Making Waves

The Delft Waves series stands within a Dutch mentality that sees the world as something that can be made, engineered, and shaped. We call it de maakbare wereld—the makeable world—a phrase that captures how profoundly human effort has defined our environment here in the Netherlands.

The seascape has always held a special place in our visual culture, from the maritime realism of the Golden Age to the abstract rhythms of Piet Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean. I’ve long admired how Mondrian sought to represent the movement and force of the sea using only a few black lines on a white ground—just pure structure and motion. His bird’s-eye view gave him a way to express energy and direction through abstraction. Pier and Ocean is a visual theory of waves, reduced to their essential dynamics.

With the Delft Waves series, I’ve created my own version of Pier and Ocean. It follows the same impulse, but through a completely different approach. I don’t use paint or brush. I use the sea itself—or rather, a simulation of its behavior, governed by the logic of computer modeling. The project revolves around a software tool called “Delft Waves,” developed by Deltares, the Dutch institute for applied water research. Deltares embodies that Dutch belief in controlling the sea through knowledge, structure, and design. Where they once built enormous physical test sites—scaled models of harbors and coastlines—they now model everything digitally.

I wanted to turn this scientific tool toward a purely artistic aim. In each iteration of the Delft Waves series, I simulate the behavior of waves over a ten-square-kilometer stretch of the North Sea, just off the coast of Scheveningen. Into that virtual sea, a configuration of underwater barriers is placed. These structures act as compositional elements. As the waves move and interact with these elements, the software calculates their changing heights under various weather conditions. The results are rendered in color: the visual outcome of natural forces processed through code.

The series consists of twelve panels. Eleven depict wave behavior under real, historically documented weather scenarios—from absolute calm to hurricane-level storms. Each one is modeled according to actual probability and environmental effect. But the twelfth is different. I asked Deltares to simulate an imaginary storm—something beyond any historical precedent. The program executed the request without hesitation: a storm so extreme it would flood half the country. Yet the image is strangely elegant—its beauty at odds with the scale of the disaster it describes.

What I find most compelling about Delft Waves is the merging of scientific and artistic reasoning. I’m not trying to explain the sea, and I’m not aiming for expressive self-revelation either. Instead, I’m working in that curious zone where scientific research is no longer strictly functional, and artistic practice becomes procedural. I chose to print the works on forex—an industrial PVC more commonly used in advertising displays—precisely because it ties the project back to the realm of public communication and scientific demonstration. It suits the work’s origins and its method: rigorous, technical, and yet open to aesthetic wonder.

For all its complexity, Delft Waves is still, at heart, a series of seascapes—a reflection of a nation's relationship with water.