Catalogue > At random

Chasing The Dot (2021-ongoing) is an immersive rollercoaster of light and colour, a sensorial plunge into the limits of perception. Within a vast, horizonless Ganzfeld space, the audience floats through storm-like fields of colour, blazing with indirect light, 1 million lumen waves carrying vivid after-images. At the centre of their gaze, a single floating point, he foveal dot, flares to life and remains fixed, no matter where the eye turns. Premiered at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, this installation explores stroboscopic thresholds and synaesthesia. Inspired by Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, the meticulously crafted light score fragments and reassembles vision, prompting open-eye hallucinations. Viewers experience a sensory fusion, seeing with their ears and listening with their eyes. Every modulation of hue, frequency, and decay reveals the hidden architecture of consciousness, exposing its hinges and seams. The audio emerges directly from the humming, pulsing, and crackling of the powerful lights, intertwining seamlessly with the visual hallucinations. It sounds like a rhythmic, electric storm rich, textured, and hypnotically synchronized with waves of colour. Here, light becomes tangible matter. Perception transforms into choreographed dance, casting each viewer as co-author. The artwork completes itself when spectators close their eyes, creating private cinemas behind their eyelids. Chasing The Dot demonstrates how flexible our perception of reality truly is, highlighting how astonishingly fine tuned our brains are in creating consciousness.

Philip Vermeulen is a Dutch artist who explores the fundamentals of human perception. His installations are to be experienced with the whole body, while challenging the physicality of light and sound, movement and vibrations. Vermeulen experiments with a variety of elements including motion, light, sound compositions, physics, nature, and digital technology, creating hypersculptures that appeal to and trick the senses of the spectator. These kinetic works act as a catalyst, dissolving the boundaries between mind and material, creating new realms of imagination and challenging perspectives. His installations have been exhibited in museums such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (NL), Rijksmuseum Twenthe (NL), Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, NL), Museum for International Light Art (Unna, DE), iMAL (Brussels, BE), Light Art Museum (Budapest, HU), Industrial Art Biennial (Labin, HR) and ART Rotterdam (NL). Works have also been featured at media festivals, including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam, NL), Ars Electronica (Linz, AT), Festival Interstice (Caen, FR), Mapping Festival (Geneva, CH), Novas Freque?ncias (Rio de Janeiro, BR) and CTM at Halle am Berghain (Berlin, DE). In 2024, Vermeulen will present his first large-scale solo exhibition Chasing The Dot at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe.