When mistakes do not cause damage, they open unexpected paths. Those small slips of intention are full of rare beauty: They are the generative equivalent of losing your way in a city that you know. They carry a sense of liminality, a refreshing unfamiliarity, eventually the thrill of what comes next, provided that you can let go, even for a while. Like the city, the machine becomes a co-author of a different story.

Digital tools invite precision. We specify formats, destinations, and parameters, expecting clean execution. Yet when something misfires the logic breaks open – accident and misinterpretation become collaboration: machine and human co-create something neither could have predicted or done alone.

A transcription system, when fed the wrong input, invents. It strings together words that produce or mimic meaning. What begins as failure becomes poetry. An OCR, when it fails to recognize the alphabet of a given text, replaces it with other symbols, that can be observed and admired separately from any possible meaning.

Errors, deviations from the plan, and accidental artistic results:

Photos taken by accident 

Stickers created by accident

Asemic language created by OCR

Transcription system errors due to wrong language input: [a] original text [b] correct translation [c] error

Image from a video after an ffmpeg command ran without destination 

We spend so much of our time trying to avoid mistakes – in speech, in text, in code – we dread making them, and we are often judged and scolded for making them. Yet the most memorable discoveries often happen when control is lost. When we lose orientation, we see differently. A misaligned photograph may reveal a new composition. A broken command may expose a hidden pattern. An algorithmic confusion may give us fresh poetry.

To embrace error is to suspend mastery. It means allowing the system – technological or personal – to surprise us. It’s a form of trust: a willingness to let meaning unfold rather than dictate it. Getting lost, whether in a city or in a sequence of commands, restores our capacity for wonder. It reminds us that not every route must be efficient, not every result must be correct.

Besides, an error is also a performance, a one-time act of deviation that can’t be rehearsed: a resistance that you usually only find in improvisation, and this improvisation can’t be planned, predicted, packaged, or monetized. Its value lies in its singularity: once recognized and repeated, it ceases to be error and becomes style, code, or pattern, even when the results differ. This is not necessarily a degradation but a transformation. The raw accident becomes a method, the surprise becomes craft.

In a world obsessed with optimization, the true mistake is still one of the few gestures that escape design. After all, perhaps the error is not the deviation, but the plan itself, a breaking of the illusion that outcomes can be perfectly engineered. Maybe we need to lose our way, again and again, so that the world can reappear in unfamiliar form.

Between September 2023 and July 2025 I studied for an MFA. When I started this study I was 41 years old, with three jobs, a young child and a busy, somewhat messed up life. My creative rhythm, as well as almost any other set rhythm I might have had up to that time, was disrupted, and most works that came out during this period were not products of the pure joy of making (one day we'll talk about the process as well as the outcome of this study). However, there were those moments that somehow slipped through the fingers of institutional creativity and then several little projects appeared. However, because they came to life in fragmented, seemingly unrelated moments, I failed to see them as a whole and I also failed to see from the start their immediate connection with the topics, materials and methods that I chose for my 'institutional' projects.

Self-portrait was the first one of these side projects. It came to fruition during a ceramics workshop around Halloween. I decided to use acrylics and varnish (nail polish) instead of glazing it. The topic of identity, stereotypes and gender roles, that would later emerge in my graduation project, as well as masks as a medium, would only become concrete about a year later in my practice. 

Picnic was a child of found objects. The discarded, the every day, the unfitting. From the wooden board to the plastic threads, all objects in this assemblage are items that would have otherwise ended up in the trash, which was also meant to be a performative building element that would shape the sculptures in identitours.

Wall was the last one. The bold color palette is there, as well as the found objects. Underneath, on the found canvas, you can see parts of an underlying painting of a woman. But it's not a message of despair. This wall is a live wall, a lived wall, against the sterile white of decorum, and is in fact a happy expression of that woman. Looking back, those choices I made unconsciously were expressions of and foreshadowed the concept of virtuality, that I also embrace in identitours.

It seems that there is always a little bit of us in everything we do, one way or another.

The umbrella project "Labels, but not for clothes" approaches the topic of labeling and stereotyping from different angles and calls for participation and has developed as a triptych.

The project had its first public moment in November, in the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NL.

The purpose of this first part: To show the impact of exposure to biases and labels at an early age. In what ways do words shape us?

The second part, presented in LeesZaal West in Rotterdam explored through a video piece and a web 'game' how stereotyping is systemically reinforced through repetition and exclusion.


The third and last part, identitours, a site-specific transmedia installation in Buitenplaats Brienenoord, was also my graduation project, and the one that took the discussion further, to what happens after being exposed to biases and stereotypes and in the creation of identity. It is tightly connected to the thesis Shifting Identities where the conversation unravels in some depth.  

I always thought that if you have even the slightest view to the natural world, you don't need television and you never get bored. There is always something happening: A cloud, a breeze, some wafting smell. Even inside, if you have a fireplace, you can spend hours watching what is possibly the strongest resemblance of a mystical dance the natural world has to offer. All these joys of the senses and the mind are connected to some kind of movement, some kind of wave. 

However, there is also another level of observation: The observation of the unmoving, the still, the silent. If you observe anything long enough, something magical happens: It starts changing before your eyes. The object exists only in immediate connection to our perception of it. If the objects were conscious of their existence, they would be divided between the view of themselves and our view of them. Which view would be holding the truth? These were my thoughts, as I photographed this object and watched the monster-bride endlessly change before my eyes. Different corners, different light, different relation to space, to itself. It began as an interpretation of an amplifier by its maker (Christian Kennecke, aka @ernstunited) and in the perception of those observing it it became a bridal dress, a bride, a monster, a purse. 

It has been some time since then, and I'm still thinking about the monster-bride, probably because I hadn't examined anything so intently in a long time. Watching the object for so long left a strong impression that is still growing in me. Obviously, observing hasn't stopped when I took my eyes away. My mind is still processing, my perception of the object is still changing, evolving perhaps. If you watch anything long enough, you fall in love with it: It becomes an extension and expression of you, a poem that touches you deeply. I am not sure if hate is even a possible feeling, once you get close enough to anything, or if feeling depends on the object's nature, if such a thing exists, or our own disposition. In any case, if I ever get bored, if I ever feel empty, all I have to do is get out of my head, stretch my gaze to anything my gaze can reach, and enjoy the show.