NOWHERE is as much a book by me as it is about me. After 25 years of work I felt the need to invite people coming from different backgrounds to freely comment and reflect on my work from their point of view. Book maker Irma Boom developed the object currently in your hands. It is a radical book with multiple faces; allowing the viewer to read, to study, to enjoy and to play, as distinct methods of interpretation. Urs Stahel, Aaron Betsky and Shumon Basar – all active as authors as well as curators with whom I worked before – question my work from the perspective of design, architecture, visual arts and photography.

Irma Boom – as a designer – not only took the liberty of creating a visually driven flow of images, irrespective of their date of creation, she furthered my fascination with scale and abstraction by pushing the reader to turn the book upside down, inviting him/her to look again, look better. In their own way the authors, inclu­ding the designer, contribute to an understanding of the changing world behind my pictures.

In a world of mediated realities, true or false determination is omnipresent in our daily routines, resembling a 24/7 computer game of infinite levels of repetitive competition. The play itself has become the goal of the play. Questioning the visual expressions of globalisation and urbanisation has led and inspired to NOWHERE also becoming an exhibition. In the same spirit, curator/ producer Bas Vroege (Paradox) assembled a team consisting of an artificial intelligence researcher (Gjorgji Strezoski), an architect (Tiago Rosado), data designers (RNDR), and a composer (Henry Vega), under the guidance of assistant­ producer Hannah Hagen. Our mutual aim: finding alternative ways of revealing the motives that drive me making my art. The team pushed me to make these motives explicit, label and quantify them. The spreadsheet on the inside of the belly band of this book shows the groundwork for that, whereas the grids on the glossy side of the fold­out pages show the terms in connection with a scaled, chronological representation of the full body of work from the past 25 years: 241 works, of which 5 are videos. The matte side of the fold­out pages offer a glimpse of the way the AI is dynamically providing links between the 241 works, based on the abstract notions representing my motives, presented as an 18 x 3 m video projection.

In line with developing new ways of creation and the individual appropriation of images, traditional ways of understanding no longer fully suffice. All understanding starts with an open mind and a commitment to the idea that our place might prove to be different than expected and even grow into something completely new. We have to change to stay the same.

Artificial intelligence introduced new ways of understanding, that in turn might provide me with new ways of looking at the meta structures of the image industry that are determining today’s architecture and cities, and its visual commercialisation. You never know, but envision it. Look at it this way, or look at it another way. It might be true or false, at the same time. You simply have to decide on that, for it’s in the eye of the beholder. You are here, now.

Frank van der Salm

Rotterdam, January 2021