About me

My software

Since 1995, software development has been the central thread in my working life. I began with independent projects such as Partyweb and Hoppa, later developed software professionally for others, and eventually for Dutch archival institutions, including the Amsterdam City Archives. Although I stopped my commercial activities in 2020, I continued building, now with a stronger focus on the long-term preservation and publication of my own archive.

That work now continues in Catalog, the platform I am developing together with a full-time software developer. Catalog is an integrated environment for creating, organizing, documenting, preserving, and publishing content of lasting value. It brings together archiving, communication, identity, provenance, and micropayments in a single system for the secure management and publication of intellectual and creative work.

Stichting Outpapier provides the institutional setting in which this vision is realized. Its purpose is the preservation and presentation of cultural and intellectual heritage, while allowing ownership and copyright to remain with their original holders.

For more about my software, visit Catalog.org. For the broader archival and preservation context, see Outpapier.nl.

My music

I am drawn to music that balances structure with tension, repetition with surprise. I have a particular affinity for minimal music, especially Philip Glass, but also for the harmonic richness and strangeness of Olivier Messiaen. I love the sound of the Hammond organ, and I am equally drawn to brass, dissonance, noise and chaos.

The music that shaped me ranges widely, from David Bowie to Tears for Fears, Simple Minds, Dead Can Dance, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield, Nina Hagen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Pink Floyd. Growing up in the 1980s meant growing up in a time of enormous musical variety, and that openness has stayed with me.

In my own work, I am less interested in perfection than in presence. I look for irregularity, friction, and unpredictability — the small imperfections that keep music alive. Especially when working with software, precision can become a trap. I prefer to leave room for the human hand, for instability, for what I think of as human entropy.

I compose in Cubase, and my background includes several years of piano lessons in childhood. Below is a selection of my compositions, ranging from one minute to half an hour. Two of these pieces have already been used in a dance performance, though I see all of them as potentially performative works.

My photography

Photography has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. As a child I was nicknamed “Fotopietje” because I was always carrying around my little camera, begging for film and flash cubes, which were far from cheap.

Later, in Groningen, I bought my first serious camera. For a brief moment I considered a Praktica, which I could buy second-hand for very little, but in the end I chose a Minolta X-300 camera with a 135mm portrait lens, a 50mm standard lens, and a 28mm wide-angle. I worked mainly in black and white, developing and printing the photographs myself.

Portraiture quickly became my main interest. At a certain point my Minolta equipment gave way to Nikon, and my collection of lenses steadily grew. Yet I was always searching for greater sharpness and control, and that search eventually led me to a 13×18 cm technical camera, which I managed to buy cheaply from a local photographer.

That bargain did not remain a bargain for long. A dealer in second-hand photographic equipment sold me, at considerable expense, a pair of heavy Linhof tripods, a discarded Balcar flash unit, a 13×18 enlarger, and even a massive glazing machine for finishing baryta prints. I was building not just a photographic practice, but an entire physical world around it.

The technical camera was, in truth, hardly suitable for portrait photography, although I did make a few beautiful images with it. The video below documents a project with a model that took weeks of preparation. The polyester jewelry I strapped around his body was of my own design and making.

The shoot failed almost completely because I had set the camera incorrectly: the film was underexposed by at least eight stops. The fact that anything at all remained visible on the large-format transparencies still feels like a miracle. As far as I remember, it was the last portrait session I ever made with that camera, and it also marked the end of my ambitions as a professional photographer.

The shoot was filmed by my friend Jason — a document not of perfection, but of ambition, error, and persistence. At 15:05 you see me checking a polaroid that turned out completely black. Instead of double checking my exposure setting, I blamed the polaroid! A crucial, career-changing mistake.

Here are the results. Although the large-format transparencies at first appeared completely black, I was able, thirty years later, to recover the images by illuminating them from below with a powerful flash and re-photographing them with a Nikon D850. Even so, they fall short of the quality they might have had if the original exposure had been correct.

