(Theun Karelse, NL) growing up I was interested in drawing as a way of learning about the world in a close parallel to natural sciences. I subsequently studied fine-arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam before joining FoAM, a distributed group of transdisciplinary laboratories operating at the interstices of art, science, nature and everyday life. My interests and experimental practice explore edges between art, environment and technology. Taking the last 10.000 years as a frame of reference.
I practice and support ecosystem and landscape regeneration in Europe, India and Afrika. My outdoor studio consists of serveral gardens that serve as testing grounds for urban biodiversity, climate adaptation and ancient knowledge systems. I'm an active member of FoAM, of the Embassy of the Earth, part of the Future of the Delta team at the Embassy of the Northsea and Speaker for the Living at zoöp CCU and zoöp Amstelpark.
His practice has been shared at venues such as: Ars Electronica (Linz), AxS Festival (Los Angeles), Transmediale (Berlin), Victoria and Albert Museum (UK), Changwon Sculpture Biennale (South Korea), Ars Bioarctica (Finland), Maajaam (Estonia), RIXc (Riga), PIFcamp (Slovenia), Trienale of Milan (Italy), GROOTE MUSEUM / ARTIS (Nl), Naturalis (Nl), Het Nieuwe Instituut (Nl), CCU (Nl), and Zone2Source (Nl).
Theun has been guest tutor at: Central St Martins (UK), Cerritos College Art (Los Angeles), Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland), HKU (Nl), and ArtEZ (Nl).
Book publications include: Green Reader (Fo.AM 2023), Duizenden Toekomsten in Zeeland (Ambassade van de Noordzee 2025), Art As We Don't Know it (BioArt Society 2019), A Fieldguide to Machine Wilderness (Fo.AM 2022), De Wilde Wereld (Sanne Bloemink 2020).
Reviews include: WeMakeMoneyNotArt.org, De Groene Amsterdammer, Parool, NRC, De Nieuws BV on Radio 1 (Nl).
Scientific papers include: Environmental literacy : an ecocentric view on technology in the Anthropocene (Michelle Geraerts, UU Msc thesis), What I Do is Not Words (Robin Cramer, Radboud University Msc thesis), Art, Algorithms and the North Sea (Eeke Brussee, Erasmus University Rotterdam Msc thesis), Soils of Change: Unravelling Artistic Practices in the Anthropocene (Pia Kristine Raahauge Beiermann, VU Msc thesis).
Recent and upcoming activities:
2025:
2024:
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field-research for the Embassy of the Northsea
The Embassy of the North sea has been a formidable force in the rights for nature movement in Europe, positioning itself as a learning space where diverse practices can be developed, tested, questioned and reflected upon. The Future of the Delta team, is a fieldresearch team assigned by the Embassy consisting of professor of rivers and deltas Maarten Kleinhans, artist Theun Karelse, socio-environmental researcher Darko Lagunas and artist and anthropologist Anne Jesuina de Andrade. Their task: to explore the more-than-human futures of this coastal region. Through various explorations and fieldwork on location, the team aims to contribute to coastal cultural mindsets and invigorate more inclusive approaches to coastal spatial planning.
Four years of research and experiments have been bundled into a publication in 2025, with chapters exploring the issues of the Delta region from the vauntage point of various non-human entities including: the dunes, the Harbour porpoise, the Eal, the colonial history in relation to the present, the 172 drowned villages, and Seaweed.
More: Embassy of the Northsea
Dreams as anatomies
This is an evolving series of workshops where small groups make and embody various creatures using rapid prototyping materials, inflatable pumps, movement and sound, held together by large amounts of tape. These expressions might be monsters that can help us banish forces that haunt us in our lives, or summon forces that we need. They can embody animals, ghosts, forces of nature, or even quite abstract ideas.
This practice, of externalizing something through playful incorporation, feels like it has been expanding in these workshops to a broader theme of the dreams our bodies dream. The dreaming body pervades Northern European pre-Christian cultures in stories, in arts and in ritualistic and shamanic practices. The physical part of dreaming is often overlooked when dreaming is assumed to be only a mental activity. (The brain-body divide of modernity). What do we encounter if we connect with our dreams physically?
Location: Instrument Inventors Initiative in The Hague May 2025 / Nerdlab, in Gent September 2025.
welcoming back the Otter to Amsterdam with a floating garden
As an icon of wetlands returning to Amsterdam after 50 years of absence, the otter is calling to us: to reimagine our relationships to water, waterrich landscapes and their vast biodiversity and kinship-networks. Gardeners, landscape architects, and urban planners of Amsterdam may have started to think of bees, butterflies and birds when they design and manage our urban green spaces, but the return of the otter feels like a game-changer!
