RICHARD VIJGEN
four installations

THROUGH ARTIFICIAL EYES
When a computer looks at the world, what does it “see”? This installation lets the audience look at 558 episodes of VPRO Tegenlicht (Dutch Future Affairs Documentary series) through the eyes of a computer vision Neural Network. The installation employs an object detection algorithm that has been trained on Imagenet data across three categories; people, artefacts and natural objects. These categories are the "eyes" through which the algorithm observes the archive.

HERTZIAN LANDSCAPES
Hertzian Landscapes is a live visualization of the radio spectrum. Unlike visible light, waves in the radio spectrum cannot be perceived by us directly yet this space is teeming with human activity. Hertzian Landscapes employs a digital receiver to scan large swaths of radio spectrum in near real-time and visualizes thousands of signals into a panoramic electromagnetic landscape. Users can zoom in to specific frequencies by positioning themselves in front of the panorama as if controlling a radio tuner with their body, giving them a sense of walking through the spectrum. From radio broadcasts to weather satellites and from medical implants to aeronautical navigation, the radio spectrum is divided into hundreds of designated slices each tied to a specific application. Based on a localized frequency database that describes these slices, signals are annotated to provide information about their theoretical type and application.

ARCHITECTURE OF RADIO
The infosphere relies on an intricate network of signals, wired and wireless, that support it. We are completely surrounded by an invisible system of data cables and radio signals from access points, cell towers and overhead satellites. Our digital lives depend on these very physical systems for communication, observation and navigation. The Architecture of Radio is a site-specific iPad application that visualizes this network of networks by reversing the ambient nature of the infosphere; hiding the visible while revealing the invisible technological landscape we interact with through our devices. The architecture of radio app is a realtime, location based visualization of cell towers, wifi routers, communication, navigation and observation satellites and their signals.

THE DELETED CITY 3.1
The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a home-page. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built home-pages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world at Geocities, a free web-hosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free "piece of land" to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neighbourhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighbourhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.