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The drawings I make are based on the principle of self-organisation. A term derived from network theory. Intuitively I have found a procedure in which the process of drawing is self-organising. When I first made this kind of drawings, I knew little about phenomena such as self-organisation, complexity or emergence. That changed four years ago, when I started reading scientific literature about these topics in preparation for two residencies. Also because of conversations I had with philosopher Eric Schliesser about self-regulation and a lecture by physicist Erik Verlinde about emergence, I understood that an emergent phenomenon occurs during my drawing process. From that moment on I started to delve into this subject. It has led to a turnaround in my work, in which processes with emergent properties are now central.

Emergence means: appearing spontaneously. Emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviours which emerge only when the parts interact. It is a phenomenon that occurs frequently in nature. For example, a flock of birds in the sky showing the most fantastic shapes, a colony of ants collectively creating the most stunning building structures, or thousands of fireflies that blink in perfect synchronisation. This is swarming behaviour which is not much different from how atoms and small particles collectively behave. Colour, for example, is also an emergent phenomenon: atoms have no colour, colour only appears when a large number of atoms are in a certain arrangement. Culture can also be regarded as an emergent phenomenon, just like artificial intelligence, to name a few examples. By reading science books on physics and biology among others, I try to understand how emergent processes work, in order to be able to feel how everything is connected; how countless elements in a hidden order form reality; how chance and increasing complexity can lead to complex adaptive systems which lead to new phenomena, such as life and consciousness.