Otterdam is a floating garden with common and rare indigenous water and swamp plants, which is cyclical; its structure biodegrades over 1 or 2 years. This project explores the gap between Dutch watermanagement and our horticultural practice (gardens and parks); unlike the Aztec chinampas or indonesian chrimp gardens the Dutch have never really developed a culture of watergardening. Some initiatives are starting in seaweed faming, butour freshwater ecosystems are relatively unexplored. Project aims: exploring animal wisdom as guide to gardening and ecological practices, exploring ghosts (Tsing et all) and hauntology as an active ecological practice, exploring celebration as an ingredient of how we relate to non-humans, creating moments in our culture for celebrating our connections to other forms of life.
>> More: Otterdam page in Radical City..
Location: Waternatuurtuin, Westerpark, Amsterdam 2023, moving to Amstelpark, 2024. Supported by: Cultuurfonds NH
Speaker for the Living
Creative Coding Utrecht is a platform for digital creativity and stems from an international movement of makers, who strive to make technology accessible for creative expression with an emphasis on alternative approaches. This attitude is investigative, critical, collaborative, open, hands-on, and inclusive. The international community of creative coders has developed a unique and innovative maker culture, whose principles we want to share with the wider population and apply to a variety of fields.
The Zoöp idea surfaced during a series of workshops in which Het Nieuwe Instituut, FIBER festival and myself collaborated. At one of these workshops Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (HNI) explored the 'rights for nature' movement asking what kinds of existing legislation could be harnessed. Because developing new legislation would probably take over a decade. The workshop identified organizational forms as a field of legislation with a lot of potential. What if the idea of the coop could be extended to include more-than-human interests: from coop to Zoöp.
Central to the Zoöp organizational model is a person who can act as a voice for non-human life concerns with relative independence: a Speaker for the Living. CCU became the world's fifth zoöp, and based on my trackrecord in investigating the intertwining of ecology and technology, I was asked to be Speaker for the Living at CCU.
Can puppetry be a method of ecological research?
Like much of the Netherlands, Amsterdam used to be swampy and creatures like the moose thrived here. Very few traces of them are left. Perhaps only the invasiveness of certaain waterplants reminds us of their absense.
In her thought-provoking book, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing describes how we live among ghosts in late industrial landscapes – the shadows left behind when animals disappear or even become extinct. When animals like the moose disappear from our landscapes, we lose not only their presence but also the unique behaviours and connections they share with us. It is also very much a cultural loss.
In GhostGardening we explore the lost world of the moose through the art of ensemble puppetry. A small team embodied the spirit of the moose, an incredible creature that once roamed these lands and waters. What can we learn about animals and their environments by physically representing them this way? Can puppetry be a method of ecological research or landscape design?
residency programme at ARTIS Amsterdam Royal zoo
March 2022 / June 2022 field experiments @ ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo and Groote Museum
Residents: Driessens & Verstappen, Heather Barnett, Thomas Thwaites, Ivan Henriques, Antti Tenetz, Špela Petrič and Ian Ingram.
Machine Wilderness is an artistic fieldresearch programme exploring new relationships between people, our technologies and the natural world. Machines have become an intrinsic part of our world (according to some a second nature). But their presence is highly disruptive to the worlds of other beings on land, in the seas and skies. How can technologies relate more symbiotically with other living beings?
Residency programme: In 2022, seven artists join the Machine Wilderness residency programme exploring the rich and diverse worlds of animals, plants and microbes in ARTIS and MICROPIA. From March till June artists will each be experimenting for a number of weeks in the park to get closer to the lives of other creatures and reveal hidden worlds. Visitors can see them at work during their research or learn more in artists' presentations. By exploring the relations between technology and other life forms we investigate how animals and plants share signals, how they learn, set boundaries, or organize their lives. Through experiments and prototypes we try to find ways to engage with their worlds more deeply. Can machines help us rejoin the great conversation with life?
>> Visit the project website..
Locations: ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo, ZOOdio, and Groote Museum
Machine Wilderness is based on long-term research by Theun Karelse at FoAM and developed into a programme in collaboration with Alice Smits of Zone2Source. Supported by: Stimuleringsfonds, AFK, Vriendenloterijfonds, Cultuurfonds
thought structured by landscape
Humans as a species operate within a framework of symbolic representation that enables us to articulate ideas, share ideas, plan, design, reflect, make decisions, and reflect. We associate this with literacy, but for the majority of human evolution these frameworks were oral. I'm particularly interested in ways in which the landscape itself was an infrastructure to organise thought. All over the world cultures associated knowledge to features in the landscape; the Aboriginal songlines of Australia, the Native American pilgrimage trails, the ceremonial roads of the Pacific Islands, and the Neolithic causeways and henges of Europe. This is landscape as mind-palace.
