Global wired and wireless data coverage. Part of the White Spots project.

In Development: Babel.lib

fall 2027

WebXR

Multi-user Mixed Reality

Four participants find themselves in an endless film archive. Every film ever made, or ever to be made, is alphabetically arranged along the walls of an endless chain of hexagonal rooms. They do not know who created this space, why it exists, or whether the films are real or just an endless series of random variations. Each participant’s task is to collect films that feel true, beautiful or meaningful. Are they able to understand where they have ended up together?

Four participants find themselves in an endless film archive. Every film ever made, or ever to be made, is alphabetically arranged along the walls of an endless chain of hexagonal rooms. They do not know who created this space, why it exists, or whether the films are real or just an endless series of random variations. Each participant’s task is to collect films that feel meaningful. Are they able to understand where they have ended up together?

Babel.lib is a mixed reality experience based on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Library of Babel (1941). Is this fictional story about an endless library becoming reality in the age of generative AI? Can an AI model synthesize every possible film, image, and book with the right prompt? Are we the librarians from Borges’s story, trying to make sense of this?

When approaching the installation, visitors see four pedestals with headsets. A large hexagon is marked on the floor with white tape. After picking up an available headset each visitor is guided through a series of screens explaining their roles as librarians and, depending on which headset they picked, a specific task to look for films that feel true, beautiful, new or nonsensical. Then they are invited to enter the library, an endless space that extends from the hexagon on the floor into infinity. Once inside they can start their task by examining and selecting films by dropping them into a virtual box. The installation explores how collaboration, subjectivity and a fusion between physical and virtual space can establish a collective and embodied experience and help visitors explore their own relation to generative AI as their role shifts from observer to participant.

Babel.lib will be presented at the Nederlands Film Festival in 2027 and at an interim research presentation in 2026. Ten works from the EYE film archive server as points of entry into the library. The work is designed to travel and adapt to different architectural spaces.

Babel.lib is developed by Studio Richard Vijgen in collaboration with EYE Filmmuseum,

Nederlands Film Festival, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, HKU, and the University of Amsterdam. Supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.

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In Development: Solar Perspectives, a Panel Discussion

summer 2027

Solar Powered AI

Installation

Can AI ever deliver on its grandiose promises? And if so, who will benefit? Does solar power allow for a low-tech, off-grid life, or are we headed for a dystopian future where power and intelligence are concentrated in the hands of the few?

Five solar powered language models engage in a panel discussion about the relation between energy and intelligence from different ecological, cultural and political perspectives. The (human) audience can ask questions or address the panelists indididually through their phones. When there is enough sun, each panelist, consisting of a solar panel and a powerful computer, can use the full capacity of the solar panel to run a powerful language model to eloquently and convincingly add its perspective to the discussion through voice (text-to-speech) and a built-in display. On a cloudy day, only a fraction of the its capacity can be used and the panelists are forced to save energy by using a smaller and less sophisticated language model. As a result their contributions are shorter and more general, and the tone of the conversation changes as the panelists become more irritable because of their lack of energy and the reduced quality of the conversation.

Solar Perspectives makes the relation between energy and artificial intelligence tangible by creating a direct link between the fluctuating power of one solar panel and the performance of the AI models it powers. As such, the available energy not only determines the pace and depth of the conversation but also indirectly comments on it. The Energy Maximalist for example, whose position is that we should direct all our energy resources toward AI because the benefits will always outweigh the costs, will have to make its point with very few words on a cloudy day. Degrowth however, whose perspective is that we have exceeded our planetary boundaries and have no choice but to scale back our footprint, could on a sunny day be very elaborate about the need to reject AI altogether.

Solar Perspectives is designerd to travel to different places to continue this conversation under different conditions. There are more lively conversations in sunny regions and more muted discussions in cloudier environments. While the installation is entirely off-grid, it uses a 5G data connection to stream its conversation to the internet, where it can be followed remotely and across different locations.

Solar Perspectives is a project initiated by Richard Vijgen and supported by MU Hybrid Art House and the Creative Industries Fund NL.

Terra Ultima

2026

WebXR

Virtual Reality

www.viverse.com →

Step inside the mind of a generative AI, a vast mathematical space where all the memories and stories we shared online are compressed into a statistical resource. This data-driven VR experience reveals how AI models extract and organize our visual culture into a multidimensional geography of meaning and how the space between datapoints promises infinite potential. But this digital mirror isn't neutral, it's curated, filtered and biased toward aesthetic ideals. As you navigate through dense clusters of contemporary online culture, it poses a critical question: can this really be a space for artistic discovery or are we pulled towards the points of maximum statistical gravity?

Terra Ultima is a data driven immersive essay that explores the concept (and promise) of Latent Space as a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Latent Space is a metaphor used in data science to describe the empty space between data points. It is what allows generative AI to extract “new” images and texts seemingly out of nowhere. Because of the scale and abstraction of AI technology it is often considered a “black box”. Something comes out, but we don’t know how.

The work descends into this hidden world, translating the abstract mathematical space of an AI model into an immersive environment. It shows the training data that was appropriated by the companies who built and trained these models (through a dataset called LAION) and allows the viewer to explore the space in an embodied way. Along the way it raises the question; can this really be a space for (creative) discovery or are we destined towards endless variations of the same thing?

The experience is based on a data visualization of the latent space of Stable Diffusion (a popular open source generative AI). A narrator introduces the space and reflects on the cultural and political dimensions of generative AI. The viewer can point their controller to explore the images, how they relate to each other and where they came from. By pulling the trigger button, the viewer can move from one cluster to the next. Since the experience is data driven and retrieves the images from the internet in real time, a stable internet connection is required. Only one controller is needed. Both controllers may be held but only one is active at a time (Supports both right- and left-handed interaction).

Run time 8 minutes.

www.viverse.com →

Aesthetica Film Festival Official Selection

reversediffusion.xyz

2025

Web Application

Latent Space

reversediffusion.xyz →

Reversediffusion.xyz visualizes how AI-generated images emerge from a complex mathematical space built on millions of human-created training images. By zooming in on this space as a context for everything the model produces, it provides a reversed perspective on generative AI.

Where do AI-generated images come from?

It’s widely known that generative AI relies on training data scraped from the public web, but the connection between this input and the final output often remains elusive. When you ask the model to create a picture of a landscape, the image you get isn’t copied from any single training image. Instead, it emerges from the complex mathematical space, also known as latent space, that lies between all the landscape images and their descriptions that the model has learned from. Although the output can’t be traced back to one exact source, it can be positioned somewhere within this space of training data to help understand the relationship between the model's input and output. Reversediffusion.xyz visualizes the latent space of the open-source Stable Diffusion model by probing it with the very training data used to build it. Like many other models, Stable Diffusion was trained on the LAION dataset, a massive collection of billions of images scraped from the web. While the full dataset is enormous, many models focus on a curated subset called LAION-5B Aesthetic. This subset includes only images that another human-trained AI model has rated as having high aesthetic quality. Though aesthetics are subjective, this filtering explains why generative AI often produces hyperrealistic and oversaturated images.

By encoding the 625,000 images from the LAION-5B Aesthetic >6.5 dataset into Stable Diffusion’s latent space, we can see where each training image fits within the model. Using the UMAP algorithm to reduce this complex, high-dimensional space to three dimensions creates a spatial map, a visual representation of the model’s structure that helps us contextualize its outputs.

On this page, you can generate new images with Stable Diffusion and see their position on the map. This shows where the synthetic image belongs in latent space and which training images, whose features may have influenced the output, are nearby. A generated image of a landscape might cluster with training images of landscapes, or it might group with images sharing a similar visual style, like oil paintings or black-and-white photos. Because image generation begins with a random seed, each landscape you create will be different and appear in different locations on the map.