And yet portraiture never really left me. I also began using it as a kind of test case for software I was developing. My idea was simple: to photograph people, allow them to view their portraits online immediately, and let them purchase access on the spot. Only now, eleven years later, has that technology finally reached the point I had originally imagined.

I am now preparing to go back into the city and photograph people at events again, this time as I first intended. Below is a video of my first participation in Masters of Luxury, a large fair in Amsterdam, where I photographed visitors using my own software. Alongside it is an animation of a virtual exhibition space containing a selection of my portraits, as well as the followed by a slideshow of the high resolution images.

Kindergarten

I attended kindergarten in Nijverdal between the ages of four and six, and I remember it as a joyful and creative time filled with drawing, painting, and making things. In the group photograph below, I am the laughing child on the right; my best friend was the other laughing child at the left, and together we had enormous fun.

I was also a strong-willed child, prone to the occasional dramatic outburst — sometimes vivid enough to send a chair flying across the room — and that intensity stayed with me into my early teenage years. My teacher, whom I remember as Loes, met it with patience and understanding. Looking back, I think some of that intensity may have been connected to the years I spent in a children’s home before my adoption.

One memory from those years has stayed with me especially clearly. I was sitting on the back of my father’s bicycle when he told me that there were people on the moon at that very moment. “Yes, I can see them!” I replied, to his great amusement. He laughed and told me that was impossible. I suspect I had invented it on the spot just to sound interesting, probably with a blush on my cheeks.

Fotoalbum

VWO

Secondary school was a difficult and often lonely period for me.
My parents had decided that the local school in Nijverdal was not good enough, so each day I cycled twenty kilometres to Almelo and twenty back again, in all weather. At the same time, they had chosen to live deep in the Hellendoorn woods, which meant I was physically cut off from both my old friends and the new ones I might otherwise have made more easily.

We lived on the grounds of Krönnenzommer, a former tuberculosis sanatorium that later became a care institution for elderly people with dementia. It was a beautiful setting in many ways. We had a dog, and I made long walks through the forest. But for a teenager it was also a place of profound isolation.

Those years were shaped by distance, restlessness, and resistance. In addition to school itself, I was spending some three hours a day on my bicycle. My grades reflected that reality. I was strong-willed, oppositional, and prone to bursts of anger. I clashed repeatedly with teachers, especially the history teacher, and spent a fair amount of time outside the classroom.

One incident from my first year remained with me. My best friend, with whom I shared a great deal of laughter, was being reprimanded by our French teacher over the use of a felt-tip pen. At one point the teacher said, “Shall I draw on your face with a marker?” I replied, “As long as it’s a brown one, you won’t see it.” The teacher reacted with theatrical outrage and yelled “witkop” (whitehead) at me.

What stayed with me was the gap between a child’s perspective and an adult’s. As a child, I attached no negative meaning to skin colour; it was simply one visible fact among others. The teacher’s reaction forcefully introduced the idea that such a reference must already carry something improper or degrading. That reversal left a deep impression on me.

From my earlier experience in kindergarten, where my best friend also had brown skin, I had learned the opposite: children do not naturally experience such differences as negative. More often, it is adults who teach them to do so.

I did almost no homework in those years. I especially disliked German, and because I rarely prepared for it while the teacher liked to give surprise tests, my marks were often disastrous. By then it was clear that VWO was no longer realistic, and after the third year I moved to HAVO.

HAVO

I completed the final two years at the Kamerlingh Onnes Lyceum in Groningen, after my parents had moved to Haren (over het spoor). By then I was working at the checkout of an Albert Heijn supermarket on Friday evenings and Saturday for the lunch breaks. Yet that period at school was harder still. I entered a class in which everyone already knew each other, and I was not introduced into their group.

During breaks I would lock myself in the toilets rather than face the schoolyard alone. No one seemed to notice. It was a bleak time, and I was still living at home.

One of the few bright spots during my difficult years at HAVO in Groningen was the drawing class. I had chosen drawing as an examination subject, and together with a small group of fellow students I worked on a number of engaging assignments.

