00:01:24
MD: Good afternoon, thank you for welcoming us. Today is 12 May 2021, we are in presence of Peter Struycken, in your beautiful house with Sanneke Stigter and myself, Marie Ducimetière.
This interview is part of the thesis that I am currently writing on three of your early artworks:
SHFT-34, DISP and BLOCKS. We already had a little exchange via email and you answered my questions very nicely, thank you. We will come back to it. But first I am curious to know… SHFT-34, DISP and BLOCKS have been part of the Transformation Digital Art Project as case-study artworks that took place in in 2014-2015. Different preservation strategies have been chosen for each artwork at this time (emulation for SHFT-34, reconstruction or reinterpretation for DISP and migration for BLOCKS).
What are your greatest fears about what might happen to these software-based artworks in the future, over the 5, 10 or 50 next years?
00:02:36
PS: I think SHFT-34 is reconstructed by myself and written in a new, more up-to-date language by Floris Van Manen. The earlier… BLOCKS… BLOCKS is written, is part of a program I used for making real sculptures but I added an important second program to it.. My god… [turns to SS] ‘Zwaartekracht’ wat is dat?
SS: Gravity.
PS: Gravity! A program with gravity. And a program with the gravity… [thinks] The gravity programs interacts with the blocks who each have a mass and a velocity and together with the earlier program of the blocks for the sculpture it makes a continuing, never-repeating space with changing blocks. The earlier program, which I used for the sculpture, mixes a cube, or cubes, into elongated or flat shapes dependent on their position in space and also the colour changes as a function of a position in space. That program was made especially for the Gemeentemuseum. I don’t know exactly how it went but they didn’t like it or they… it was for years functioning quite well but then there was a discussion about the light. The light level on the exhibition floor where it was project... [laughing] was made by the architect as a focus point of sunlight so in the
summer, when the sun was at his Zenith at 12 o’clock, it was right on the projection. And it faded too much, the projection. So I asked to put a verduistering. Wat is een verduistering?
00:06:13 SS: A blind.
PS: A blind! Yes! Which you could regulate into this focussing point of the light. The light thing is from architect…
SS: Berlage?
PS: Von Berlage. It was a kind of mystic idea about light and art. That was his idea to put it right into that spot. And an important Dutch artist at the time was asked to make, in that same space where my projection was, to make a large grass and it was done by [thinks]… I even had the drawing of…
SS: Het is niet Van der Lek heh?
PS: Ne ne ne. [He looks into his library to find a book] Chris Lebeau. Chris Lebeau was an important Dutch designer of textiles and phenomenal designer. He made the most beautiful tablecloth design. [To MD] Maybe you know him?
MD: No, unfortunately.
00:08:00
PS: Because you are French, you have knowledge of design to such wonderful… [looks at the book]. Well I’ll look it up. And glass tube! Anyhow, that was never realized because of the war, so it was always closed. And then I was asked to make a special work for that space, which I did.
After a few years, because of the sunlight, It was not used anymore, and I complained. I said ‘It was a gift of the Museumvereniging that is… people are interested in art as a kind of way dat…
Museumverening soms een club van mensen...
SS: ja ja, het zijn de musea vooral toch, die daarin ehh... of was het van het tijdschrift?
Destijds?
PS: Nee, het was een gift van... all the museum friends.
SS: Oh ja. Vrienden ja ja
PS: The director, what’s his name now SS: Was dat Locher toen? Nee
PS: Nee nee
SS: Benno Tempel?
PS: Benno Tempel.
PS: But the director, what is his name... Benno Tempel thought it was more easy to just throw the work away and tell people that it was a temporary project so it wouldn’t cost him any
restoration. And I thought it was crazy so I proposed, when the discussion with LIMA came around, I proposed to restore that scene. But I got into a very curious relation with LIMA cause I said ‘ well, this program is written by Daniel Dekkers, who is my adopted son, and he is a software scientist.’ I said ‘ well he has to rewrite the program’ and for the SHFT-34, Floris Van Manen already had it restored but LIMA wanted to start to do it all over again. I said ‘ that is crazy! I don’t want that”. Because it is a lot of work and I have done it once and it is in perfect condition, why should you want to… There was something about an agreement, about money they received from a foundation where they kind of made this proposal where they would restore my works. And the first work, DISP, I don’t think anyone ever restored that. There is just the original registration that was made several years after I made it. And it was one of my first programs on a color television.
LIMA said that it was their property. But it was not their property, it was from Museum Boijmans.
So I wrote to Museum Boijmans, I had a exhibition at Museum Boijmans I think in 1980 or something, it is with the blue catalogue… I’ll get it [goes get the catalogue in his library]. And it was on tape, which was already not very good. At that time… Oh yes, 1980. At that time, there was already a lot of art on tape but musea didn’t know what to do with it. They just put it in a carboard, there was no special preservation. But I gave it to them because it was a quite
professional tape. So you had to have a special recorder to run it. And it ran at the exhibition in a loop. You found this catalogue?148 Because there is a description. I think it’s the first thing I did.
And I made it when it was read just on tape because this is… it was a real-time program. What it did… [To MD] Have you ever seen it?
MD: Yes.
00:14:10
PS: Ok! So it’s just changing colors [talking about DISP]. And that was for the first time that I realized that we have no memory for color. You can change color, and you see the change, but you don’t see the relation in time. So that was very curious to experience. That there is a tremendous difference between continuing and changing sound, and continuing and changing colors. You have no idea, after two colors you don’t know what you saw again three colors ago…
Hum… Three colors earlier. So then, I thought ‘ well you have to see the colour which follows, and the colour that is just passing’. So you get three colours. That still didn’t… I didn’t like that too much. I thought ‘well, maybe, of the colour structure, I make several samples at the same time so you can sense the relationship’. But that was much too artistic for me, with the squares, I didn’t like it. And too much emphasis on the shapes instead of the colours because you see the changing size of the shapes and that seems as visually as important as the colours, So I diminished the complexity and made four squares which each time in different order change the colours. That gave for me a satisfying result in seeing in how colours relate from that specific structure. And that structure was the… I think the first structure in the world that was calculated by a computer.
Because colour in early computerized images always was added. Or with filters, or each time deciding on a colour someone wanted to show. Colour structure… A certain type of relationship of colours. My idea was never… I was not… I don’t have a picture of it. Ah yes, here is a picture. You mix, with light… You mix three colours, red, green, and blue. You know that? And you know that you mix if you mix the green with the red you get the yellow? [MD nodding] Ok. So at that time, with this machine, which is this machine. Maybe you have found that?
00:17:52 MD: Yes.
PS: At that machine, at that time, I couldn’t use more than 255 colours at the same time. 56.
But always starting with 0 so until 255. So I made a structure changing, a changing of colour starting with the red as a very long string. And if you pile parts of the string until the screen is full, you get this image. But in fact, it is a very long string. And for the green, I took wave form. You know what the sign for a wave is? [MD making a wave sign with her hand] Yes. This is a sign wave but a quite slow one. Of course the pictures are terrible because you go from black, no color, to the maximum. And there are all gradations in between. But this is a slow one. Starts high, again two 0, and then you have to go to the next line and it’s getting high again. The second one, the green, has a little bit more speed and you can see that this… Well as pictures of the green it gives that impression. But it’s a wave again. And for the blue I took a third wave. And then, the
combination of the red, and the green gives this impression. The red and the blue this one. The blue and the green this one. And all together this one. And there, because I couldn’t use more than 255 colours, this was the limitation. But there is no repetition of any colour in this structure because if you take that sign waves in such a way that they will not repeat... Well they will repeat somewhere in time but it can take years… There is not a repetition of the relation between the
148 Structuur – Elementen 1969-1980, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1980, design by Daphne Duijvelshoff, Photographs by Wim Crouwel
colours, And so I took this structure to design… So that was in fact the first… The program..
