‘It is entirely possible that behind the perception our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.’
- Albert Einstein
In his projects, Mike Ottink playfully examines sensory perception and experience. Intuitively he works on his visual language in which transitions occur from one sensory discipline to another. Initially his paintings and books evolved out of drawn graphic scores. Autonomous pictures cite ‘volatile’ installations or performances of sound and moving images. They are an alternative to sound, photo, or video recording, which in his
view, corrupt the moment of execution. These works resonate with the ideas of David Bohm on ‘Quantum Coherence’: ‘The fabric of reality is a holistic medium where everything coexists with everything else.
The so-called ‘Implicate Order’’. In tune with ideas of stretching perceptual borders, Mike Ottink designs and builds his own drawing and painting tools.
His recent works mirror the view that although
information seems volatile and entropic, it does not really get lost. It merely shows to be an essential building block in our sense of reality. Yet filtered from its morality and meaning. He works toward the philosophy that we create islands of meaning in an ever-increasing flood of random data. (And echo James Gleick’s insights on science and information history; ‘The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood’.)
Through collaborations such as Amsterdam’s VHSUHF he also creates musical instruments and techniques in the context of audio-visual performance. In an effort to evoke, experience, and express the invisible, as well as the inaudible, his works stand as the intuitive science: the alchemy of noise and the desire to find something