IDLE

IDLE is a real-time generative audiovisual installation and performance that ran continuously for six hours at De Lindenberg in Nijmegen. In computing, an idle process is not an absence of activity but a baseline the system maintains while nothing is demanded of it. IDLE takes this condition as its subject and its method.

Its structures are not composed in advance. They emerge from a persistent system in which each state is derived from the one preceding it, so nothing resets and nothing repeats. The visual language draws on early computing: low resolution, a restricted palette, discrete grids. Change occurs slowly, by gradual modulation rather than event, and the work sustains itself, as an idle process does, whether or not it is being watched. I built the system from scratch in JavaScript and Web Audio, generating image and sound in real time on a browser, projected on a theater screen.

Throughout the evening I moved through the building, observing, listening and recording, and fed fragments of the night into the system by hand through a custom control panel: images, sound and text. IDLE holds an imperfect memory of what it is given. Material I entered early could resurface hours later in altered form, or not at all, and everything that reached the system had already passed through my attention. By the end of the night the work looked nothing like it had at the start.

IDLE was commissioned by Kunstnacht 2026 and premiered on 19 September in the Steigerzaal at De Lindenberg, Nijmegen.