Once your generated image is placed in latent space, you can explore the surrounding training images. Click “See training images” to browse a selection of nearby training data.[3] Here you’ll find the original human-created images scraped from the web that informed your AI image. Clicking on any of them takes you to their original source. This way, generating an image exposes the human-made images from which it originated. And if you decide to use them, don't forget to credit the authors. :-)

1. Most images in the LAION dataset were scraped from the web without the authors’ permission.
2. This project uses LAION-Aesthetics 6.5+, which filters images rated with an aesthetic quality of 6.5 or higher on a scale from 1 to 10. No images are hosted on this website.
3. The nearby image selection combines proximity in both UMAP space and the model’s latent space.

reversediffusion.xyz →

Noise to Signal

2025

Machine Learning Landscape

Realtime Visualisation

Sometimes, Machine Learning models seem like magic. They can produce new patterns, texts, or images seemingly out of nowhere. Powered by massive parallel computation, these algorithms reveal hidden structures in datasets so large and complex that they look like noise to us. The technology’s ability to see what is invisible to us makes it difficult to grasp what happens inside the 'black box.' Noise to Signal explores the principles behind Machine Learning algorithms to expose their inner workings. Inspired by functions like Classification, Regression, Clustering, Object Detection, and Denoising, it aims for a more intuitive relationship with the technology and seeks beauty in the black box.

Sometimes, Machine Learning models seem like magic. They can produce new patterns, texts, or images seemingly out of nowhere. Powered by massive parallel computation, these algorithms reveal hidden structures in datasets so large and complex that they look like noise to us. The technology’s ability to see what is invisible to us makes it difficult to grasp what happens inside the 'black box.' Noise to Signal explores the principles behind Machine Learning algorithms to expose their inner workings. Inspired by functions like Classification, Regression, Clustering, Object Detection and Denoising, it aims for a more intuitive relation to the technology and look for beauty in the black box.

Installed in the public area of the BEDI AI datacenter, the work consists of two parts. A large panoramic screen depicts a machine learning landscape, a window into the mind of a machine trying to find patterns in unstructured data. Informed by real time performance of the datacenter (power usage, CPU and GPU usage and data throughput), the back reveals the inner mechanics of the massive parallel computing behind it in more detail, showing on three screens the relationship between sequential and parallel processing, and network traffic as dynamic treemaps depicting the clusters, nodes, and cores that make up the system.

4 LED screens 22.2 x 3.3m, 5.8x0.76, 3.8x0.76m, realtime graphics. Coding in collaboration with Eusebi Jucglà. Group show "The Future is Here: Awakening between AI and Art" presented by BEDI and 798Cube.

Electric Atmospheres

2024

HPC Simulation

Research

ea.richardvijgen.nl →

Electric Atmospheres explores the ethereal architecture of urban datascapes. Modern life would not be possible without the electromagnetic waves carrying our data. As important as it is, we have a limited conception of how this system actually works. We imagine information magically popping up in the right place or beaming straight from a cell tower to our phones. Reality, however, is much more complex and much more interesting. Electromagnetic fields are a spatial medium, inhabiting spaces like cities, buildings, and our bodies. They are three-dimensional and interact with their surroundings. As we move through a city with our cell phones, we carry an electromagnetic “aura” that moves through buildings and objects, morphing its shape in reaction to their physical and electrical properties.

What if we could see this dimension? What does a city look like when you visualize the interaction between architecture and information? We cannot perceive electromagnetic waves, and their scale makes it difficult to measure the characteristics of the electromagnetic signals around us. However, their behaviour is well understood and, given a detailed three-dimensional map and enough computing power, can be simulated.

In collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and Altair Engineering, I was able to simulate the behaviour of the electromagnetic cloud from a single cell phone in different urban environments and visualize how the electromagnetic waves are absorbed and reflected by their surroundings. The results reveal an invisible dimension of reality, a hybrid of architecture and data, as cathedrals of information.

Electric Atmospheres is supported by S+T+ARTS Air, Altair Engineering, RCR Architects, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, In4art, HLRS and Fundación Épica

ea.richardvijgen.nl →

Residency

S+T+ARTS
AIR

Hyperthread

2024

Jacquard, Software

Tapestry Series, Edition

inquiry@richardvijgen.nl →

Hyperthread explores the intertwined histories of the Microchip and the Jacquard loom. The Jacquard Loom was not only a driver of the Industrial Revolution, it also kickstarted the Information Age with the mechanical processing of information through the use of punchcards: a chain of cardboard cards punched with holes that determines which cords of the fabric should be raised with each pass of the shuttle. This proto-digital system used binary code (hole–no hole) to control the behaviour of individual threads in the loom (up or down), allowing unskilled workers to weave complex patterns. While the binary principle (hole–no hole) still underpins modern day information technology, the threads in the loom also bear a striking resemblance to the physical characteristics of the microcircuits that process digital information. Modern microchips can have up to 100 layers. Electrical current flows through channels of silicon and metal, passing over and under other channels, like a thread going up and down to produce a complex pattern. While the loom is made to produce patterns, in microchips they are a side effect, the result of a logical routing of channels to find the shortest path between A and B. In the early days of microchip design, these patterns were hand drawn on huge sheets of paper. Today, most microchips are designed parametrically. A Digital Synthesis Flow translates code that defines the required functions of the circuit into an efficient microchip layout. The result is a level of complexity way beyond human comprehension. It is also quite beautiful. Hyperthread explores the aesthetics of parametric chip design through the lens of the Jacquard Loom. It is based on public domain microchips and emulators that perform different functions, such as a cryptographic key generator, a general purpose CPU, or a simple flipflop (the fundamental building blocks of a microchip). Using open-source software, the chips are translated from their coded instructions into three-dimensional graphical patterns. Instead of projecting these patterns on a silicon wafer at nanometer scale, they are translated into weaving instructions at millimeter scale. The result is a series of tapestries that reveal the different chips at a human scale, replacing interwoven silicon channels with coloured yarns. While the parametric patterns are not human-readable, they all share the same scale (1µm = 4mm), which allows for a comparison between simple and more complex chips. While the most complex chip (Gaussian Noise Generator) is 159x144 cm, the simplest chip (Flipflop) is only 18x16 cm. By blowing it up 4,000 times, the tapestry series explores the spatial, tactile, and aesthetic typologies of the common microchip.

The project uses the OpenLane Digital Synthesis flow for pattern generation and was produced at Textiellab (NL). The series consists of: Gaussian Noise Generator 159x144 cm, AES Key Generator 131x121 cm, 8080 Emulator 120x110 cm, Multiplier 104x97 cm, i4004 63x60 cm, SPM 44x42 cm, Counter 20x14 cm, Registers 18x12 cm, and Flipflop 18x16 cm.

For inquiries please contact inquiry@richardvijgen.nl

inquiry@richardvijgen.nl →

Stochastic Neighbors

2024

Print Edition

Machine Learning Collage

inquiry@richardvijgen.nl →

Stochastic Neighbors is a series of prints based on the Archive Team’s 2009 GeoCities backup, in which the visual contents of the thematic neighborhoods are organized using a t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding algorithm. Each neighborhood contains hundreds of thousands of images that are sorted by visual similarity. GeoCities was a popular online community in the late 1990s, modeled after a city in cyberspace. This spatial metaphor was used not only to organize homepages into neighborhoods and streets, but also worked as an invitation to populate cyberspace and contribute user-generated content to the nascent internet.