Below are several works I submitted for the quarterly examinations. The subjects were not entirely of my own choosing, though I seem to remember that we could select them from a number of set options.

Pedagogische Academie

After finishing HAVO, the question was what to do next. I found that difficult to answer. What I wanted, more than anything, was to continue developing my general knowledge — psychology, sociology, geography, history — while also keeping space for the creative side of myself. Drawing had been one of the subjects in my final exam package, and that mattered to me.

The teacher training college, the PABO, turned out to offer almost exactly what I was looking for. It combined many of the subjects that interested me, and gave me room to keep learning without forcing me to decide too quickly what I wanted to become. I had no strong ambition to stand in front of a classroom, but I loved the idea of continuing to develop myself and leaving the future open.

The works I produced during my years at teacher training college still surprise me by the amount of energy they contain and the thoroughness of their approach. Looking back, I am struck by the seriousness and commitment with which I made them. I remain proud of these works, and of the curiosity and discipline they reflect.

The teaching practice journal presented below records the lessons I taught during my placement school and the evaluations written by my tutors. It can be read alongside the works above, as a parallel record of the same period: one showing the ideas and assignments I developed at college, the other showing how my work was observed and assessed in practice.

The handwritten notes below were taken during lectures at teacher training college. Together with the work shown above, they give a more immediate sense of how I listened, selected, and organized ideas at the time.

This paper on drawing, space, and perspective was hand-typed on an Olivetti typewriter.

Artotheek Groningen

In the final year of my teacher training, I did a placement at the Artotheek in Groningen, a kind of lending library for art, where artists receiving public funding were required to make work available.

I was supervised there by two gay men who did not get on particularly well, largely because they expressed their homosexuality in completely different and incompatible ways. Then there was me: a slim, not unattractive young man who had not yet fully figured out what he wanted. I found the dynamic between the three of us both amusing and intriguing.

During the placement itself, it never became entirely clear to me what was actually expected of me. Much of the time, I felt I was mainly required to maintain the appearance of being usefully occupied. In professional terms, the placement was therefore rather empty.

At the same time, Willem — the more outspoken of the two — did play a role in my growing acceptance of my own sexuality, much as my drawing teacher at secondary school had done earlier.

The inevitable result was that, at the end of it, I had to produce a placement report about a period in which I had never fully understood what I was supposed to be doing. It turned into a somewhat diffuse piece of writing — something one of my tutors also noted, with some justice, in the margin comments.

Slaaphuis Druif

During my student years, I was introduced by my close friend Sarah — who lived in the student flat with me — to Slaaphuis Druif, a combined youth hostel and homeless shelter. I went through an intake interview, then worked a trial shift, and was accepted.

Although it was officially volunteer work, students were paid for it — I believe either 50 or 100 guilders per day. In any case, for a student living on around 600 guilders a month, it was a very welcome supplement.

More importantly, the work itself was extraordinarily interesting. Something happened almost every evening. After each shift, we kept a shared diary, to which I also contributed extensively. Fortunately, I was able to preserve these diaries. They are now held by Stichting Outpapier and have been digitized for the long term.

The stories in them are often stark and unsettling. I doubt such an institution could still be run today in the way it was then. What made the experience especially intense was that, as students, we were brought face to face with a social reality far removed from our own. The shelter revealed a world of fragility and disorder that stood in sharp contrast to the futures we imagined for ourselves.

Below is a complete overview of my contributions to those diaries. My plan is to publish the complete diaries later this year on a separate website.

I often brought my camera, tripod, and a 300-watt lamp with me during my shifts. Sometimes I would replace the 60-watt bulb in the office with my own 300 watt version, and a temporary studio would emerge. Surprisingly, many of the shelter’s visitors were willing to sit for portraits.

Schuitemakersstraat 16

At twenty-two, I began my path as a photographer in a former warehouse on Schuitemakersstraat 16 in Groningen. I first occupied the building as a squatter, and shortly afterwards was allowed to stay with the consent of the PTT, its owner at the time. After clearing out years of decay and transforming the space by hand, I built a large darkroom and exhibition area there under the name Pigeon Art Productions.

