Portfolio website for Laura Nitsch and İpek Hamzaoğlu, who formed the collective HEKATE Film Collective. Designed with Anna Moschioni.

“HEKATE collaborates with filmmakers, artists, writers, and activists to share the knowledge and the experience of an artist-run network.”
— hekatefilmcollective.com

https://hekatefilmcollective.com

The data scraped archive Chalgarhythms contains over 8000 Bulgarian chalga songs. It is the continuation of my thesis project ‘Chalga: The Music in Bulgarian Life’ and brings together a vast collection of chalga material such as: producers, singers, songs and relevant metadata. The bilingual archive is accessible in both Bulgarian and English and so allows for non-Bulgarian users to delve into the universe of Bulgarian chalga music.

Photography by: Céline Hurka, Roel Backaert

https://chalgarhythms.com/

AR animation viewed through the Fatschadas on the façade of the ‘Aalt Huus’, the Heimatmuseum Safien, Switzerland.

Invited by Curdin Tones to develop an animation tool for bringing this beautiful type alive. After lots of iterations, we devised a snappy and robust tool that leaves lots of space for experimentation. The typeface was also ‘revived’ specifically for the project.

Project Initiated by: Curdin Tones
AR App developed by: Jan Robert Leegte

The Python tool transforms a video and plays it in the terminal as ASCII art.
Video → Images → ASCII txt files → slides in the console

Inspired by the crack intros from the late 90s and one amazing idea for Star Wars in the terminal, I wanted a tool to transform heavy video files into low-res ASCII slides you can ‘watch’ in your console.

Supervised by: Just van Rossum
Part of: Galactic Highway (2019)

Tool developed with NodeJS and Electron to parse through text documents.

The Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds (BSPB) embarked on a project to map out every construction site inside or near a protected zone. This is part of the EU programme Natura 2000 to conserve natural habitats. I volunteered to help by creating a (NodeJS) tool to automate the task of going through thousands of Bulgarian documents and sieve through the necessary information.

Github Repo

After Edward Dżułaj worked on Panama, on which I helped, Edward and I decided to develop another version—Bogota—which will be more distorted and unpredictable.

The script affected certain parts of the letter shapes resulting in something we could not predict exactly. This fit perfectly with the concept that our friends Seojeong Youn and Selina Landis developed later for the exhibition poster.

Font Files

Supervised by: Matthias Kreutzer (OPS), Just van Rossum
Part of: The Giant Floating Eyeball—Finance & Algorithm exhibition

The project investigates how languages developed their scripts and the logic or lack of logic to construct a new writing system based on arbitrary parameters. The Latin writing system has dominated the world ever since the printing press was invented and there has been a wrong perception that it is somehow superior.

That is impossible to determine. Humans adapt to their writing systems regardless of its complexity. Thus any sequence of letters could be a writing system. My research led to me to investigate and delve further into the history and structure of real and constructed languages. Mostly happening with the help of the amazing www.omniglot.com and Frank E. Blokland.

The result was a script that can notate English and Bulgarian sounds, but the system works similarly to Mongolian. Written from top to bottom, left to right, with initial, medial and final forms, similar to Arabic.

PDF of the research

Font File

Supervised by: Frank E. Blokland

Typeface made with Python in Drawbot inspired by original sketches of wooden type “№34—Corps 180” from Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles.

The very simple geometric structure lends itself to a lot of animation opportunities and interlacing issues. It is also available as a standalone font.

Download the font

Supervised by: Frank Grießhammer

Typeface made with Python in Drawbot in the class LetterStudio at the Royal Academy of Art—The Hague.

Supervised by: Just van Rossum

After having an interview with Kylièn Bergh about his travel habits, we concluded that we have found the ‘meaning of life’. The book focusses on the conversation and how we reached this conclusion.

19 × 28 cm

Supervised by: Esther de Vries

The Giant Floating Eyeball was a project collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Finance and the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). The exhibition featured many projects on the topics of finance, predictions, algorithms and ethics.

Emily Anderson and I designed a prediction emergency kit. In case the Dutch Ministry of Finance get into financial trouble they can refer to our guide to patch the situation.

There is everything from reading the planets, impact of asteroid orbit on human economy, picking the perfect employees based on their zodiac signs. All of this must be in accordance with the astral chart of the Ministry of Finance.

Supervised by: Matthias Kreutzer (OPS), James Graves, Maarten Cornel
Part of: Bogota, Waxing In, Waning Out

The Giant Floating Eyeball was a project collaboration between the Dutch Ministry of Finance and the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK). The first issue of the newspaper featured many articles on the topics of finance, predictions, algorithms and ethics.

Emily Anderson and I devised and designed a prediction for the month of April according to the phases of the moon. When to invest and when to hold? Surprisingly many people are ‘influenced’ by the phases of the moon, consciously or not, and can slightly change their own behaviour, therefore the economy. Fortunately, it all passed and nobody held us accountable.

Supervised by: Matthias Kreutzer (OPS), James Graves, Maarten Cornel
Part of: The Giant Floating Eyeball—Finance & Algorithm exhibition

Research book for an exhibition exploring different aspects of economic development between China and Bulgaria. Two very unrelated countries at first sight but with similar past. The book holds an account of the exhibition setup plus the related visual research.

21 × 28.5 cm

Supervised by: Michel Hoogervorst

Claude Garamont designed many beautiful typefaces. In the 20th century many foundries and designers took a dab into reviving Garamond. There are very similar yet not the same. Similarly there are at least 10 version of the Brazilian song ‘Mas que nada’. It was logical to bring them together.

21 × 29 cm

Supervised by: Matthias Kreutzer (OPS)

“Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans.”
—en.wikipedia.org

By deciding not to produce any digital work, the installation resulted in a comic book that synthesises all the important people in the field and their contrasting opinions, plus some of the most important achievements of the last decade.

3 x 1.5 m

Supervised by: Hannes Bernard (SulSolSal), Kévin Bray

It seems that many things could be ‘tools for communication’. The encyclopedia is a collection of a finite number of these tools, organised in arbitrary categories.

28 × 36.5 cm

Supervised by: Laura Pappa

Short experimental film inspired by the never-realised, but drawn-out, scene ‘Across the Galaxy’ by Jean Giraud for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. Rendered in pure ASCII, the animation can cross the universe with its small size of under 20MB.

Part of: Asciimator

I have always been fascinated with the idea of Babel: people talking one language, working together, reaching for the unreachable. Luckily the book ‘De Grote Werken den Mensheid’ synthesised all of humanity’s buildings. This film wants to twist the legend and finish what they have started.

03:01

Supervised by: Esther de Vries

The film explores the connection of our digital habitat and nature. A safari through the very controlled and designed savannah of the Mac operating systems. What are the influences of our natural environment on our virtual one? How have we done that?

In collaboration with: Michelle Janssen and Fien Leeflang
Supervised by: Lauren Alexander (Foundland Collective)

Short experimental sci-fi film telling the story of a future burdened with tension, which escalates in a war. In this world some people are tired of technological progress and want to stay wherever they are. The rest do not accept this. An imminent war breaks out to bring balance to a shattered world.

05:01

Supervised by: Hannes Bernard (SulSolSal)