WE_ARE_DATA (2021-2022)

Part of the Blok series
Acrylic on paper, 21×29.7cm, engraved slate, 35x50cm

The “We Are Data” series represents an early, radical phase of the Blok investigations, predating and informing the later Kompresor works. These stark black-and-white paintings push digital compression to its absolute limits, reducing social media portraits to their barest binary essence.
Executed in acrylic on A4 paper, the forty works in this series systematically degrade digital source material to confront the paradox of identity in the age of algorithmic representation. Where Kompresor would later explore the gradations of loss, these works document the final threshold of recognition – the moment when faces cease being faces and become pure data structures.
This deliberate reduction served as both technical and psychological exercise, breaking down my own perfectionist tendencies through the ruthless simplification of form. The rigid pixel grids mirror the series’ conceptual framework: a self-imposed system designed to undermine control, where even the “failures” of misaligned blocks become necessary imperfections in the work’s digital/material hybridity.
As the foundational Nigredo manifestation within Blok, We Are Data established the alchemical approach that would later evolve through Kompresor and beyond – the methodical deconstruction of imagery as path to artistic and personal transformation. The series remains a crucial artifact of this destructive/creative threshold, where portraits stop representing people and start revealing the architectures of perception itself.
A selection of the portraits has been engraved on a slate tablet and buried in an undisclosed location as a part of Trash in the Yard exhibition.

EXHIBITION HISTORY

DUNGEON – Solo Exhibition (2024)
Curation: Bram Engelaar, Niek van der Veer
De Nijverheid, Utrecht

Trash in the Yard (2022)
Curation: Martina Raponi, Belle Phromchanya, Eden Mitsenmacher
Arboretum Trompenburg, Rotterdam

Fundacja Ocalenie – Fundraiser Exhibition (2022)
MONO, Rotterdam

Place to Be (2022)
Curation: Ine van der Horn
Galerie Pouloeuff, Naarden