Artistic Research

My praxinoscope is inspired by Emile Reynaud's inventions. His original praxinoscope was a spinning drum with a column in the centre holding 12 mirrors, which reflected the 12 images of an animation strip that sat flush with the inside edge of the drum. The angle of the mirrors separates the images such that when the drum spins, the illusion is created of one moving image rather than 12 separate ones. This was an improvement over the zoetrope, which used slits in the wall of the drum instead of a central column of mirrors. The praxinoscope offered a clearer, brighter image. Below is Reynaud's praxinoscope, which he marketed as a toy. Reynaud used a biscuit tin for his prototype. I used old Kodak film cans – one large one for the main drum and a smaller one for the central column, which also hides the battery. Battery? Yes, my praxinoscope uses a COB LED strip (with diffusion) to offer the possibility of backlighting the animation strip. This is useful for showing the texture of the paper, for revealing anything printed or drawn on the reverse side of the animation strip, and for illuminating film strips. It is somewhat sacrilege – or at least cruelly ironic – to put film in a praxinoscope, since the advent of film was ultimately what led Reynaud's inventions to be seen as obsolete. But for the narrative of my film Ship of Fools – which is very much pro-Reynaud – this was a necessary evil. In Palimpseste sur souvenir the benefit of the light is demonstrated: it allows certain animations to glow warmly, and in other animation strips layers of text or image on the reverse side are revealed. Very apt in the context of a 'palympsest' – a writing parchment that is used and reused over time, accumulating layers of history in the residual marks. You can see this in the stills from Palimpseste below. Below are some images from Ship of Fools (2026). As I discovered working on Palimpseste, there are interesting visual possibilities with the praxinoscope beyond simply reproducing looping animations in the traditional sense: by creating an image strip with no regard for persistence of vision, the device effectively creates a moving collage. The offset angle of the mirrors causes the arranged images to blend in to each other. The moving collage also has a certain depth as a result of the curvature of the drums. With the right lighting, the collage appears to emerge from a dark void.

This is a text film, but it's also about materiality, memory, photography and branding.
I wanted the onscreen text to be analogue, to capture the textured, human imperfection of the titles and intertitles of old movies. I devised a way to use a Canon AV-1 analogue photo camera to create and present the slides. The process was as follows: write and typeset the slides, print them on paper, photograph them on the analogue camera, have the film roll developed, then feed the developed film back into the modified camera and view the slides through the lens opening of the camera.
I created a false back to the camera with a diffusion plate that allows an even amount of light to pass through the developed film from behind. In between shots, the camera's mirror drops down and – with some additional diopters placed behind the camera — the camera user can be seen in the viewfinder via the mirror. Below are some tests prior to the final version of the text in the film, which spans two rolls. Below is a typical text slide as it appears in the final film.

I call this a #translation experiment because I am translating invisible, environmental factors into visible 'grain' (looks more like bokeh in effect).My original intention was to introduce some visual redundance to clean digital images, akin to the grain in analogue film, in which every frame seems to swim with movement and life. But I didn't want just to make prettier or more visually complex images, or some purely aesthetic, nostalgic filter. I saw it as an opportunity to create 'smart grain', a way to represent some invisible aspect of the place or situation where the film was made. So that you might come to sense the meaning of the smart grain over the course of the film.One application I tested was to express things like local pollution and local wealth in grain of differing colours and densities (see 'pollu' and 'muni' under the tools section of the site).I didn't make a film using this method yet, but I did use the 'pepper's ghost' style mechanism to create visual effects for The Spheroids (2025).How does it work in practice? I created a shelf that is mounted under my digital film camera's lens. The shelf can hold a smartphone, with the screen facing up. On the phone I load one of the apps that mines data relating to your specific place/time/situation (pictured here is muni). A ghost image of the screen is reflected into the lens by a sheet of acrylic held at a 45-degree angle. This utilises the 'pepper's ghost' effect to practically overlay the phone's image over the camera image. The advantage of doing it this way, rather than digitally, is that the 'grain' goes through the lens, and thus takes on the optical characteristics of the specific camera and lens you are using.

I wrote a poetry zine in which I tried to imagine poems as films. Aren't all poems just poems and films just films? Probably. But I liked the thought exercise.

In 2018 I explored the possibilities and limitations of making animations for oscilloscope. An oscilloscope is an instrument that visualises voltage. It can be used to represent sound as a wave. If you manipulate that sound, you can make the wave look like images on the oscilloscope screen. Using specialised software and Blender 3D, I made animated films for oscilloscope (see the 'films' section of my website. I was also invited to perform live together with musician Jurgen De Blonde at Art Cinema OFFoff in Ghent. I manipulated his synthesiser output signal to create live images based on pre-designed models.The performance was 40 minutes long and took visual inspiration from a poem by Dominique De Groen, which I translated into images.

In 2017 I continued my exploration of sound, language and rhythm with two experiments. In the performance Weird, I'm alive! I created a dynamic sound collage out of a Facebook messenger conversation. Recorded soundbytes of the conversation were triggered by unwitting users of the website MultiplayerPiano.com. I patched the midi output from the website through to my digital audio workstation. The website users playing the virtual piano brought the conversation alive in unpredictable ways that gave the text new meanings and a life of its own. Another experiment was Touching the cheese (2017), an experimental comedy-fiction film in which I translated the rhythm of a German folk dancer into the rhythm of the protagonists' speech.The captured rhythm was visualised on screen in the manner of a midi sequence.

In the short experimental film 'Motion them with breath' (2016) I played with the inherent rhythm of language and the tone of the human voice. I recited a poem and invited guitarist Jesse Vanden Eynde to replace my voice with guitar-playing. The explicit meaning of the words was lost in the audio but the tone and rhythm remained. The image takes over some of the meaning of the language that was lost, albeit through a very indirect interpretation.

Between 2014 and 2019 I was a member of the collective CLUBHUIS. During that time we occasionally organised residencies, events and group activities. The swimming flipper was part of a simple language-based game I created (called 'soul diving') to stimulate reflection on personal fears, struggles and comforts. The colourful tape snippets on the wall were a translation of rhythm into a visual language.

When transcribing an audio recording of a German woman speaking English, I would occasionally have to rewind the audio. I noticed that in reverse, something of the German woman's native tone and rhythm was still present, despite her speaking English. Having an understanding of German, and detecting this German flavour in the audio, my brain tried to interpret the gibberish as German. I heard words that weren't there and realised that the words I heard created a portrait of my subconscious. I asked a German native speaker to listen to the backwards English-language recordings and write down any German words he heard. He heard even more German than me in the gibberish. It was like an auditive equivalent of the Rorschach inkblot test.

This was an installation that translated a poem into sounds and smells. The work had an olfactory component and a sound component, brought together by the mechanical installation, made in collaboration with an industrial engineering student. For each section of the soundscape, a new scented concoction would swing into position, and the smell would be wafted toward the nose of the user. Listen to the soundscape online.