Participating Artist

Tom’s work is about the communication and non-communication between electronic devices and humans, focusing particularly on his relationship with such devices.

Drawing on his fine art background, his work explores the relationships between, human touch, memory and everyday electronic objects. For example his work “Moederkoek”, which literally translated is mother-cake but refers in English to the placebo, Tom performs with his mother and she bakes a cake, like she used to when he was a young boy. In the contemporary version, in a self-assembled kitchen, Tom performers with his mother, sampling her baking and the sounds its produces in real-time. These sounds are arranged and manipulated on the fly and form an ongoing, improvised composition. The performance ends, with the cake going into the oven and the smell of baking filling the room. Once it is baked, the cake is served to the audience.

Tom’s latest invention is the Crackle-Canvas. Using STEIM crackle box hardware, Tom has created paintings that produce sound. Each painting can produce sound by itself but when connected with other paintings forms a ‘painting orchestra’. By connecting cables between the paintings, the sound changes, while the cables length, colour and form, form a drawing on the wall or in the space the paintings are hanging.

In the live version of the ‘Crackle-Canvas’, Tom connects the painting with 200 meters of cable. Showing the public one of the thousand compositions that can be made in space and sound, after that the public are invited to try make their own compositions. Currently Tom is touring The Netherlands and internationally with ‘Moederkoek’ and ‘Crackle-Canvas’.

N.I.P. interests

During the N.I.P. 2007 workshops I hope to explore other software and ways of building interfaces. I have over the years, learnt to build my own interfaces. However although my knowledge is always improving, it is still a slow and everlasting process. Through the N.I.P. workshops, I hope to develop new technics in building software and interfaces that can help me refine this process.

Technologies that Tom has used

Hardware: Wireless midi interface building, STEIM's crackle box building
Software: LiSa, STEIM sampling software