MonsterCode brings practices together from a wide range of sources. These were actively applied even in Europe well into the Renaissance, but almost completely forgotten since then. In these practices thinking can be structured holistically, not spread across various books or servers, but in a unified space. A walk to the supermarket can become an epic journey through a timeline of human evolution, or a library of all local bird species, or both. What happens when thinking is nolonger only an internal proces, but happens through interaction with the environment?
Monster refers to imagination. Code refers to encoding things geographically.
2021/22 - Fieldsessions: Amelisweerd with CCU, Almere Strand with Srandlab, Amstelpark with Z2S, and during PIFcamp in Slovenia.
enviromental machine learning
RandomForests is a field-program interested in the potential of machines for environmental learning. Until very recently the ability to relate to the environment was limited to biological beings like plants and animals, but now machines are starting to blur those lines. Random Forests explores what environmental machine learning could entail and if an artificial agent could become environmentally literate. What does this emerging 'synthetic world- view' mean for the appreciation of environmental complexity and the power-relations between our technologies and their environment? Could environmental literacy in the artificial agents that populate our environment create any opening towards environmental solidarity, intimacy, affinity, allegiance, reverence, commitment and kinship? >>More soon..
2018 - Field sessions: ArsBioarctica at the Kilpisjarvi Biological Fieldstation in the Finnish Arctic, Imrama on Terschelling Island (the Netherlands), Dinacon at Koh Lon Island (Thailand) and MAAJAAM Estonia. Supported by: Stimuleringsfonds
machine fieldwork
With much of our current environmental predicament stemming from anthropocentric bias, should machine learning be primed on learning from humans exclusively, should their natural habitat be corporate, as they currently are, or do intelligent machines deserve more diversity on a planet full of varieties of intelligence? Do the artificial agents that are currently taking seat in corporate boardrooms deserve to spend their weekends floating around coral-reefs, hike across mountains, or get stuck in a swamp? What if machines also learn directly from animals and plants? Like orphaned orangutans do in training-forests?
Deep Steward is a collaboration with Ian Ingram in which machines spend time doing fieldwork and make up their own classifications of those environments.
Field sessions: The pond at Het Nieuwe Instituut 2018 and 2023/2027 and a large tree outside the Triennale Milan as part of the Dutch Pavilion. Supported by: Stimuleringsfonds
floating observation raft
Wild Bits asked artists to investigate notions of digital nativeness and digital immigrants. Although our digital infrastructure is shaped by collosal human bias, it operates in densely populated multispecies realms. I proposed to investigate where to place the 99,9% of other species within the spectrum ranging from digital natives to digital outcasts.
The method would be to select one local organism at Maajaam - bird / mammal / insect - and make it central to the investigation, making use of a rich array of investigative techniques: ecological / artistic / digital observation strategies. On arrival my focus was immediately taken by the creek running through the MAAJAAM terrain with an enigmatic bever-dam and expanding out into a small lake, which no-one had visited for decades. So some sort of exploratory and sensorially immersive raft was called for. >>More soon..
2018 - Supported by: Stimuleringsfonds
Embassy of the Earth
White Mountain is a Maasai driven initiative, supported by the Embassy of the Earth of which I am a core team member. Expanding and building on the original White Mountain Maasai initiative to restore Mt Kilimanjaaro to health in 2019 in Amboseli, Kenya, we gathered at an iconic site in between Mt. Meru and Mt. Kilimanjaro, close to Ilkirumun Village, Siha District, Tanzania in 2023. During the second Basecamp 120 Maasai representatives gathered to establish a common future vision for Maasai in both countries. The basecamp was a call to all parties to gather for a 'unprecedented collaboration', to restore ecosystems and regenerate livelihood across the habitat of designated White Mountain Maasai communities and others.
The Embassy of the Earth consists of half a dozen core team members from all walks of life, who self-organize as conditions require. The Embassy supports socio-ecological regeneration in situations where problems are too complex and too interlinked for any party to address them alone. Moving beyond neo-colonial approaches of bringing expertise aimed at solving other people’s problems. Instead the Embassy starts from Sacred Space. Often working with indigenous peoples, ceremony is at the heart of our work, reviving a spirit of collaboration and establishing unprecedented collaboration to revive land and livelihood. The Embassy offers space, for that to happen, like this Future Search Basecamp.
The image above is a photo I took when rain started to fall miraculously after months of extreme drought, as people were dancing during the opening ceremony.
>> More: Embassy website (which I designed but needs an update)
Winterschool at Academy of Architecture
Each year the Academy of Architecture invites an artist to host the Winterschool, a week long curriculum for 120 students. In 2024 I developed the Winterschool on invitation by head of landscape architecture department Joost Emmerik with the theme 'a cult of the Earth'.
