The camera— that profoundly liberal invention— whispers:
I’m ready for anything. Give me chemicals, give me a little light, give me time and no shaking, and I will be done.
A pocket-sized Enlightenment, believing every world is reachable, every surface printable, every body open to possibility.
And now generative machines produce punctum— yes, Barthes’ punctum— the involuntary meaning that slips through the cracks of intention. Not planned by the author, nor by the algorithm, but arriving later, after you’ve slept on it, after the dopamine subsides. Fast food for intellectual minds, rewarding at first bite, quickly stale. You return in the morning and mutter: It was not that great after all.
Style appears. Style overload. Those who lack craft run toward it— high, abstract, fast— while you work the old way, learning the hand, the long path, refusing to choose sides.
Spend time with it— real duration— and you’ll see how expensive time has become. Only unproductive duration is free. Yet we abandoned that when we entered the cinema, trading mobility for the promise of instant return. No one waits for tomorrow in a theater. In a museum, though— time’s ticking clock can’t be heard. There we look forward to looking back.
And somewhere in this, the black box— practical, yes, but also a symptom of our incapacity to coexist. The dark room becomes a social problem, a refusal of interference, a denial of shared space.
Everything becomes a question of time, of how little we have left, of how duration is mined like ore.
Growing old treated as disease, dementia as enemy, while software dreams of pure disembodiment— young, innocent, clean.
And yet— beneath all this— you remind us: we are bifocal, split, never individuals. We are believers, especially visually.
The camera says: I’m ready for anything.
But the eye says: I am not a camera.
And the brain says: I choose no side.
And the forest says: Take your time.
And the weak image whispers from the periphery: Here is the non-event— stay long enough, and you may hear it breathe.
I first edited the full transcript from the presentation, and then OCR scanned text ‘The Time Spent” from the BIRDSONG book. Then I made a personal selection of the sentences that resonated with me. Then I gave that to ChatGPT and asked it to condense all this into a 1000-word poem, then 500 words, then 100 words. Then again, I made a personal selection of the best GPT snippets. And further edited them to my personal (un)taste.
Sometimes, the silence of the sacred and the touch of chance awaken something deep within.
This is what happened to me when I once again found myself confused by beauty, when visiting the Stefan Vanfleteren exhibition “Transcripts of a Sea” in the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent.
“In 2020, photographer Stephan Vanfleteren embarked on a challenging project that culminates in the exhibition Stephan Vanfleteren. Transcripts of a Sea at the MSK Ghent, during autumn and winter 2025. The exhibition is the conclusion of a long quest, not only into the depths of a body of water, but also into the essence of artistry – Vanfleteren’s answer to what complete artistic freedom can mean.”
You can find good-quality pictures on Stefan Vanfleteren’s website. That page also includes some paragraphs about Vanfleteren’s practice and his approach to this project. But the experience in the museum is way superior.
First, there is the silence. When you close the door between the entrance hall and the exhibition space, the noise of the city is cancelled, and it feels like you are entering a sacred space. The silence also slows you down. Your steps are more measured, respectful. Your breathing adapts.
Second, there are the artworks. Huge, super high-quality photographs of the North Sea. Most black and white. They radiate the same sacredness as the paintings of Gerhard Richter. They incentivize introspection. The artworks are positioned in conversation with actual sea paintings of famous painters. The difference between painting and photography blurs completely.
I begin to wonder, leaning in to scan some of the photographs up close. It feels as if I’m standing in the sea. It’s something I have done before, with paintings, sculptures, and bodies. This close-by scanning is a different eye-set that adds a new aspect to my artistic practice. Here is a “scan” of one of the paintings…
Third, there are the information panels—their texts are as beautiful and inspiring as the paintings themselves.
Here is an example of the panel poetry:
“The North Sea is not azure blue, but rather a medley of grey, green, and brown hues, shifting with the mood of the weather. Through those muted, muddied, and sullied reflections, the white foam crashes in the surf – boiling with fury or dripping with desire between land and water. Even the tallest wave eventually lands flat on its stomach. The surf as a postscript of a long journey.“
“At first, I sought to capture the sea as faithfully as possible. But gradually, I realized it could never be truly reproduced. It is precisely the art of letting go that has led to fascinating and challenging results. Chance, failure, and experiment became ever more important. embraced the unexpected quirks of my camera: motion blur, miscalculations in focus distance, and unforeseen colour casts.“
“The absolute freedom found in a confused autofocus, incorrect exposure, or unintended framing became a blessing. And I allowed the scratches, mist, droplets, and salt stains on the camera’s protective glass to remain, trusting in the unexpected. In fact, I chased my own delightful failure.“
I am reminded by this Gerhard Richter quote:
When I walk out, I am overwhelmed by the sheer effort and attention to detail it took the artist to land an exhibition like this. Just watch the logbooks at the end of the expo.
Picture by author
There is also a film screening of “The Tide Will Bring You Home” by Basile Rabaey, who followed Vanfleteren during his five-year sea expedition. But the small film Black Box was too crowded to make this a joyful experience. So, I skipped that, hoping the film will appear sooner or later on the Internet.
Basile Rabaey
A tapestry of slowness, silence, and chance. “Transcripts of a Sea” runs till 4 January 2026 at the MSK in Ghent.
I went to the premiere exhibition of David Claerbout’s The Woodcarver and the Forest at the Castle of Gaasbeek. I went by bike, for me, a two-hour ride each way, on a warm sunny day through the Pajottenland, the region southwest of Brussels where I spent the first 25 years of my life. Cycling up and down its rolling hills stirred deep emotions and memories of my youth. This is the land of Bruegel, of Geuze and Lambic beer, of Remco Evenepoel. It is also, unmistakably, my land.
Before arriving at the castle, visitors walk about 15 minutes from the entrance through a carefully tended, forest-like domain. The path itself already feels like part of the experience, drawing you gradually into a slower, quieter, almost meditative state.
A top-level garden modelled on castle gardens from the 18th and 19th centuries. A strong example of living cultural heritage. Take a stroll through this magnificent Garden of Eden, with the old-model fruit repository, the beehives, and a wonderful view of Gaasbeek Castle and the Pajottenland.
I lingered in the garden for some time, sitting on a bench and gazing at another bench across the way, the two connected by a loofgang—a leafy tunnel formed by pear trees. I simply sat in silence, doing nothing. Eventually, I walked through the shaded passage to the other side, before making my way to the castle. In hindsight, the video I captured carries an unintended sense of suspense.
Once inside the castle, visitors are guided along a signposted route. Along the way, I captured this video of sunlight filtering through stained glass, casting vibrant patterns onto the wooden, carpeted floor.
The Claerbout installation awaits at the very end, rising three stories high beneath the roof.
From the brochure:
This work is Claerbout’s latest creation and presents itself as an intimate portrait of a reclusive young man. Do you feel the meditative effect of the slow, repetitive movements and their sound?
Specific audiovisual stimuli – such as soft sounds or rhythmic movements – can evoke feelings of relaxation and inner calm. This phenomenon is known as ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) and forms the foundation of this work
The Woodcarver and the Forest is an open film, which is completed using generative artificial intelligence. As a spectator, our experience also remains open and unfinished, partly due to the long duration of the work.
This reveals the dual nature of the film: an interplay between pleasure and sorrow, beauty and destruction.
“I want people to keep watching for hours or at least to settle into that idea of extended time, knowing that they will never be able to see everything.”
Still from Claerbout’s video installation – picture by @petervan
I sat in there for more than one hour. It put me in some state of limbo about my own work and where I want to go next. Following Google’s Gemini AI, it means “to be in an uncertain, undecided, or forgotten state where nothing can progress or be resolved, similar to being caught between two stages or places.”
I am a big fan of David Claerbout. See previous entries on this blog here. The Woodcarver gave me the chance to revisit some of Claerbout’s earlier works and conversations, while also helping me reconnect with the artistic drive within myself.
Here is a more recent talk by David Claerbout
Some interesting quotes
Change your mind-set ànd your eye-set, from inquisitive to open-ended
The Brain does not choose sides; it does not know how to
And around minute 18, he gets into a very interesting schema of “former” AI technologies. He really got me when he says “the camera is a profoundly liberal invention” and later “around the 2000s, we start to think of visual culture as a assemblage, the coordinate system is back, and a coordinate system knows exactly where you are it has exact points in space it can find you back and instead of a liberal body in a world that could be anything anywhere it changes into a pinpointing in a space that so we we get a gathering of coordinates and we’re no longer free”
In closing, he shares reflections on recent readings that explore AI, vision, and the language of thought.
