The machine is a little robot controlled by a computer. It could create sand castles but Gijs prefers to give it the honour to write important things on the ground.
Out of a small opening the sand flows, very slowly to the ground, letter by letter. The machine can write whatever we want, from short phrases to very long histories or poems. Slowly the written text will get affected by the weather, by the audience and will disappear.
Skryf refers to the fact that everything is transitory. An almost irrelevant pile of sand creates the magic of the word. Human beings, nature and the passage of time are responsible for the disintegration of the word again. Sometimes very quickly, sometimes very slow.
Gijs van Bon (1975 ) attended the Design Academy in Eindhoven and received his advanced training at the HKU in Utrecht, Department of Theatre Design. He initially became known primarily for his abstract kinetic objects. From 2001 he exhibited regularly in galleries and art centers. He also began designing and performing theatrical, autonomous events.
The multidisciplinary objects and installations by Van Bon always move between two areas of tension: abstract moving objects and theatrical installations.
He knows how to combine and use the boundaries between them to get as much as life as possible into his objects.
More about his work can be found on his website http://www.gijsvanbon.nl