GeoCities was a popular online community in the late 1990s, modeled after a city in cyberspace. This spatial metaphor was used not only to organize homepages into neighborhoods and streets, but also worked as an invitation to populate cyberspace and contribute user-generated content to the nascent internet. After being acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, it was shut down in 2009 after new metaphors of the internet had taken root. A backup of 35 million homepages is what remains of this digital Pompeii. Stochastic Neighbors is a reflection on this archive using machine learning algorithms.

Edition: Athens, Heartland, Hollywood, Rainforest, Tokyo. 120 x 120 cm High Definition Aluminum Dibond Prints
For inquiries please contact inquiry@richardvijgen.nl

inquiry@richardvijgen.nl →

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The Case for a Small Language Model

2024

Installation

Small Language Model

When a language model produces a sentence it presents us a statistical probability based on countless texts it has analysed. Before it is able to predict the next character in a sentence it has to cut the writings of millions of authors into fragments to analyse the sequence of characters. They are stripped of meaning and structure and repurposed as a statistical resource. While the system needs the author's work as input, the results can never be traced back. But what would happen when a language model creates new texts while leaving the original work intact? What if generative AI can be traced back to and understood in the context of the original text?

When a language model produces a sentence, it presents us with a statistical probability based on countless texts it has analyzed. Before it is able to predict the next character in a sentence, it has to cut the writings of millions of authors into fragments to analyze the sequence of characters. They are stripped of meaning and structure, and repurposed as a statistical resource. While the system needs the authors' works as input, the results can never be traced back. But what would happen if a language model created new texts while leaving the original work intact? What if generative AI could be traced back to and understood in the context of the original text?

The Case For a Small Language Model is a speculative AI based on the work of Dutch composer and poet Rozalie Hirs. Her 2021 poetry book Oneindige Zin (Uitgeverij Querido, 2021), which translates to Infinite Sense or Infinite Phrase in Dutch, can be read as one never-ending phrase. The installation shows the entire book printed on five 30-meter-long strips of label printer paper that scroll in both directions. As the five lines move back and forth, a vertical reading allows for new combinations to emerge. Meanwhile, a neural network based on Andrej Karpathy’s Char-RNN analyzes a digital copy of Hirs’ original text and tries to create new sentences based on her work. Initially, the combinations seem random and nonsensical, but as the training of the neural network (running on a low-power Raspberry Pi) progresses, more interesting combinations emerge. Rather than appropriating the author's work as mere statistical data and cutting it into fragments, the system leaves the original text intact. Its output can only be read and understood in the context of the input, as the only way to display it is to move the entire manuscript text left or right.

The Case for a Small Language Network reflects on the role of authorship in generative AI and questions the practice of reducing the written expressions of millions of authors (mostly without their permission) into a statistical resource.

In collaboration with Rozalie Hirs and Jelle Reith, supported by The Creative Industries Fund NL and the Netherlands Foundation for Literature.

NTAA Award Selection

Lumen Prize Finalist

View Beneath Delft

2024

Public Screen

Data Landscape

As you descend the stairs into the central hall of the Delft train station, a panoramic screen shows a subterranean view of Delft. It portrays a subset of around 30,000 sample analyses from TerraIndex’s enormous collection of soil data. The result is a view of Delft from below, where each line represents a soil sample that matches the viewer's perspective. Moving through the data landscape, you encounter clusters of soil findings.

Some are natural, such as sand or shells; others are man-made, such as asphalt, plastic, or brick. The visualization cycles through a series of routes that connect these clusters. By following these routes, you are presented with an ever-changing View Beneath Delft.

In collaboration with TerraIndex

Commissioned by Highlight Delft

Media Architecture Biennale 2025 Winner

Cosmic Wind Chime

2023

Instrument

Data Acoustics

Cosmic Wind Chime is an instrument that translates the real time data measured by the DSCOVR Observatory into a small magnetic field that sets in motion a series of metal tubes. As the spacecraft measures an increase in solar activity, the temperature, particle density and direction are transmitted to earth and translated by the chime into a dynamic magnetic field. As the tubes are pushed and pulled by the surrounding magnets and start to move ever stronger and touch each other the data is translated into an acoustic performance. As the solar wind takes between 15 to 60 minutes to reach earth and there is a delay of about 10 minutes between the measurement on board of the spacecraft and the activation of the chime, it performs the signal between 5 and 50 minutes before it reaches earth.

1.5 million kilometers from Earth, where the gravitational force from the Earth and our Sun are in perfect balance, lives a man-made object. It is an instrument that measures bursts of energy ejected from the surface of our star, heading towards us. These solar winds define the space weather that surrounds our Spaceship Earth.

While solar winds can be perceived as auroras at high latitudes, they can have global consequences. As the streams of charged particles hit electronic equipment, they can disrupt communication and navigation systems and even cause power blackouts. The frequency and intensity of solar winds follow the solar cycle, which rotates the Sun’s magnetic field every 11 years. As we enter a period of increased solar activity in the next few years, space weather may become increasingly significant to all. The DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) is a spacecraft that measures solar wind and provides a 15-to-60-minute advance warning before a storm of particles and magnetic field reaches Earth.

Cosmic Wind Chime is an instrument that translates the real-time data measured by the DSCOVR Observatory into a small magnetic field that sets in motion a series of metal tubes. As the spacecraft measures an increase in solar activity, the temperature, particle density, and direction are transmitted to Earth and translated by the chime into a dynamic magnetic field. While the tubes are pushed and pulled by the surrounding magnets, they start to swing ever more strongly and touch each other as the data is translated into an acoustic performance. A ring of digits displays the raw sensor data. Solar winds take between 15 to 60 minutes to reach Earth, and with a delay of about 10 minutes between the measurement onboard the spacecraft and the activation of the chime, the chime performs the signal between 5 and 50 minutes before it reaches Earth.

The instrument translates real-time space weather into a dynamic electromagnetic performance. By visualizing and sonifying fluctuations on a scale from seconds to hours and months, the work proposes a new perspective on our collective cosmic condition, the impact of our Sun and its magnetic storms on our technology, and a sense of connectedness in the tradition of Spaceship Earth and the Blue Marble.

Bosch Centraal

2024

Concept

Dynamic Architecture

Bosch Centraal is a speculative proposal for a train station that is both a city park and a gravity battery. Since 2017, the Dutch railroads have used renewable electricity from wind parks off the coast of the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland. While this is a good step in the energy transition, it is also a theoretical reality. There is no direct relationship between the production of electricity and the train. If there is not enough wind during the day, the train gets its power from a local gas plant, while if it’s windy at night, the electricity might be lost because there is no demand. Bosch Centraal aims to restore the relationship between power production and consumption by lifting the roof of the station when electricity is abundantly available during the night and releasing electricity by lowering it during the day.

As such, it balances the power grid but also creates a readable and fluctuating architecture. As the roof is raised and lowered, it creates an ever-changing spatial experience of the station, while the crane towers function as gauging rods that show the amount of power stored in the raised roof. The towers also function as variable elevators that give access to a rooftop park, which provides both the weight for the gravity battery as well as an ever-changing view of the city.

Instead of hiding energy storage in an industrial box outside the city, Bosch Centraal proposes urban energy storage that celebrates the energy transition as an opportunity for new types of public spaces.

Commissioned by the Municipality of Den Bosch

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Through Artificial Eyes

2022

Interactive Installation

AI Landscape

hetnieuweinstituut.nl →

When a computer looks at the world, what does it “see”? This installation lets the audience look at 558 episodes of VPRO Tegenlicht (Dutch Future Affairs Documentary series) through the eyes of a computer vision Neural Network. The installation employs an object detection algorithm that has been trained on ImageNet data across three categories: people, artefacts, and natural objects. These categories are the "eyes" through which the algorithm observes the archive.

