A single sculpture is limited to inhabiting only one place in space, which led me to working with installations as a medium instead. A multitude of sculptures, drawings, paintings, even smell. Their order of appearance taken into consideration, as the visitor encounters them entering the space. Working together through their placement in space to evoke one or multiple experiences. Making the visitor able to navigate the work itself and by their presence become part of the work.

Art Rotterdam - paintings and sculptures

With industrial scent machines, I infected Art Brussels in 2016 with Plague. Placed inside a closed off fumigation tent that resembled a covered to-be-revealed sculpture, they dispersed their different smells onto an unknowing public, their aerosols landing on them, as they carried them further through Art Brussels and onto their day. Four different aromas alternated to subconsciously evoke nostalgia (cola candy flavour), the unknown (spaceship), the alluring (the perfume of an apparel store) and the appalling (airplane crash).

"König focuses on the arena of fear that is often connected to the unknown and the worry about the dangers that lay ahead. Some of the defining strands of fear that König explored connect to the disquiet and unidentified danger of radiation and virus infections. While our sensory receptors are unable to help us establish its extensive harm, it is often long term or life threatening."

Nest The Hague source

Plague - Art Brussels

From there I started to grow an interest in closing the work off entirely — making the visitor long for an entrance rather than granting one. There is something inside us that makes us walk over the next hill, fuelled by the promise that we can reward ourselves with the view from there. Not much different from how we can keep scrolling on our devices, in search of the next satisfying insight or perspective.

So I started creating works from this notion, and for Unfair I installed an interrogation room. Inside this work, called Bystander, I created actual clouds that gently touched a floating rectangle as they moved by. Red and green wingtip lights of an airplane blinked inside, lighting up the clouds, as a rumbling sound of an airplane was audible. On the floating rectangle, in a 16:9 format, only subtitles appeared: interrogation questions of airport customs taken from a popular reality TV series. The answers of the interrogated were left blank, but the timing was kept. The room could not be entered.

Bystander - Unfair Amsterdam

A smell was dispersed from the room, together with the clouds that could be seen leaking through an air vent, luring people towards the mirror. It could be viewed through a one-way mirror, but only when viewers held their hands between the glass and their eyes, closing off any reflection. A work made to be easily missed.

Bystander - Unfair Amsterdam

My interest in creating works as experiences of the body longing for space grew. I wanted to build upon my practice and deepen it with a more rooted master's. To understand the constructed environment, and more precisely the interior. So I enrolled in Interior Architecture Research & Design at the Piet Zwart Institute.

There I researched and created, broadening my academic and architectural knowledge, and wrote my master's thesis on the experience of space-time and the interior of a crash link. During my studies I created several works that played with the notion of perceived time as space.

Touchdown - 8min interpolation

Crash - 5:32 machinima video loop

I graduated in 2020, during a full Covid lockdown — with no physical exhibition possible. The graduation work had to become an online piece. As a reaction to all the extra data bandwidth being used during full lockdown, I decided to create something smaller than a megabyte in size. I wanted to keep the Cloud cool while challenging the receiving end. An ode to the first famous computer virus of my time, the ILOVEYOU worm. I wrote a 15-minute animation purely in HTML and CSS. This pushed the receiving (client) end to work, as the server side only hosted the instructions (code) which were only a small download in size (around 750 KB). The content of this animation was an extended thought on constructed space from a cinematic angle, moving through shifting chapters.

Phosphor start

After graduating, I started to dive more into coding. Beyond HTML and CSS, I picked up JavaScript and started creating small videogames, as tests, like CRS and HCAR.

HypoCriteAutoReply

Eventually I started picking up Unity, learned how to code in C# and got familiar with Blender over the years, fascinated by building environments without using material resources. Then I started working on Detourist, an atmospheric exploration game which can be wishlisted on Steam .

Detourist - in Development

Around this time I started working as a senior lecturer at the Advertising & Beyond department of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Here I worked among all years of bachelor students, guiding them with feedback, workshops and lectures, designing briefs, deciding on the curriculum and assessing their competencies and works.

It was also around this time that Jasmijn Visser contacted me as she had the concept of a video game and wanted me to develop it for her. This grew into a multi-year collaboration, in which we created The Weather Has Been Cancelled, for which I did the game development and all 2D and 3D animation. In TWHBC the weather has disappeared, and you, the protagonist, have to find out where it has gone, what the cause was, and how to bring it back.

TWHBC - Villa Heike Berlin

TWHBC - detail

TWHBC - interface

TWHBC - screenshot

Where I once made mostly physical installations, I became increasingly drawn to the immaterial: text and code. At the moment, I'm even writing a novel, Botanist, whenever I have time to write. I'm always looking forward to new ways of working.