User:Timo
At the Piet Zwart Institute, I give personalized tutorials to students in combination with the Prototyping classes, where I provide technical guidance and support the students projects. Besides, I assist with several departmental projects such as the technical setup of graduation shows and the development of (online) publications. Next to my work at the Piet Zwart Institute I also run, together with Fellow Piet Zwart Institute’s alumni Annemieke van der Hoek & Michael van Schaik, a company called Restruct, where I develop sites and (mobile)apps.
After finishing a Masters in Image Synthesis and Computer Animation at the Utrecht Art School HKU, I worked as a freelance designer for several years. This work mostly included motion graphics development as well as visual effects based work for clients ranging from commercial brands (such as Nike, Albert Heijn & KPN) to (short) fiction films and festivals. Other work included: title-design, video-editing, post-production (-supervising) and authoring.
In 2009, I graduated at the Networked Media department of the Piet Zwart Institute myself, where the focus of my work started to shift towards programming in relation towards visual media. One of the results was the graduation piece ‘You only live Forever’, a perpetual video installation that recombined scenes from James Bond films based on the standard narrative elements and logic of the film series. The installation and related research was a exploration of ‘database cinema’ -films that are no longer following a linear narrative but whose scenes are rearranged records in a database.
During this course, the net-art parody ‘Pirates of the Amazon’ (which I created together with exchange student Tobias Leingruber) became a short-lived but high-profile internet hype and was featured on a range of influential technology-related websites as well as the New York Times, the Washington Post and several Dutch mainstream news media. The software combined online reseller Amazon.com with popular download site piratebay.org, by offering a direct ‘download for free’ link when browsing the Amazon.com website. The project was practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture. Two days after publishing the software was taken offline after receiving a take down request by the legal department of Amazon.com.
After graduating, I was invited to join the technical staff of the newly-formed department Lens-Based Digital Media, which later merged (together with Networked Media department) into the Media Design and Communication department.