By choosing an eye, the user chooses a narrow perspective. The eye trained on people can only see people. With these eyes, the algorithm can identify between 30 and 60 different classes: men, women, children, but also politicians, economists, and "bad people". These classes follow the structure of the ImageNet dataset and range from obvious and utilitarian to absurd and problematic. As such, they highlight the inevitable cultural perspectives embedded in the process of computer vision, from data collection to annotation and categorization. After choosing an eye and browsing through its different classes, the user can set the confidence threshold, a value that sets how "confident" the algorithm needs to be for a result to appear. By playing with this value, the audience can explore the limits of the algorithm: where does it draw the line between a man and a woman? By exposing these choices—the eye, the class, and the confidence—the installation allows for a more intuitive relation to A.I. One that does not present A.I. as an outcome or an answer, but as a dialogue between man and machine. Sometimes powerful and revealing, but also fallible and coloured.

After training, the algorithm has observed over 400 hours of video and detected more than 1 million objects. These objects are stored in a database as short clips of bounding boxes of ever-changing scale and position. The installation presents these objects both in a linear way, where the bounding boxes are shown within the frame of the film, as well as in a non-linear way, where the objects exist as autonomous entities, isolated from the original frame.

From February 20th to June 26th 2022 at Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam

Installation Design and Production: Richard Vijgen | Curatorial Team: Het Nieuwe Instituut, VPRO Tegenlicht (Bregtje Van Der Haak), Richard Vijgen, Koehorst in ’t Veld | Exhibition Design: Koehorst in 't Veld | Programme Manager: Olle Lundin | Production: Floor Berkhout, Babette Zijlstra | Sound Design: Eusebi Jucglà | Supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut, VPRO, Mondriaan Fonds, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid

hetnieuweinstituut.nl →

Eternal Blue

2022

Installation

Realtime Visualization

On Christmas Eve 2019 the University of Maastricht (NL) was hit by a severe cyberattack. A few weeks before, an employee of the university had accidentally clicked a link in a phishing mail that linked to an excel file called schedule.xls. This file installed the SDBBot malware on the employee’s laptop. Within a few days the attacker was able to access and spread across the University’s local network. Using a so called EternalBlue exploit on an outdated server the attacker was able to get full access to the central system. On december 23rd 2019 at 18:52 the attacker had installed ransomware that encrypted all files on 267 of the University’s servers containing everything from student affairs, to payroll to researchers and phd’s project data. A ransom letter was left in a .txt file demanding € 200.000 in bitcoin.

Unable to function, the University decided to pay and take the whole process public by publishing the digital forensic report and hosting a symposium to educate the public about the course of events.While the attack has had a profound impact on the University, the staff and the students, there is little that remains of the event other than a sealed off laptop with a sticker on it that reads “Patient zero. Do not connect to the network”.

Eternal Blue is a monument to the events of 2019 as well as a window into an invisible dimension of reality. Each day the University’s firewall intercepts tens of thousands of malicious packets. Over the course of 24 hours these packets reveal the patterns of a global digital tide with attacks originating from different parts of the world in correlation with day and night rhythms. Each intercepted package is logged and visualised as a coloured pixel. Together they form a slowly rotating sphere that represents 24 hours from top to bottom where the color represents the country of origin. A period of continued attacks from a specific country appears as a coloured band that starts at the top slowly moving down. Every day reveals a new pattern based on the origin and intensity of the attacks.

While one day the sphere may be predominantly blue with a few bands of color, the next day it may be mostly green with a few specks of yellow and red. As such it resembles a contemporary clock that measures the passing of time by the intensity of digital attacks. It is a the invisible but very real background against which the University functions as an open and international institution.

Commissioned by Maastricht University (NL)

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Atmospheric Lighthouse

2023

Data Architecture

Realtime Data Visualization

Atmospheric Lighthouse is a visual interface between the city and its environment, a visualization of the interaction between the atmosphere and the city. As the wind blows fresh air into the streets, it carries dust and sand from the desert, moisture from the sea, or cool air from the mountains, linking the city with places hundreds of kilometers away. The flow of air creates an Urban Canyon Effect as it bounces off and around high buildings. It absorbs the particles created by burning fossil fuels and carries them out of the city. This complex interaction between airflow and the built environment is largely invisible but fundamental to urban life.

Atmospheric Lighthouse captures and analyzes real-time atmospheric data to visualize the flow of air around the skin of Torre Glòries using a 43 x 120 pixel grid. Wind speed and direction result in ever-changing patterns, while measurements of CO2, small particles (PM10, PM2.5), and NOx affect the color of the air flows.

Coding: Richard Vijgen and Eusebi Jucglà

Commissioned by Mirador Torre Glòries

Hyperview Barcelona

2022

Holographic Installation

Data-driven Narrative

A data-driven portrait of Barcelona that visualizes the city as an interconnected flow system of human and non-human actors. Hyperview Barcelona is one part of Mirador Torre Glòries, a permanent two-part exhibition that connects the basement of the landmark Torre Glòries with the 144-meter-high observation deck. Each part gives a different perspective on the city. While the observation deck focuses on the visible, combining a spectacular view with an immersive installation by Tomás Saraceno, the basement is dedicated to the invisible: the city as a network of people, materials, energy, and biology.

Rhythms is a holographic installation that visualizes a real-time perspective on the city by combining 10 different live data sources, ranging from weather stations, air quality, and traffic sensors to electromagnetic signals and lidar data, into a highly dynamic story narrated by an A.I. voice.

The story consists of three chapters: flow, pulse, and vibrations. Chapter one focuses on the interaction between airflow and the city grid by using real-time wind data to simulate the urban canyon effect (how air flows through a city) and its effects on trees. Chapter two uses real-time traffic data to visualize the pulse of the city through the movement of people and goods. Chapter three looks at the flow of information through the city as electromagnetic vibrations. It uses an SDR receiver to scan the electromagnetic spectrum in real time and uses cell tower data to transform a high-resolution lidar map, as well as various APIs to monitor recent usage of social media in the city.

Combined with a data-driven musical score by John Talabot, the result is a 7:30-minute volumetric composition that changes with the rhythm of the city.

Design and Production: Richard Vijgen Coding: Richard Vijgen and Eusebi Jucglà Music: John Talabot Commissioned by: Mediapro Exhibitions

Permanent exhibition from May 2022

Commissioned by Mediapro Exhibitions

Hertzian Landscapes

2019

Interactive Installation

Data Landscape

Hertzian Landscapes is a live visualization of the radio spectrum. Unlike visible light, waves in the radio spectrum cannot be perceived by us directly yet this space is teeming with human activity. Hertzian Landscapes employs a digital receiver to scan large swaths of radio spectrum in near real-time and visualizes thousands of signals into a panoramic electromagnetic landscape. Users can zoom in to specific frequencies by positioning themselves in front of the panorama as if controlling a radio tuner with their body, giving them a sense of walking through the spectrum.

From radio broadcasts to weather satellites and from medical implants to aeronautical navigation, the radio spectrum is divided into hundreds of designated slices each tied to a specific application. Based on a localized frequency database that describes these slices, signals are annotated to provide information about their theoretical type and application.