After watching the video, I visited the University of Ghent library—you can get a visitor’s pass as a non-student for €15 per year, granting access to all of the university’s libraries! There, I picked up the book The Time That Remains, a title that resonated with me on two levels: first, the concept of time, so ever-present in Claerbout’s work; and second, the realization that I am approaching my seventieth birthday, prompting me to reflect increasingly on the time I have left and how I want to spend it—especially in my artistic practice, if I can even call my tinkering that.
From the intro:
This publication marks the welcome collaboration between internationally acclaimed Belgian artist David Claerbout and two European institutions: Wiels, Brussels and Parasol unit, in London. The publication accompanies Claerbout’s exhibition opening at Parasol unit, on 30 May 2012; but it also provides a highly appreciated documentation for Wiels, which held a solo exhibition of Claerbout’s work, The Time that Remains, in 2011.
It’s from 2012, but the content is, well, timeless.
Some quotes/insights from that book.
“I think the recent proliferation of black boxes for film and video-art is not just a practical solution to a problem of sound and light interference, but also reflects an incapability to coexist. This can become apparent in large group exhibitions, where media installations appear strong when they are shown by themselves in a small or large dark space, but they easily collapse when shown in a social space where people move about and interact. The black box is a social phenomenon, for me it is a problem.” Ulrichs, David, ‘David Claerbout. Q/A, in: Modern Painters, May 2011, pp. 64-66
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“Time is invested into something that will prove to be valuable and productive. By consequence duration’ becomes increasingly expensive. But duration can only be free if it is unproductive.”
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“Cinema, YouTube and film-festivals demand the prolonged physical immobility of the viewer. Music, exhibitions or a walk in the park don’t.“
My sense of being in limbo stems from a hesitation: to move further into abstraction rather than figuration, toward longer forms rather than shorter ones, toward meditative sound and video landscapes rather than straightforward documentary. It also comes from my struggle to resist the banality of social media—where time is squandered on addictive, bite-sized fragments of content that ultimately feel useless.
I believe I know the answer, yet I dare not leap just yet.
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered by accident a way to get myself in a zen-state of total peace and relaxation. Not that I feel super hectic or nervous, or something like that. Not that I need it. Not that I was in search for it. I just stumbled upon it and I really liked it.
It is the very simple – highly repetitive – practice of drawing many many little bricks, black ink on white paper. I am doing this when I am completely alone in my studio, with some repetitive music in the background (see later), and the sound of a ticking clock.
The only other things I hear/notice is the sound of the pen softly scratching the paper, the sound of my breath, a motorcycle or car or plane passing by in a soft distance, a door opening/closing somewhere in the house, sometimes a dog barking, or a dove crying.
“As in Zen, the trick is to become one with the activity, to engage in it fully, to see and appreciate all details–be it hiking in the woods, penning an essay, or tightening the chain on a motorcycle.”
It made me think about the repetive art of Roman Opalka who spent a big part of his life drawing numbers from one to infinity.
Roman Opalka by Lothar Wolleh – Sep 2002
But I don’t talk nor record my words while drawing my bricks. I am silent. And listen to repetitive soundscapes. I was looking for some “non-intrusive music”, music without meaning, music without noise, something that did not distract from the content (aka the bricks), but was rather amplifying it. I tried several ambients from Brian Eno, or songs from Robert Frip’s Music for Quiet Moments series and many more.
Until I discovered this AI-auto-generated music library by @alex_bainter.
The “song” that I have used most so far is called “Lullaby”.
Ann Pendleton-Jullian pointed me in the direction of Lu Qing’s work. Ly Qing is the spouse of Ai Weiwei, but she is always in background, not looking for press attention. When browsing her work, I stumbled upon this repetitive work, acrylic blocks on a silk roll of about 20 meters long and 83 cm wide.
This ink painting on a bolt of silk is partially unrolled and drapes over a table. Small dark-grey squares in acrylic paint almost fill the fabric and create a grid. Departing from her early abstract oil paintings, beginning in 2000, Lu Qing has painted on a twenty-five-metre bolt of silk that she buys each year. Small geometric shapes are painstakingly painted on the fabric over the course of the year. Regardless of how much of the cloth is painted, Lu considers the painting complete at the end of the year and begins with a new bolt the next year. The varying shades of dark grey in the work indicate changes in Lu’s emotional state and in the pressure she exerted, and also recall the different shades of black in traditional Chinese painting. The work is a meditative practice in which the process is valued over the end product, and it functions as an abstract record of emotion and time. (from https://collections.mplus.org.hk/en/objects/untitled-2012687)
I ran to my attic, found a roll of cheap white paper of 1 meter wide and 5 meter long, and started drawing. What you see in the video above are the first 5,000 bricks of a “long” work.
Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network pointed out that my work was multilayered, with the layers being Peace, Mind Wandering, Kairos, Repetitive work, Musical memory anchors.
In my opinion, it also has layers of different types of attention.
Attention to the drawing itself: getting the pattern right, working without no or a minimum of grid/supporting lines, drawing “perfect” bricks, made in one line-flow, for each of them.
Attention to the mind-wandering: making small (at times only mental) notes, reflections about a project, my daughter, my spouse etc.
It’s useless, I know. But it brings me in contact with an unexplored part of myself. It brings me in a Zen state, a state of deep calm and happiness. I am literately and metaphorically losing my time, my-self. Or am I re-finding my-self?
Doing something. Doing the work. Getting lost. In time and space that is. Being one with my practice: it is more important than end product.
This is episode-8 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read a chapter of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds. As this chapter is the “Afterwords” section of the book, this is also the last episode in the Robert Poynton series. Maybe other calm conversations follow. Who knows?
Here are Josie’s three sentences:
What I couldn’t anticipate were the unplanned pauses that would occur along the way
If anything, rather than delay things, the time-out accelerated them.
Too much pause and nothing gets done.
And here are my three sentences:
Rehearse ideas with different people
Carlo Rovelli’s book, The Order of Time
That long gestation period meant that once I started I was able to get going quickly
This is episode-7 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read chapter-7 of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds.
Chapter-7 is about Time for Pause
Here are Josie’s three sentences:
A longer pause…gives the intelligent unconscious – what Claxton calls the ‘undermind’ – a chance to have a crack at a problem, bringing a more associative, creative quality of thinking to bear.
In any natural system, there is always ‘redundancy’ or ‘requisite variety’ built in; stuff that isn’t useful yet, but could be one dayf relying on just one.
The decision to start properly came in a pause.
And here are my three sentences:
Our fulfilment does not derive from being as efficient as possible
It (pause) gives you the chance to follow your mood, not the schedule
Instead of trying to cram more in, you focus on getting more out
We covered a wide range of topics from redundancy, richness of experiences in a complex world, we are not machines, beautiful change, elegant movements, cybernetics, requisite variety,…
…the “undermind”, leaving space open for sacred moments, commitment, to start doing, at the right time, after the right pause, after reading all the signals.
We also discussed how efficiency kills imagination, and why we should go into the t-shirt business 😉
This is episode-6 of the calm conversation with Josie Gibson from The Catalyst Network, inspired by Robert Poynton’s book “Pause – You are not a To-Do list“. The approach is simple: we both read chapter-6 of the book and highlight three sentences, and mark the words that resonate most. These sentences and words are the triggers for a very slow-paced conversation on whatever comes our way. No tricks, no gimmicks, just a gentle and calm wandering and meandering of minds.
Chapter-6 is about Tools (of Pause)
Here are Josie’s three sentences:
He uses differently coloured Google calendars where the colours represent how each kind of time feels to him..
It is more powerful if you are able to think about multiple layers, and build a set of practices that weave together the different ‘pace layers’ of your life instead of relying on just one.
Noone has a life so unrelenting that it is impossible to pause.
And here are my three sentences:
‘Exhale time’ is when he is teaching, writing or delivering work for clients. ‘Inhale time’ is when he is reading, studying, walking or spending time with people he just finds interesting
Notice what that experience is. If it was interesting, or useful, or valuable, or thought-provoking, or puzzling, or curious, or fun, or engaging in any way at all, do it some more. If not, try something else.
Instead of trying to manage your time, pay more attention to finding your rhythm
We covered a wide range of topics from responsible imagination, slower time, golden time, smell time, sound time, synesthesia,…
…colors of the months, layers, weaving, fabric, calendar, interstitials, 3D, 4D, rhythm in context, two people dancing the tango, wondering with intent, accountability for creative health, and undefended presence (mentioned in the Coaching Summit 2020 video below).
We even talked about the South-Australian Tjuringa, a Dream Stones, and artist Roman Polanka’s visualization of time.
Other links mentioned in this podcast:
The book Design Unbound (some free chapters for download here)
Petervan Studios 