Programming… I had been programming drawings and I started in [inaudible] to program the colour structure. The program took just to make a screen filled … A filled screen with continuing colours is very easy. Because there is no restorations, I did it once on an afternoon with my friend Floris Van Manen. And in one afternoon, we made all programs, we programmed it [talking about DISP, WAVES, LIJN1, VLOEI, SQUARE and GRID3]. It is so easy that it can be done immediately. But LIMA, who proposed to redo it… I think because the quarrel with me, they quit. But if you would ever like to have it reprogrammed, it is no problem because it is so easy. And very precise because we can reconstruct the sign waves and then we have the exact use of the colors from the… I think I made versions where this colour is just step by step… Oh yes. Follows step by step the colour structure. And here you see that if you take the… In this case, when I took separate colours in different squares, the emphasis goes to the square, and not to the colours. The colours are taken as granted. And in that case when it is more simple you really see the changing colours and the changing relations. And… Yes that’s it. And very important thing for me at that time was the first work based on a colour structure, with red green and blue, to make a space structure with it. And because the red, the green and the blue have values between 0 and 255, so each colour has a red component, a green component and a blue component. They each have a value between 0 and 255. So you get 3 different values, one from the red, one from the green, one for the blue. But you can also transfer them to x, y and y from a space. And then you take the space as a cube from to 255 , 255 and 255, and then you get a cube. And then you can position the colours exactly in the space that has the same use, the same numbers derive from the sign waves, for the colour and the space. So that was the first time I manage to combine space and colour. That is something I used my whole work, Where I used space, I used that principle, the value of a colour also
matches a specific place in space. And of course, when computers became… When I got my own computer, I could calculate without any… That was in the beginning of the 80’s. I could calculate not 255… Not limited by 256. I could calculate any number of colour. That was the start to make those kind of things in which colours change and without limitation. Because if you choose your values, if you use your values from the sign waves well you can continue forever without repeating. I started then to make lines with the colours, and I discovered that there was something for me very interesting. If you make a specific type of light… I have another example [goes pick up a book in his library]. Oh this the space where the works function, you can see very vaguely, you can see the cubes moving [points to a picture of BLOCKS at the Geementemusem Den Haag]. But… If you decide on a type of line, in this case a limitation of the machine here was that this was the smallest area I could calculate. So now, you can calculate on many pixels but the pixel here was about half a centimetre. But you could make, on a simple way you could decide on connecting squares in a specific way and then, a certain type of light appeared. To my
amazement, I thought that once the whole screen would… was filled, it would become a chaos, but it didn’t. You get this kind of structures and the lines just scribble over it and over it and over it. And the structure stays exactly the same. So, every type of line, in a very complex combination has its own end structure. This never changes. Of course, every time the line draws over it, colours are changed, but the overall impression stays the same. When I saw that I was so amazed that I decided on another line, and in this case, I made another type of line, where kind of
clustering appears. And when the thing is filled, it stays on of course changing but with completely different overall impression as this one. And then I made of course… I don’t know how many different… I took for example three different lines and in the end, you get this. So that was very intriguing because that was the first time something which intuitively would end up in a chaos, didn’t at all. And for me, very important insight. And there was another thing which was very important for me, that is... Here you have such pictures drawn with a line.149 And I shifted… I turned the screen, and this is, for instance, after 30 minutes. So, it’s completely changed. But
149 Showing picture 47, KTV Kleur 1977, p.43 in the “Structuur – Elementen 1969-1980, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1980, design by Daphne Duijvelshoff, Photographs by Wim Crouwel” catalogue.
here, underneath, I made a photo of the use of sign waves for red, green, and blue and the
combination. In this case, I used other sign waves, so I got an overall of colour structure. But if you take pictures at random and with anytime in between the colours differ but the overall
impression is that it is the same colour sphere. And it is totally different colour structure but after any time, you can repeat this endlessly. Every time, the structure will be different, but the colour impression stays the same. So that was another, for me, very important insight. That colour does not… Colour relation, the impression of colour relation do not depend on the amount of colours within the structure. The amount can differ, but the impression stays the same. That is also curious because we think ‘oh, if you’ve taken a lot of red, from this structure, and a bit of green, and some average white, or you change that… the impression of the colour structure will change’
and it does not. It only changes, of course there is a difference, if there’s for instance extra red here I think… I see it now… Here. Of course, that gives another atmosphere to the structure. But not in terms of colour relations. The colour relations stay the same. Only, let’s say, for preference you could say ‘well I like this more than this’ because there is so much red in it’. Well ok, then you like it for aesthetics reasons. Because of certain amounts of colours. But the overall impression is that it is the same colour structure. And then I realized that size of colour is a completely