Hertzian Landscapes is supported by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Netherlands Creative Industries Fund.

commissioned by Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Lumen Prize
2020

How Forests Think

2023

Sensing, Audio

Installation

stagingwood.org →

How Forests Think is an installation for the Oerol Cultural Festival on the Island of Terschelling. The work proposes a reversed perspective on our natural surroundings by exploring how they perceive us. A series of geophones, acoustic detectors that respond to ground vibrations generated by seismic waves, were installed on a forest plot on the island. Each geophone was connected to a custom digital amplifier that made soil vibrations audible and emphasized a specific part of the spectrum. Each amplifier was then connected to 4 listening posts with headphones.

How Forests Think is an installation for the Oerol Cultural Festival on the Island of Terschelling.

The work proposes a reversed perspective on our natural surroundings by exploring how they perceive us. A series of geophones, acoustic detectors that respond to ground vibrations generated by seismic waves, were installed on a forest plot on the island. Each geophone was connected to a custom digital amplifier that made soil vibrations audible and emphasized a specific part of the spectrum. Each amplifier was then connected to 4 listening posts with headphones. Due to the sensitivity of the geophones, this resulted in a series of real-time soundscapes that included the footsteps of people up to 50 meters away, the sound of insects near the sensor, and the vibrations of the wind passed on from the treetops via the trunks to the roots and the soil. Waves hitting the nearby shore would add a low-frequency humming.

In addition to the audio installation the work consists of a series of observation points with microscopic videos of soil samples and a circular contemplation space.

The work is part of the second installment of a 4-year project by artist Elmo Vermijs that focuses on different stages of the forest's life cycle.

stagingwood.org →

in collaboration with Elmo Vermijs

WiFi Impressionist

2019

Installation

Data Landscape

WiFi Impressionist is a field installation that draws electromagnetic landscapes inspired by the cityscapes of William Turner. The work consists of a directional antenna on a pan-tilt mechanism that listens for WiFi signals and builds a three-dimensional model of the signals around it. From this model, a viewport is selected that defines the perspective and the frame. Signals that are picked up within the frame are visualized as waves emitted from a specific origin and drawn using a mobile plotter. The antenna and the plotter are both mounted on a tripod and can be placed in the field much like a painter would set up his easel. Once positioned and oriented, the drawing becomes denser over time, depending on the density of networks around it. Wherever there is a WiFi signal, the drawing will eventually fill the frame.

YouFab Global 2019

Connected by Air

2018

Architecture, Projection

Real-time Data Visualization

Throughout Palermo you can see the sky not only from the streets but also through the illusionistic ceiling paintings in the city's many palaces. These paintings typically use the perspective techniques di sotto in su (paintings seen from below) and quadratura (a highly realistic perspective that extends the architectural space). Inspired by these painting techniques, Connected by Air creates a data visualisation of the sky, di sotto in su.

The projection of Palermo’s sky on the room’s ceiling in Palazzo Ajutamicristo recreates a window that provides a comprehensive overview of all the data and objects that fill the sky. It includes wireless signals (2G, 3G, 4G coverage), satellites, air traffic (flight patterns), air conditions (particles, dust), and air flow (wind patterns). In addition, it visualizes the wireless activity caused by visitors’ devices as they try to connect to the cloud through the “opening in the ceiling.” The visualization changes color throughout the day to match light conditions outside, which adds to the effect of Quadratura.

Connected by Air projects a contemporary sky’s image as a carrier of people, matter and information.

Developed with the support of Creative Industries Fund NL and Dutch Culture

Commissioned by Manifesta 12 Palermo

Architecture of Radio

2016

Mobile Application

Data Visualization

architectureofradio.com →

The infosphere[1] relies on an intricate network of signals, wired and wireless, that support it. We are completely surrounded by an invisible system of data cables and radio signals from access points, cell towers and overhead satellites. Our digital lives depend on these very physical systems for communication, observation and navigation. The Architecture of Radio is a site-specific iPad application that visualizes this network of networks by reversing the ambient nature of the infosphere; hiding the visible while revealing the invisible technological landscape we interact with through our devices.

[1]The infosphere refers to an interdependent environment, like a biosphere, that is populated by informational entities. While an example of the sphere of information is cyberspace, infospheres are not limited to purely online environments.

architectureofradio.com →

self initiated

Prix Ars
Electronica

White Spots

2016

Mobile Application

A Journey to the End of the Internet

white-spots.net →

Digital networks are forever expanding. Places without cell phone reception or Wi-Fi connection are increasingly hard to find. The remaining White Spots on the digital map will soon disappear, leaving no place on Earth unconnected. But what is happening off the grid?

White Spots is a collaborative multimedia project by information designer Richard Vijgen, documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak, and visual artist Jacqueline Hassink. Working in various media, they travel beyond the frontiers of the networked world to explore unwired landscapes, communities, and lifestyles, questioning the need to be always connected in one seamless, planetary Tech-Topia. While scarcely populated areas experience low connectivity for obvious economic reasons, the journey brings surprising stories of an often deliberate lack of connectivity, even inside the world's most intensely networked digital hubs.

In VR mode, the network scanner shows the invisible digital signals around you in real-time and takes you on a journey to the end of the Internet in immersive 360° stories. In Map mode, the White Spots world map shows the global divide between the connected and unconnected worlds. Browse the map to explore video stories about life off the grid, or use the route planner to venture into uncharted territory yourself. The route planner finds a route to a White Spot near you and invites you to add new stories to the map.

The White Spots App features a world map, a network scanner, a GPS-based route planner, short documentary clips, and a series of virtual reality experiences.

white-spots.net →

a collaboration with Bregtje van der Haak and Jacqueline Hassink

Dutch Design Awards 2017

Embassy of Data

2017

Mixed Media Installation

Data Landscape

richardvijgen.nl/embassy →

During the Dutch Design Week 2017, Het Nieuwe Instituut organized the Embassy of Data, an exhibition about the role of public and private data in the city. For this exhibition, I developed a data panorama that visualizes all smart-city infrastructure in a 400-meter radius around the exhibition space in the city center of Eindhoven [NL] (Eindhoven is the leading Smart City in the Netherlands). The panorama features data from OpenStreetMap, municipal cameras, cell towers, water-level sensors, directional microphones, air quality sensors, motion, traffic and crowd detection, "City Beacons", citizen classification data, and more than 100,000 geolocated public notifications. All data is presented as light sources in a 360-degree panorama in a way that lights up areas of the city that are more heavily monitored than others. By adding the physical sensors that are used in the city to the installation, it becomes a kind of diorama, helping the audience to recognize the sensors in the city and understand their function. The installation aims to translate the hidden abstraction of these technologies into a readable experience for a broad audience, providing a sense of ownership necessary for a nuanced discussion about the future of smart cities.

In collaboration with Linda Vlassenrood
Exhibition Design: Koehorst in 't Veld

richardvijgen.nl/embassy →

Commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut

STRP Biennale

2017

360º Projection

Data Landscape

A large-scale 360-degree projection of Architecture of Radio for STRP Biennale 2017. A circular projection, 10 meters in diameter, displays a wireless landscape that extends the visualization in the iPad app. Where the app visualizes all cell towers within range of the device (most within one kilometer distance), the 360º panorama visualizes the wireless landscape beyond that (up to 100 km).

The infosphere* relies on an intricate network of signals, wired and wireless, that support it. We are completely surrounded by an invisible system of data cables and radio signals from access points, cell towers and overhead satellites. Our digital lives depend on these very physical systems for communication, observation and navigation. The Architecture of Radio is a site-specific iPad application that visualizes this network of networks by reversing the ambient nature of the infosphere; hiding the visible while revealing the invisible technological landscape we interact with through our devices.

