Indifferent Universe (study)
The idea for the Indifferent Universe series started with my first look through a high-power telescope. Together with a friend we drove to the countryside far away from any city lights and set up the entire device in the pitch-blackness of a winter night. After a bit of fiddling we were able to focus on Jupiter and for the first time in my life the enormity of space stunned me. Seeing planets, stars and nebulae with your own eyes is a totally different experience than watching it online. I suddenly remembered a quote from Stanley Kubrick: "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.", and I knew I had to create work that resembles this feeling of insignificance.
A few weeks later, Chris van Diemen -who founded Taken by Storm, an awesome design agency in Rotterdam- called asking me if I could shoot the cover of CRISP magazine using colourful explosions. After some serious experimentation we succeeded beautifully and I found the means to expand upon this technique capturing these clouds of paint pigment launched by both manually throwing them or launching it through a special air canon I built for this purpose.
