Douwe Mulder

Beeswax crayons on paper

Crumpled paper from the waste paper container moved while scanning and printing during break at work.

Years ago I found a DVD full of scratches on the street: Seven years in Tibet. I made an etching from this DVD, scanned the etching and printed that scan. Years later, when my parents-in-law gave me a discarded fax machine to experiment with, beautiful moiré patterns emerged when I copied that print with the fax. When the sheet feeder picked up the print and I partially pulled it out, beautiful shapes emerged that I could manipulate like a woodworker on a lathe. It then turned out that only that one printout with that one type of KPN fax machine gave this result.

Exhibition view 1

Exhibition view 2

For the past months I have been making prints of consumer electronics by inking them, putting paper on the inked surfaces and making the prints. The series consist of the prints of items such as refrigerators, TV's, printers and computers and subwoofers. The above image is from my studio as I was working on the prints that are now being exhibited at the HIT festival at the Haugesund museum in Norway. I am very happy the jury gave me an honourable mention and thinks I represent a ‘’...fascinating conceptual approach to relief printing. Mulder shows us an unsentimental approach to printing in his series Readymade Reliefs, in which he presents prints of the undersides of mass-produced objects such as refrigerators and loudspeakers. The prints result in abstract linear patterns that contain both critical distance and a humorous embrace of our everyday technology.” See https://www.hitfestival.no/english

Recently I was commissioned to create prints for a poster museum to-be (Gatans rum) in Söderhamn, Sweden. For this commission I was inspired by the analogue approach to print making that many poster makers had before the rise of photo editing software. I firstly inked a modem, a CD, a VHS tape, a Raspberry Pi and a camera and then transferred these onto paper. Secondly I scanned the resulting prints and enlarged them to make a series of five highly detailed readymade relief prints.

A slide show of images of broken flat screen tv’s. In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

The title of this work mimics typical flat screen names. The work exists of a mini DV tape, that in an act of resistance against being outdated attempts to be high-tech once more by becoming a huge 445 inch screen. In the process memories of loved ones are destroyed. In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

This edition was designed to be adaptable to any site and size of choice and included instructions on how to install it. The edition was made for and funded by Mossans art market, 2017. In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

The Roman torso of a faun has been 3D modelled to encompass a bottle cap, a slit for images and a tripod screw. In this condition the broken faun brings together obsolete objects into a queer, new existence.

Many encounters with artworks happen through screens but all screens render a different result, even with the same image, basically creating endless versions of the same painting. Who has seen this work in real life? And does that still matter? In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

This work exists of a radio with a missing antenna that we found in a trash container. We enhanced its reception through an old fence we found elsewhere and which was now functioning as an antenna. During the exhibition the radio was tuned to a local radio station, playing on low volume. In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

A DVD player seems to realize it is fast becoming obsolete and tries to communicate its grief by playing the silent, black and white performance film I’m too said to tell you (1971, 3:34 min) by artist Bas Jan Ader. In the film the artist is shown in anguish, crying, unable to utter a word. Though the DVD player is not connected to a television screen that mediates the film, it manages to use reference as a form of expression for its melancholy. In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

For this work I appropriated a slick technique often used for making commercial signs, laser engraved plexiglass with LED lights, but did so in a cheap and DIY way. Instead of having to stick to a fixed logo, style or end result we took the freedom to scratch and hammer, to drag and nail and to crack and bend. In collaboration with artists Loes Degener and Jonas Gazell.

Sketch commissioned by the Critical Habitats course at the Royal Institute of Art. In the context of the redevelopment of the Slussen area in Stockholm the statue of King Karl XIV on horseback has been removed. One of the most often reoccurring plans is to place the statue somewhere on the square (Ryssgården) in front of the Stockholm City Museum once the redevelopments are finished. We believe that a mere replacement of the statue would be a example of the negation of historicity in public space and the neutralization of the present by denying how past inequalities are still shaping and neutralizing power relations in the present. We therefore made a proposal to instigate a debate about the replacement of the statue. What we propose is to place the statue of the first ruler of the House of Bernadotte upside down at Ryssgården at the location where the staircase towards Stadsmuseets courtyard opens up. We propose to do so in such a way that the statues pedestal protrudes from Ryssgården and the equestrian statue itself protrudes from the ceiling of Stadsmuseets new exhibition hall below. On Ryssgården we would place a staircase onto the side of the pedestal, enabling people to climb the pedestal offering them simultaneously a speakers corner and a view that was formally reserved for kings on horseback. Inside the new exhibition hall the hanging statue would hopefully function as a permanent tool for reflection by confronting visitors with alternative narratives.

The work View from my room the day after consists of a photo I took from my room in Amsterdam and subsequently printed and cut up in small stripes to be able to straighten the rainbow, reflecting a radical insight I had. As shown in Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Many museums and cultural institutions worldwide are free of charge. At some of these institutions you do not even have to get a free entrance ticket. Still the funding and perceived success of these museums partially depends on their visitor numbers. How do these museums calculate these numbers? The Bildmuseet in Umeå uses a system of sensors to do so. At the opening of the exhibition at Bildmuseet (Umeå, Sweden) we launched our company Make your visit count! Based on the business model of websites that sell YouTube views, Facebook likes, Twitter followers our company sells museum visitors. By simply hiring people to trigger the visitor counting sensors an x number of times our company makes the visitor numbers go up. As part of our product Make your visit count! also enables visitors to contribute to the success of the museum through a video that shows the way the museum building automatically calculates its visitor numbers. Three video stills on the left and an image of the company launch on the right of the page. In collaboration with Loes Degener.

The website newmessages.net automatically creates infinite combinations of random images and random text it finds on the web. In doing so the website functions like a digital subconscious, reflecting everything we ever put online. The images it produces are dreamscapes of commodities, brand names, logos, corporate sigils, slogans, snapshots of personal notes, stock photography, amateur photography and web­terminology. In collaboration with Loes Degener and Emile den Tex.

This installation connects a router to the internet through objects found on site, thus creating a wifi network in the exhibition space. Visitors can ‘see’ the internet pass through the installation by using the wireless network on their own smart phones or tablets. The eight colourful cables from inside a cut­up ethernet cable form a conductive drawing on the floor. Installation as shown at Künstlerhaus Thurn & Taxis in Bregenz, Austria.

Videostill of the youtube firework-review of ‘Viking walhalla of the slain’. Audio of the video with abundant natural sounds (birds, wind, insects) and the firework sounds.

The building of the Russian National Centre for Contemporary Art in Samara, a former Soviet factory kitchen, has a strong historical connotation: from above it shows the symbol of a hammer and sickle. By means of a choreography of gestures, objects, songs and speech we addressed the history of the building as a Soviet factory kitchen and its future use as a museum for contemporary art. through a Documented with a drone camera.

Performance with Loes Degener at HUMlab X, the experimental humanities laboratory at the arts campus of Umeå University. The performance was the result of a research project into the representation of ancient Roman spectacle in contemporary mass media screened productions. We used material, spoken and screened references to relate to the matter: a floor screen, a popcorn machine, a MacBook Pro that we sacrificed, food, blood, academic sources and series and games about Roman spectacle. How could an educational context address these historical spectacles in a more multi sensory way?

File format sculpture (Helvetica font).

In 2011 I took a photo of the sun. On sizeofthesun.com I enlarged the photo to be as big as the sun’s surface area: six trillion eighty-eight billion square kilometres. Every single pixel of this 2 megapixel photo now covers an area the size of India.