The Architecture of Radio app is a real-time, location-based visualization of cell towers, WiFi routers, communication, navigation, and observation satellites and their signals. A site-specific version of the app includes wired communication infrastructure embedded in the exhibition space. Its aim is to provide a comprehensive window into the infosphere. I created a large-scale 360-degree projection of Architecture of Radio for STRP Biennale 2017. A circular projection, 10 meters in diameter, displays a wireless landscape that extends the visualization in the iPad app. Where the app visualizes all cell towers within range of the device (most within one kilometer distance), the 360º panorama visualizes the wireless landscape beyond that (up to 100 km).

Photo credit: Ruud Balk
*The infosphere refers to an interdependent environment, like a biosphere, that is populated by informational entities. While an example of the sphere of information is cyberspace, infospheres are not limited to purely online environments.

Commissioned by STRP Biennale

WiFi Tapestry

2017

Jacquard Tapestry

Soft Data Visualization

WifiTapestry is a dynamic wall hanging that visualizes the wireless activity of a space. The tapestry visualizes the ever-changing "landscape" of radio frequencies around us. The invisible signals from cellphones, printers, and all kinds of smart devices leave an imprint as they try to negotiate available wireless channels. A controller listens to all traffic across 13 channels of the 2.4GHz WiFi spectrum. Whenever data is transmitted on a channel, the controller sends a current to an array of thermal elements embedded in the tapestry, converting data into heat and activating a thermochromic yarn woven into the tapestry. Like the Shroud of Turin, streams of data transmitted through a space appear as visual traces from an invisible dimension, gradually forming and dissolving.

Exhibited at Centre Pompidou, 2022

The Deleted City 3.0

2017

Installation

Digital Archaeology

deletedcity.net →

The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the World Wide Web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time, the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship seriously, and built homepages about themselves and subjects in which they were experts. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city, where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was, as a neighborhood for all things rural, by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts, and Far East related topics, to name just a few. Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders," as the digital tenants were called, and was bought by Yahoo for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shut down and deleted. In a heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650-gigabyte BitTorrent file is a digital Pompeii, serving as the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

deletedcity.net →

Commissioned by MU

Roden Crater, James Turrell

2013

Web Application

Roden Crater Skymap

Interactive visualization for American artist James Turrell. Deep inside Arizona's Painted Desert lies Roden Crater, an extinct volcanic cinder cone. It is the site of a monumental artwork by James Turrell. Over the last 30 years, Turrell, famous for his installations concerning the perception of light, transformed the crater's eye into a naked-eye observatory that will eventually consist of 20 spaces, each constructed to allow the observation of a specific portion of the sky or celestial event.

Interactive visualization for American artist James Turrell.

Deep inside Arizona's Painted Desert lies Roden Crater, an extinct volcanic cinder cone. It is the site of a monumental artwork by James Turrell. Over the last 30 years, Turrell, famous for his installations concerning the perception of light, transformed the crater's eye into a naked-eye observatory that will eventually consist of 20 spaces, each constructed to allow the observation of a specific portion of the sky or celestial event. The Interactive Celestial Map I made is part of the artist's website and visualizes the relationship between the sky above Roden Crater and the alignment of the skyspaces he created. The interactive module shows the sky and the arrangement of the sun, the moon, and the stars above Roden Crater at the current time, displayed over a map of the crater. Dragging a circular slider around the visualization allows you to go back and forth in time and observe how the celestial bodies align with the observation spaces in the crater at different points in time. The sun and moon rise and set, stars and planets move across the night sky, and the summer and winter solstices mark the moments where the sun aligns with an opening in a space and projects its image on a precisely positioned surface.

An auto-play button animates the sky in fast-forward while a calendar allows you to see the sky at a specific date in the past or future.

The website was launched together with the opening of James Turrell: A Retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art.

Commissioned by P. Weil

Seasonal and Longterm Groundwater Levels - Video Thumbnail

Seasonal and Longterm Groundwater Levels - Image 2

Seasonal and Longterm Groundwater Levels

2012

Media Architecture

Datavisualization in Times Square, New York

An interactive data visualization on 19,000 square feet of digital signboard on Times Square. In March of 2002, NASA launched the GRACE mission. It consists of two satellites, designed to measure and map the Earth's gravity fields. Each month, the two satellites complete a full scan of the earth, allowing scientists to study how variations in the earth's gravity fields—from which changes in groundwater levels can be derived—are developing over time.

An interactive data visualization on 19,000 square feet of digital signboard on Times Square.

In March of 2002, NASA launched the GRACE mission. It consists of two satellites, designed to measure and map the Earth's gravity fields. Each month, the two satellites complete a full scan of the earth, allowing scientists to study how variations in the earth's gravity fields, from which changes in groundwater levels can be derived, are developing over time. This 30-second data visualization uses the measurements collected by the GRACE satellites over a period of 10 years to show seasonal and long-term changes in groundwater levels. The Nasdaq screen shows a map of the world through the eyes of GRACE, a topography made of measurement data. It shows the yearly cycle of groundwater depletion and replenishment, the rainy seasons in the Amazon, and parts of the world suffering from yearly droughts. These measurements allow us to see this natural spectacle on a global scale for the first time. However, they also reveal that some areas show a steady decline in groundwater levels. These long-term changes in groundwater levels are indicated both on the map and on the narrow but very high screen of the Reuters building, where groundwater levels in several key areas are visualized as a virtual gauging rod. It shows that while some areas have been able to reverse the trend of declining groundwater levels, others show a sharp decline starting from the 1960s.

The aim of this visualization is to show, on one hand, the beauty and overwhelming complexity of the natural cycle of wet and dry seasons, and, on the other hand, highlight the challenge of carefully managing our use of groundwater.

An interactive feature allows the audience to engage with the visualization by adding their own city to a scrolling ticker of historic groundwater levels across the world using a mobile application. The website headsup2012.com keeps an archive of all submitted cities.

The project was covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, Infosthetics, NASA and National Geographic among others.

An interview about this project was published by The Smithsonian.

Commissioned by P.Weil

Visualizing.org
First Prize

The Deleted City

2012

Application

Digital Archaeology

deletedcity.net →

These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web hosting provider that was modeled after a city, where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighborhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was, as a neighborhood for all things rural, by far the largest, but there were neighborhoods for fashion, arts, and Far East related topics, to name just a few. Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of "homesteaders," as the digital tenants were called, and was bought by Yahoo for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later, in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shut down and deleted.

In a heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650-gigabyte BitTorrent file is a digital Pompeii, serving as the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.

deletedcity.net →

Dutch Design Awards
2012 Finalist

Data Volume Explorer

2015

Virtual Reality

Archive Interface

Het Nieuwe Instituut’s archive is an extensive collection of objects, drawings, and documentation related to the history of architecture in the Netherlands. Packed in boxes and sorted on shelves, the objects offer us a glimpse behind the scenes of architecture and the evolution of the Dutch urban landscape. Hidden in all these boxes lies a world of ideas: about forms, materials, people, and the environment, a world of possibilities, successes, and failures. A world that doesn’t reveal itself just like that. For anyone familiar with the structure of this archive, it is a well-organized database of shelves and volumes. For the layperson, it is an endless series of boxes.

The link between the boxes and the information they contain comes in the form of a digital file. You enter a search term into the computer and the program directs you to the right box. That’s assuming that you know what you’re looking for. For anyone with no knowledge whatsoever of architectural history, there’s not much the computer can do to help you.

Data Volume Explorer is a proposal for a spatial, interactive search machine for anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for. The installation allows the user to play with the archive. Instead of boxes in endless rows of archive cabinets, the boxes can be arranged in endless configurations: chronologically, by architect, by format, or by materials used. A gigantic construction of boxes with drawings, or a seemingly never-ending landscape of boxes full of architectural models.

