Sander Veenhof

With an IT career that started in the era of the commodore 64 and a diploma in ‘unstable media’, obtained at the Gerrit Rietveld academy, virtually no digital domain holds any secrets from Sander Veenhof. And yet he still eagerly searches for the unknown, something that is not yet there. The fact that the digital has become so intertwined with the physical domain is a gift to him. Living in a programmable world has fascinated him since 2009, when he first started working with the then somewhat ramshackle augmented reality technology.

Nowadays he walks around with AR glasses and takes a look at a future world in which we all walk around in our own (or someone else’s) semi-digital world. What then happens between people, that is what many of Veenhof’s explorations are about. But the relationship between maker and audience is also part of his hands-on research. For participants in “Meet Your Stranger” at the IFFR, the script was completely fixed. But during “If This Then I” workshops at STRP, groups of visitors had to program themselves and their mutual interactions. In recent Veenhof projects, participants do not even know they are participants.

Research question
During the Vrijplaats, Sander will look for forms, ingredients and requirements that make it possible to create interactive AR environments in which people can come together without a supervisor or a fixed storyline in control.