativity. It’s really a search for yourself. It’s about mindset and finding new ways of how to make art from life in some kind of way.

i&a: What does legacy look like to you?

Jeroen: That would of course be in the artwork, I don’t have children, that’s my legacy. The pieces that hang on the walls. Ideas, or the stories, something that remains in some kind of way. If we think about legacy from an artist perspective, the idea that a piece could sit in art history books.

i&a: Let’s talk some more about the concept of being unbound?

Jeroen: Initial ideas are really where the danger is. Downgrading these ideas by thinking only about structure. If you are open minded as you go, you have your initial idea. As you go through the course of taking that idea and turning it into reality, you can create an unbound mindset. For me it’s about finding a new balance with breaking out of these structures and when you do that, there’s new energy, new excitement, new connections. How can we connect in new ways by exploring? How can we break these boundaries open? Increasingly my talks are about that, it’s really evolving into that.

i&a: What advice would you give to somebody who’s out there and doesn’t know where to start?

Jeroen: I think you should be willing to have the naivety to experiment and explore these crazy new ideas. I was doing a talk last week at TU Delft. A student approached me and said “How can you give me a lecture, or show me online lectures on how to create movies with artificial intelligence?” I could really feel their difficulty to actually just start experimenting. My advice, trust and have faith in your creative idea and explore that. It’s undoing the fear of failure. We’re taught not to fail. Being less focused on traditional success in a sense, finding more interesting ways of living, working. Outside of existing career paths and the more cliche aims.

i&a: In this world that you are in, what makes you uncomfortable?

Jeroen: AI to a large extent. AI is really dangerous in some ways. And of course, things like the climate crisis. AI is a double edged sword. It really depends on what you’re going to do with it or how you’re going to use it. It can be an interesting technology, definitely. On the level of media, in the creative scene, the risk is that we’ll have a flood of all sorts of mediocre content. Outside of that, there’s a huge risk in it with fraud, criminal activity, government tracking. All sorts of data, tracking people, keeping populations under control. Being used in warfare.

i&a: What is currently inspiring you?

Jeroen: It’s art. Always the most inspiring are new exhibits. Really seeing what’s happening out there. I’m going to the Dutch Design Week, for example. It’s a big design event in the Netherlands. Very interesting to see what’s happening there. Paris again in December. They have all sorts of exhibits, art from the beginning of the 20th century. For me, it’s really diverse what inspires me. So that’s my core inspiration. Outside of that, I’m really focused on all sorts of tech developments, watching podcasts about that, watching videos about that. All sorts of developments around quantum computing, artificial intelligence and philosophy. That’s where I get all my inspiration from.

i&a: What podcasts do you have on repeat?

Jeroen: Oh, wow. That’s a difficult one. I watch basically everything from Lex Fridman.

i&a: Where are you at creatively in the broader sense?

Jeroen: What’s the future of creativity? Or can we research new forms of creating again? I call it the post AI era. About a year ago I was so fed up with AI, all the prompting and all the imagery that is online. So I decided I’m going to focus more on what’s next. And that’s really getting back to the start of the conversation. It could be about finding new ways of combining digital with analog. Unbound creative. I believe what’s fundamental are new ways of using technology to come to new forms of creativity or come to new forms of, what’s next, in AI or how can we use it. That’s what I’m really working on and exploring at this point.

i&a: What’s the role of storytelling?

Jeroen: Over the past year I’ve been working on a project called Bee. It was a replication of my own mind in a sense. I started to feed AI with all sorts of background info about me and images of my artworks. I asked it to come forward with new ideas for new artworks and visualize them. It was cool as an art project, but the output wasn’t super interesting because it was more or less a repetition of what’s been there. So I started mixing it up with another AI system, which I asked to imagine the world of the bee. A mix up of the human world and the natural world to inspire new ways of cross living. That’s where it got interesting. Mixing up, breaking open my sort of AI intelligence replication with something else again. And that’s where it really got surprising again. The storytelling of the future will be really about new ways of seeing and that’s where the creativity innovation is again.

i&a: What tip, trick, or piece of advice would you want to share with our reader?

Jeroen: Exercise every day. That really gets me through the week. It’s part of my computer work. My back hurts but I’ve got out of that by just doing exercises, but you have to do it every day. Also plan in time everyday to create freely, that is were unbound thinking comes.

i&a: Not everyone sees themselves as creative, how would you suggest creating freely?

Jeroen: It’s a no plan. It’s just freely creating. It’s making a feeling, creating satisfaction or happiness. It gives you a shot for the day. You have to really enjoy it, it lifts your day. Be open with materials, for me that’s digital. For me it’s just creating something without a sort of purpose. I’m not striving towards something, it is not oh it has to look like this or be like that. It’s spontaneously exploring all sorts of small ideas and then see what happens. My mission is to meditate. It’s about watching your own thoughts. Seeing what pops up. It’s what comes from your unconscious. Opening unbound thinking. In a way that ultimately tells the story.

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impact&agency