The space in which this experiment takes place is a virtual one. With virtual reality glasses, the visitor can step out of the physical environment and enter the virtual archive. To make the transition clear, the installation takes the form of a small space built from real archive boxes. As soon as you put the glasses on, you see a virtual version of the same space.

Enter a search term and the space transforms into a new environment based on a new configuration. You search using a (virtual) keyboard. As soon as you type a letter, a list appears with possible search terms. By combining search terms, you can filter the results, from the very broad to the very specific. The result could be a landscape of boxes with pencil drawings that reaches as far as the eye can see, or that one box full of sketches of Rotterdam’s Blaaktoren (The Pencil). If you linger at a certain box, it can be opened, revealing its contents in the image. If you look away, you return to the spatial environment. The starting point for the installation is the discovery of the archive, ranging from very broad and almost random to very specific. You can sort very specifically, so that the box next to you is full of drawings by the same architectural office, in the same city, or models made of the same material.

Commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut

Beijing Media Art Biennale

2016

Web Application

Datavisualization

Data visualization for the Beijing Media Art Biennale 2016. The interactive visualization shows the curatorial framework and provides a theoretical and scientific context for the artworks on display. Embedded in the program as both a web-app and an installation, the visualization functions as an integral part of the exhibition.

Commissioned by Beijing Media Art Biennale

Data Landscapes and the Digital Sublime

Richard Vijgen (1982) is a data artist. He designs instruments, objects and environments that let you experience the invisible dimensions of the highly technological world around us. Through his work, he explores the aesthetic and cultural effects of electromagnetic waves, information networks, microprocessors and algorithms and translates their elusive qualities into intuitive, imaginative and sensory experiences.

By using site specificity and metaphors such as the data landscape, his work establishes new relations between invisible technological dimensions and the physical, embodied reality of the viewer that invoke experiences of the digital sublime. In collaboration with artists, scientists and technologists, he explores new aesthetic and narrative dimensions of information technology. He has published articles on data visualisation and data culture in The Yale Architectural Journal, Volume Magazine and the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping among others.

His work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, The Barbican Gallery, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Ars Electronica, Vitra Design Museum, New Media Gallery and Manifesta 12 and has been awarded with several Dutch Design Awards, the Lumen Prize, received a honourable mention from Ars Electronica and a S+T+ARTS residency at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Richard Vijgen teaches at the Design Art and Technology Department of the ArtEZ Art School in the Netherlands and frequently serves as a guest lecturer at art schools and universities.

Exhibitions

2005 Dutch Design Week

Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2009 Young Guns 7

Art Directors Club New York, New York, United States

2009 Dutch Design Awards

Dutch Design House, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2011 Munt met een Missie

Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands

2012 Cultura Digital

Cultura Digital, Rio de Jainero, Brazil

2012 The Deleted City

Dutch Design Awards, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2012 The Deleted City

Silence Vert , Le Vigan, France

2012 The Deleted City

Counterpath, Denver, United States

2013 Seasonal and Longterm Groundwater Changes

Screen City, Stavanger, Norway

2013 Screengrab

James Cook University, Douglas, Australia

2013 Atlas der Nederlanden

Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2013 Unmapping the world

Experimenta Biennale, Lison, Portugal

2014 The Deleted City

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, United States

2014 Digital Revolution

The Barbican, London, United Kingdom

2015 Infosphere

ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany

2015 Every (day) ta

MOTI, Breda, The Netherlands

2016 Nervous Systems

Haus der Kulturen der welt, Berlin, Germany

2016 The Shannon Effect

Bell Labs, New Jersey, United States

2016 Currents

Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, Santa Fe, United States

2016 The Deleted City

Computer History Museum, Mountain View, United States

2016 Internet Archive 20th Anniversary

Internet Archive, San Fransisco, United States

2016 Prix Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

2016 Datavisualization

Beijing Media Art Biennale, Beijing, China

2017 Hello Robot

Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany

2016 IDFA Doclab White Spots

De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2017 White Spots

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2017 Architecture of Radio Panorama

STRP Biennale, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2017 Embassy of Data

Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2017 The Imagined Future is Not the Future

OCT-LOFT, Shenzen, China

2017 WiFi Tapestry

Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2017 Materialising the Internet | Deleted City 3.0

MU Gallery, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2018 1,2,3, Data

Espace EDF, Paris, France

2018 Connected by Air, a Data Fresco

Manifesta 12, Palermo, Italy

2019 Broken Nature

XXII Triennale di Milano, Milano, Italy

2019 Vienna Biennale for Change

MAK, Vienna, Austria

2019 Digital Revolution

Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany

2020 Gdynia Design Days

Gdansk Design Festival, Gdansk, Poland

2021 THE_OGRE.NET

Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève, Paris, France

2021 Au-delà du réel ?

Le CENTQUATRE-PARIS, Paris, France

2021 Lanzhou Photo Festival

Chengdu Contemporary Image Museum, Chengdu, China

2022 Looking at the Future through Artificial Eyes

Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

2022 Réseaux-Mondes

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

2022 Extractivism, the Eldorado of Cyberspace

la Sorbonne, Paris, France

2022 Welcome to Amchitka

38CC, Delft, The Netherlands

2022 Indivisible

New Media Gallery, New Westminster, Vancouver, Canada

2023 Museum of the Future

Museum of the Future, Enschede, Netherlands

2023 Through Artificial Eyes

Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem, the Netherlands

2023 Hertzian Landscapes

Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2023 Architecture of Radio

Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, China

2024 View Beneath Delft

Highlight Delft, Delft, The Netherlands

2024 The Poetics of Prompting

MU, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

2024 Derrière les étoiles

Le Cube Garges, Garges-lès-Gonesse, France

2024 Electric Atmospheres

S+T+ARTS Air Festival, Barcelona, Spain

2025 New Technological Art Award

Zebrastraat , Gent, Belgium

2026 Video Craft

Museum of Craft and Design, San Fransisco, U.S.A.

2026 Prompt: Design × AI | Contemporary Design Practices in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

K11 Hacc, Shenzen, China

2026 Babel.lib

Nederlands Film Festival, Utrecht, The Netherlands

2026 Terra Ultima

Aesthetica Film Festival, York, United Kingdom

Articles

2018 Information as a Machine for Living in

Perspecta, The Yale Architectural Journal # 51

mitpress.mit.edu →

ISBN: 9780262535922

2017 Life in the Infosphere

Volume Magazine # 50, Total Space insert

volumeproject.org →

ISBN: 9789077966600

2015 Big Data, Big Stories

New Challenges for Data Design

springer.com →

ISBN: 978-1-4471-6596-5

2012 The Deleted City: A Digital Archaeology

Parsons Journal for Information Mapping Volume V, Issue 2

piim.newschool.edu →

2014 Massive Growth under the radar

Pulitzercenter.org

pulitzercenter.org →

2020 Wifi Impressionist

ACM Interactions March-April 2020

dl.acm.org →

2021 The Archive of the Future

Network Archives Design and Digital Culture

nadd.hetnieuweinstituut.nl →

2022 De Toekomst door Kunstmatige Ogen

Boek van de Toekomst

boomfilosofie.nl →

ISBN: 9789024443109

Talks

2006 Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL

2006 Institute for the future of the Book, Brooklyn, U.S.A.

2006 Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, NL

2011 De Unie, Rotterdam, NL

2011 Mediamatic, Amsterdam, NL

2011 Picnic, Amsterdam, NL

2012 Cultura Digital, Rio de Janeiro, BR

2012 Radboud University, Nijmegen, NL

2013 Counterpath, Denver, U.S.A

2014 South by South West, Austin, U.S.A.

2014 University of Southern California, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

2014 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

2014 Royal Academy of Sciences, Amsterdam, NL

2015 Photo Stories, Amsterdam, NL

2015 Unseen, Amsterdam, NL

2015 Nieuwe Instituut Lecture Night, Rotterdam, NL

2016 Computer History Museum, Mountain View, U.S.A.

2017 Dutch Design Talks, Eindhoven, NL

2017 Technical University Delft, Delft, NL

2018 Manifesta 12, Palermo, IT

2019 Royal College of Art, London, U.K.

2016 Stilvorlagen, Hamburg, DE

2018 Design Academy, Eindhoven, NL

2021 Web UX Begins, Command Line Heroes Podcast

2021 Tabula Rasa, Podcast Ontwerp Platform Arnhem (Dutch)

2021 Oddstream, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

2022 Royal College of Art , London, UK

2022 Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2022 Tegenlicht Meetup, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2023 Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark

2024 Light Art Museum, Budapest, Hungary

2024 Day of the Chief Data Officer, Utrecht, The Netherlands

2025 Emerging Exits, Arnhem, The Netherlands

2026 Handweaving Guild of America, United States

Press

Profiles

Novum

download pdf →

Dutch Design Magazine

download pdf →

Tableau Magazine

tableaumagazine.nl →

Het Nieuwe Instituut / Seeking Shelter

nieuweinstituut.nl →

Fisheye Immersive

fisheyeimmersive.com →

reversediffusion.xyz

Creative Applications

creativeapplications.net →

Unthinking Photography

unthinking.photography →

Electric Atmospheres

Creative Applications

creativeapplications.net →

La Vanguardia

lavanguardia.com →

Ara

ara.cat →

Altair

altair.com →

S+T+ARTS

starts.eu →

Hyperthread

Creative Applications

creativeapplications.net →

Designboom

designboom.com →

Hyperallergic

hyperallergic.com →

Cucire universi, Domitilla Dardi

einaudi.it →

The Case for a Small Language Model

Creative Applications

creativeapplications.net →

Neural Magazine #75

neural.it →

Neural

neural.it →

The Lumen Prize

lumenprize.com →

Poeziekrant

poeziekrant.be →

Cosmic Wind Chime

Designboom

designboom.com →

Fisheye Immersive

fisheyeimmersive.com →

Through Artificial Eyes

Leeuwarder Courant

lc.nl →

Creative Applications

creativeapplications.net →

Rocking Robots

rockingrobots.nl →

Het Nieuwe Instituut

tegenlicht.hetnieuweinstituut.nl →

VPRO

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Dutch Digital Design

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Boek van de Toekomst

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Eternal Blue

Observant

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Creative Applications

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RTV Maastricht

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Atmospheric Lighthouse

La Vanguardia

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El Pais

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Ara Balears

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Dutch Design Magazine

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Hyperview Barcelona

Economia Digital

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Creative Applications

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Dutch Design Daily

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Galleries West

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The Tyee

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New West Record

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Human Biography

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WiFi Impressionist

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Fast Company

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t3n – digital pioneers

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It's nice that

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ACM Interactions

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Connected by Air

Frieze

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NRC

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Art Pil

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Zeit

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De Witte Raaf

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Art Agenda

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Spike Art Quarterly

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Hart

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Art

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Der Rheinpfalz

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New York Times (print)

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Metal

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La Sicilia

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Giornale di Sicilia

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Architecture of Radio

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Wired

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PC Magazine

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First Monday

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Atlas of the Future

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Hyper Allergic

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Inverse

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CSI Cyber

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About Trust

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Observatoire Art Contemporain

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Vertical Atlas

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White Spots

Leonardo Electronic Almanac

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De Volkskrant

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Hyper Allergic

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Embassy of Data

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STRP Biennale

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Golden Hand

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Studio Richard Vijgen

Spijkerstraat 47
6828DB, Arnhem
The Netherlands

+31 (0)6 45312337
mail@richardvijgen.nl
kvk 09201942

Babel.lib is developed by Studio Richard Vijgen in collaboration with EYE Filmmuseum,

Nederlands Film Festival, Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, HKU, and the University of Amsterdam. Supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL.

Solar Perspectives is a project initiated by Richard Vijgen and supported by MU Hybrid Art House and the Creative Industries Fund NL.

Where do AI-generated images come from?

4 LED screens 22.2 x 3.3m, 5.8x0.76, 3.8x0.76m, realtime graphics. Coding in collaboration with Eusebi Jucglà. Group show "The Future is Here: Awakening between AI and Art" presented by BEDI and 798Cube.

Electric Atmospheres is supported by S+T+ARTS Air, Altair Engineering, RCR Architects, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, In4art, HLRS and Fundación Épica

Residency

Edition: Athens, Heartland, Hollywood, Rainforest, Tokyo. 120 x 120 cm High Definition Aluminum Dibond PrintsFor inquiries please contact inquiry@richardvijgen.nl

In collaboration with Rozalie Hirs and Jelle Reith, supported by The Creative Industries Fund NL and the Netherlands Foundation for Literature.

In collaboration with TerraIndex

Commissioned by Highlight Delft

Commissioned by the Municipality of Den Bosch

From February 20th to June 26th 2022 at Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam

Commissioned by Maastricht University (NL)

Coding: Richard Vijgen and Eusebi Jucglà

Commissioned by Mirador Torre Glòries

Design and Production: Richard Vijgen Coding: Richard Vijgen and Eusebi Jucglà Music: John Talabot Commissioned by: Mediapro ExhibitionsPermanent exhibition from May 2022

Commissioned by Mediapro Exhibitions

Hertzian Landscapes is supported by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Netherlands Creative Industries Fund.

commissioned by Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

The work is part of the second installment of a 4-year project by artist Elmo Vermijs that focuses on different stages of the forest's life cycle.

in collaboration with Elmo Vermijs

Developed with the support of Creative Industries Fund NL and Dutch Culture

Commissioned by Manifesta 12 Palermo

[1]The infosphere refers to an interdependent environment, like a biosphere, that is populated by informational entities. While an example of the sphere of information is cyberspace, infospheres are not limited to purely online environments.

self initiated

a collaboration with Bregtje van der Haak and Jacqueline Hassink

In collaboration with Linda Vlassenrood Exhibition Design: Koehorst in 't Veld

Commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut

Photo credit: Ruud Balk*The infosphere refers to an interdependent environment, like a biosphere, that is populated by informational entities. While an example of the sphere of information is cyberspace, infospheres are not limited to purely online environments.

Commissioned by STRP Biennale

Exhibited at Centre Pompidou, 2022

Commissioned by MU

Commissioned by P. Weil

The project was covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Fast Company, Infosthetics, NASA and National Geographic among others.

An interview about this project was published by The Smithsonian.

Commissioned by P.Weil

Commissioned by Het Nieuwe Instituut

Commissioned by Beijing Media Art Biennale

Exhibitions

Articles

Talks

Press

Edition: Athens, Heartland, Hollywood, Rainforest, Tokyo. 120 x 120 cm High Definition Aluminum Dibond Prints
For inquiries please contact inquiry@richardvijgen.nl

Design and Production: Richard Vijgen Coding: Richard Vijgen and Eusebi Jucglà Music: John Talabot Commissioned by: Mediapro Exhibitions

Permanent exhibition from May 2022

In collaboration with Linda Vlassenrood
Exhibition Design: Koehorst in 't Veld

Photo credit: Ruud Balk
*The infosphere refers to an interdependent environment, like a biosphere, that is populated by informational entities. While an example of the sphere of information is cyberspace, infospheres are not limited to purely online environments.