different, of amount of in the structure, that it is completely different experience than the colour relation. So you can make very simple… For example…If you take a big square of red and you put one tiny green spot or you take a large square green with a tiny red spot in it, of course the impression of both things will be completely different. But the colour structure will be exactly the same. So this is a thing which is… And that is something I found by coincidence. Later on, I found that in art, already in the 8th century B.C., the first Greek paintings were painted with 4 colours, white, ochres, red and black, which gives an average of greyish and brownish impression. But then they added for detail a blue green. That was an exception. Exception for colours. And that
exception made that the whole idea of the colour relations in the picture changes. The blue adds an ocean of many colours which in fact, are not there. The same principle is used by Rembrandt later, to exactly the same [reason]. They use 4 colours to mix their picture, add a detail in blue or blue green and that gives a complete colourful impression. But the colour impression is different from, let’s say, the Vlaamse primitieven, Van Eyck, for instance. Because… Let’s say the Lam Gods is a very colourful painting. But that type of colours which can appear anywhere give a totally different idea of colourfulness as when in the classic old ways, you make a whole picture out of 4 colours and add just a tiny bit of blue green or purple, a colour that can not be mixed with the white, yellow, red and the blacks. Well, this was my discovery in the first experiments with the use of computers. I, later on, used it again in paintings. This thing of… I can show you. [goes to pick up a book] I thought I never used this idea of colour structure in which you can change the amount of the colours without changing the structures. And I made paintings which differed tremendously in the amount of colour. For instance in this one you see the orange/yellow is very much there and the greenish/yellow… but in terms of colour relations these are the same. So here you can see that the colourfulness or the color relations are not the impression of colour
relation… Colour relation is not dependant on the amount of colours. Each time, for you the left sign, there are exactly equal amount and then in the right one, I changed the surface. And here too, you see that the rose and the green is very much there and every colour has the same appearance. But the impression of the colour relation stays the same. I think that this is so curious, and so important as an insight of how… And here I did it with three. Oh and this one is also… The colour just… And here too. I made extreme different paintings but still the colour relations stay the same. I think it’s quite magical. And I don’t know where it hooks to your emotions or to yours sense of quality but as a manifestation of colours it’s quite intriguing. Well, that started it all. And this is 77. This is… It’s also 77. So it’s all within one year from my first try out with colours on the structured colour with a computer program. That’s about DISP… Or what is it? DISP!
00:41:40
MD: Yeah, very, very interesting. The first thing that comes in my mind is that this was one type of screen [pointing at an image representing DISP in the book], here we have a painting…
You know, the mediums are really different. And here we have also another type of screen, I guess… Different from this one ?
PS: Oh it’s the same screen.
MD: Ok. So how much value do you place in the medium, in the hardware, in the type of screen used?
PS: Or the hardware doesn’t matter anything, not at all. No, because it’s not relevant. I would have made the same work when I add other materials. Other hardware. So for restoration, only the program counts. And of course, I don’t mind if the program is written in ALGOL or in any other language. What is important is that it gives exactly the same result. It is the results that counts.
MD: The result as in the relationship between colours but not that much the colour itself ? PS: Even the colour doesn’t matter too much. And of course on this screen, this type of hardware, it is complete different. As colour are low on the screen. But that doesn’t matter. It is the structure which matters.
MD: Interesting. Really interesting. It is even more a pity that BLOCKS was dismantled because of fading which was a colour problem in the end. But the program was running.
PS: Yes ! The program was running and if they had put up some blinds it would have been perfect. And now because… I made BLOCKS in… Now of course… [thinks] BLOCKS…. [looking at the Groninger Museum Nai Uitgevers P. Struycken book]. It was projected so behind the screen there was a projection. It was quite expensive because you had to change lamps every 7 months or 6 months. But now, I would prefer to project it on one of these big screens which you see
everywhere on the hallway. Of course, that’s very rough, big size… But there are in all shops, you see it quite often now moving images on screens of any size. Of course I would immediately say
“run the program on a new type of screen” and that would be perfect and completely
independent on whatever light fell on it. So restoration is in this case either put up some blinds or change the surface to pixel surface, and not projection.
00:46:00
MD: Could you imagine it to be projected in another museum or other space?
PS: I made it especially of this place, which is quite beautiful. And of course, you can run it on many computers. It gives an impression of what the program BLOCKS does. But in relation to the colours here, I took as a basic colour I took the colours of the tiles, which is very important in that area. So I started with the colour of the tiles, made a colour structure dependant on this colour so you see even on this bad picture you see greenish relation to it. And that is because I made it especially for that place. But of course you can run it on any computer. And it will give some impression of the work.
MD: Have you heard about a young artist that has used BLOCKS, the program, to create a virtual reality environment? I’m not sure if you’ve seen it. From Zalán. He’s a young artist and he created a virtual reality from BLOCKS where you see the 3D blocks moving around you. So that is a different environment, that’s a different... And I wasn’t sure you were aware that existed…?