Proto Space STRP
PROTO is STRP's community space in Eindhoven — a place that refuses to be finished. Together with artist Bart Hees and a small group of multidisciplinary makers, I was part of the co-creation team that designed the space from concept to opening.
My involvement ran across several layers: thinking through what kind of space PROTO should be, what needs it has to function as a living lab, how it should feel to inhabit. The result sits somewhere between studio, stage, meeting room, and bar — deliberately unresolved, shaped by whoever is inside it.
The space itself is an installation. Large sculptural foam forms, draped curtains, graffiti-painted mirrors, and hand-cast lighting objects build an environment that is clearly constructed but refuses to feel institutional. A prototype of a space, visibly still in progress.
As part of PROTO's community programme we organised an aluminium casting workshop. Participants pressed shapes into sand, and then we poured molten aluminium into the moulds. these forms were combined with hand-blown glass objects they became the chandeliers now hanging in the space: a ceiling full of things made by the community that inhabits it.
Mounted near the entrance of PROTO, Door Observer watches who comes and goes. Every time someone passes through, the machine generates a short AI-written description of that person and prints it on a thermal receipt. The descriptions accumulate — an anonymous log of everyone who entered or left.
At the end of the day, pressing a button triggers something different: the machine reads its own archive and prints a speculative account of what might have happened inside the space that day. It doesn't know. It guesses, composes, invents — turning arrivals and departures into a kind of fiction.
The piece sits in the same lineage as poeM and Biecht: a system that watches and writes, that makes you aware of being observed without quite confronting you. Here the machine is embedded in the daily rhythm of the space. The receipt it prints is yours to take or leave.