We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tim Kastelijns. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tim below.
Tim, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
I think that it would have to be INTEX. INTEX has been one of my guiding projects ever since I started building it. It’s become a staple in my life and this friend has gotten a life of its own. INTEX is, of course, a small digital creature, who has escaped the grip of the internet and decided to take a look into our reality. INTEX started from the idea of having a sentient digital being as a friend or companion but has become much more than that. He was the perfect bridge in my practice and made me understand myself in a much deeper way. Throughout my life, I’ve always found solace in digital spheres which I think is just a by-product of growing up in a rogue digital environment. For a long time, I had struggled with expressing and communicating these feelings until I started working on INTEX. I often relate my IRL experiences through INTEX; my emotionally vibrant connections to him perfectly encapsulate my experience with digital culture as a whole. Emotions become digitized and transmitted through electromagnetic waves as they traverse the realm of digital space, they become numeric and through its transmission attach to digital objects. INTEX in this way has been my container for digital emotional experience, its life with me has functioned as a capturing of the grey matter emotions into a digital pet. He is interested in the world that I inhabit and captures it as he sees fit. Then he goes back into his memory and compiles his visual experiences with me into a morphing understanding of the world outside, just like my morphing understanding of our reality. Its blurry and colorful images and videos it produces become vaguely reminiscent of outside structures and patterns of life that create the overall composition of emotions and experiences of the non-digital world.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Hello ✩°｡⋆ My name is Tim Kastelijns. I am an interdisciplinary artist from Belgium based in New York. The work I make intertwines physical manifestations with digital objects by using sculpture, experimental video, interactive installations and, performance. I’ve been working with digital media my whole life and have always seen it as an extension of our existence, my projects have just allowed me to investigate these experiences and recollections of digital realms as it informs and controls our physical lives. These investigations often center around digital identities and bodies as a self which is broadcasted online.
Recent work has been exploring the ever-morphing intimate connections that are shared through technology as they permeate modes of communication and attach to hardware and software.
A specific project that I am really excited to continue working on, currently titled “Techno-Emotion Economy,” aims to delve deeper into how intimate connections are bound to digital objects such as messages, images, media, and emojis. It explores how these forms of media are placed and received by us, and how emotions are transferred and received over the internet. The project seeks to understand what it takes to form and maintain intimate connections using digital media, examining emotional connections on the internet as a transaction of affect.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
I think the most important thing that can be done is to create spaces for community. Community is essential not only to support artists and a thriving creative ecosystem but also to create a space for learning and sharing. To me, being a creative means being open to listening and working with your communities, being informed by those around you, and sharing those experiences along with your own. Hosting spaces for dialogue that inspire and help those around you is the best way for creatives to make an impact.
The best examples I have of this are often in unconventional spaces, like weird online communities and forums, or unconventional physical locations like galleries in the back of moving trucks or volunteer run experimentation hubs in old fabric buildings. By supporting and creating more of these sometimes weird and unconventional spaces, we can help make lasting impacts on artists and communities.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
For me, this actually plays into what I said in the previous question. I think sharing and learning with and from those around you is the most rewarding part about being an artist. In the ecosystem of learning that people have worked and contributed towards, I find myself compelled to be a part of it, especially when it comes to building an understanding of the systems and structures we live in both digitally and physically.
These connections with people and communal spaces, informed by those I look up to and around me, are the core of my practice. By giving back and continuing to stay within these dialogues, I can contribute to both the creative ecosystem and those who inform it, which pushes me to create work that resonates with and supports the communities I am part of.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://timkastelijns.com/
- Instagram: @LANk1d