For this Winterschool Joost set very high ambitions; not only to introduce students to unfamiliar subject material, but also to radically reimagine the final presentation, not as a formal exhibition, but as a collective ceremony. To acchieve this I assembled a stellar cast of 10 guest-tutors to lead 10 student teams exploring 10 different realms of experience: Adriana Knouf, Anne de Andrade, Cathrine Kramer & Zackery Denfeld (the Center for Genomic Gastronomy) Anne Maria Fink & Elza Berzina, Emma Hoette, Frank Bloem, Marit Mihklepp, Robbi Meertens, Teun Castelein and Jonmar van Vlijmen, Rosanne van Wijk & Ronald Boer (Onkruidenier).
Projectweek at Breitner Academy
During the 2022 projectweek at Breitner Academy several guest teachers host classes exploring different subjects. My class explored myth: if myths carry a central wisdom poassed on through generations, what message would you like to pass on? Student teams wrote their myths, and subsequently build and animated a central creature from their myth, through collective puppetry.
Darko Lagunas joined the classes remotely checking in on student progress, with the week ending in each team enacting their mythological story in the hallways and corridors of the Breitner building.
an inflatable art/science performance pavilion
In 2013 Cocky Eek imagined Sphæræ an inflatable multi-dome pavilion based on clustering soap-bubble surfaces. We developed the project together, where I focused mostly on technical aspects of the space and constructing it in-situ.
Sphæræ consists of five semi-transparent bubbles of different sizes, together forming a multi-dome construction designed to serve as a platform for artists, scientists, and performers to make 180° works and compositions which explore the phenomena of light, sound and movement within the domes. A ventilator transforms air into a building material that forces her delicate membrane into shape. The surface becomes a carrier of immersive experiences with tailor-made works that follow the topology of the spherical architecture.
Multi-media artists/scientists/composers performed challenging compositions in the domes. So Sphæræ is not just a structure but a full programme co-curated by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand. The single membrane space can touch down on uncharted territories making temporary ecosystems with fragile and complex atmospheric conditions as an instrument to explore the phenomena of light, sound and movement.
Locations: The Pavilion has traveled through festivals as Kunstvlaai A.P.I. 2013, NL, Ars Elctronica 2014 AUT, TodaysArt 2014, NL, GOGBOT 2014, NL, AxS festval 2014, Los Angeles, USA, iii 2015, NL, {Un][split} Science & Art Festival 2018, München, DE. Supported by: Stimuleringsfonds
transient realities
trg is the first project I took part in at FoAM. It is a responsive environment aimed to make four fundamental forces apparent on the human scale: the fictional equivalents of gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear interaction. It unfolds, expands and curls up based on the energy levels within its perimeters.
trg is part of the t*series environments at FoAM which are immersive hybrid realities, or responsive “play spaces.” They are designed for full-body interaction of human participants with “irreal” responsive worlds. TGarden, txOom and TRG - the three distinct groups of environments within the series - are technologically enhanced spaces that encourage playful explorations of physical and digital surroundings, as well as fluid dialogues between people, materials and media.
More about the origins and backgrounds of trg: //Fo.AM
embodyment, architecture and space/time
#embodyment, #architecture, #prosthectics, #spacetime, #performance
Towards the end of Victorian Britain the first sounds of the Industrial Revolution echoed across Western Europe. It was also the time when the first hints of a revolutionary new understanding of space and time began to surface, from Euler, Hilbert and Ernest Mach, to come to full synthesis in the theory of General Relativity by a patent clerck in Bern.
A particular man who lived in late-Victorian London seemed to be a physical embodiment of those radical new concepts. Joseph Merrick - who is probably better known under his stage name the Elephant man - physically manifested the mysteriously curved topologies, non-euclidean geometries and deep self-similarity that emerged in physics. Like a living fractal he limped through the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution towards modernity. His face a cubist portrait avant-la-lettre. Some photographs of Joseph Merrick exist which resonate fully with the early black and white images of barren planets and moons of the solar system that featured in the astronomy journals my father subscribed too. Brutal and breathless places with no athmosphere. It's as if he lived there in that timeless realm of mathematic rules beyond the living Earth.
The human body is the part of the universe we inhabit directly. So a prime focal point for any study of our imaginaries of space and time. Spread over a very long period, I developed a way to embody the very different physical presence of the Elephantman, culminating in a prosthetics suit made by a special effects studio. To me feels like wearing a kind of space suit. This became the Elephantman-man. >>More soon..
Period: from 2000 to 2019. Supported by: Mondriaan Fund