This letter, written in February 1987 to the Municipal Social Service in Groningen, was written after my social benefits were reduced on the assumption that not paying rent meant I had no housing costs. It outlines the work and expense involved in making the warehouse livable.

I lived and worked in the building until July 1989, when I left Groningen for Amsterdam. The following agreement, signed in July 1989, marked the end of my years in Groningen. In return for transferring my user rights and the investments I had made in the building, I received 10,000 guilders — the starting capital that enabled me to move to Amsterdam and start my career as a professional photographer.

Bekeuringen

Postbank afschriften

Bouncer

I worked for six years as a doorman at a well-known gay nightclub in Amsterdam’s Warmoesstraat. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the city was changing rapidly, but those early years were still full of energy. On weekend nights the street would be packed with leathermen from wall to wall, so crowded that cars could barely pass, while inside the club was just as full. It was an extraordinary time.

Only a few years later, that world had changed dramatically. The atmosphere and the crowds had largely disappeared.

At the time I was also working extensively with desktop publishing, designing and producing printed advertisements and flyers for bar and club owners in the scene. I did this on my Power Macintosh 8100 AV, with 21 inch CRT, using Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express and some 3D design modeling and rendering software.

Hoppa.com

Hoppa.com was a web directory I developed at a time when the internet was expanding faster than existing tools could meaningfully keep up with. Search engines relied on automated indexing, while human-edited directories depended on editorial teams that could no longer adequately oversee the growing scale of the web. Hoppa was my attempt to offer a different solution.

What made Hoppa distinctive was its structure. Instead of organizing websites only by subject, it classified them simultaneously by both category and location, creating a more layered and informative way of navigating online information. The idea was to help users reach relevant material with greater clarity and fewer steps.

Hoppa was also designed to give more control to webmasters themselves. Rather than waiting for search engine robots or directory editors to discover and review a site, website owners could enter and update their information directly and in real time. In that sense, Hoppa was not only a directory, but also an early attempt to make the web more self-describing.

The screenshot below shows a design for Hoppa that was never implemented. I find it interesting because it introduces a pane-based navigation which remained important in my later work. I returned to it in Toutatis, Bitpub, and Hyperworld, and eventually in the Catalog Shell module that underlies all Catalog desktop applications. The design also reflects an early use of credits, a concept that would much later reappear in a more developed form as Bitcash.

Bitpub

design documenten, visitekaartjes, promotie visuals

Etos

Hyperworld

In 2020, I ended my work for the Amsterdam City Archives. The immediate reason was a public procurement process built around an enormous list of requirements that, in my view, could not realistically be fulfilled by anyone. That judgement proved correct: very little of that programme was ever realized, and the new website they eventually received still looks as though time has stood still since their supposedly temporary transition site.

That was also the end of Bitpub, a project that had been developed specifically with archives in mind. Without my largest client and principal test case, I had little confidence that other archives would adopt the software, especially when Amsterdam itself had chosen to move away from it.

Then came Hyperworld.

In truth, all of my projects — under different names and in different forms — have pursued much the same goal: to create an integrated environment for publishing and communication, one in which information can be stored efficiently and reliably, and retrieved just as effectively. I have often found it difficult to define exactly what I was building, and this interview is a good example of that.

Below is an unedited interview in which I try to formulate what hyper.world was about. The footage has been left exactly as it was recorded, without cuts or edits, so it remains the raw conversation in full. Looking back on it three years later, I am pleased to see that I already had a fairly clear understanding of the direction I wanted to pursue.

Today, with the help of AI, it has become much easier to structure ideas and articulate them clearly. My current project, Catalog — which is in many ways a continuation of Hyperworld — is documented more fully than anything I have done before. In the past, I was so absorbed in implementation that describing the larger vision always lagged behind.

Contact

You can reach me at [email protected].