For centuries, humanity has been searching for it: the prime matter, or prima materia. Since time immemorial, alchemists like George Ripley and Nicolas Flamel have dedicated their lives to the search for that gray lump of clay from which the entire cosmos is said to have been molded. Speaking of clay: Ilse van Klei and her partner Bas Rellum belong to the newest generation of alchemists - operating not from a secluded cabin in the woods full of bubbling brews, but from an industrial building in the heart of Rotterdam, surrounded by stacks of paper and ink. Here, they create something new from existing elements. This year, this duo is responsible for the visual part of the festival campaign for Into The Great Wide Open, a project for which they view the world through a modern alchemist's lens. At the core of their tingling pixel designs lie the movements and structures of the seemingly so indifferent universe. They place every dot to understand the world better, to lay bare the underlying patterns that form the blueprint for the world around us.

‘Literally everything moves according to the same laws,’ Bas says. ‘Sound, image… it can all be reduced to the same kind of mathematical waves. That is an incredibly trippy and cosmic notion. It is also exactly what inspires us: the patterns in the world around us. For instance, I can get intensely happy walking through the city and spotting a crack in the concrete. Then I think: I could never design this more beautifully myself. The ultimate designer is nature; we image-makers are just imitating her. And if we succeed in doing so, we get applause.’ 

Nature served as a model for this project, too. Particularly Vlieland - the island with which the duo feels a deep connection. Ilse ended up at the very first festival edition almost by accident and kept coming back ever since. Bas also holds a special place in his heart for the Wadden area. As a born Groninger, he regularly made the crossing to Schiermonnikoog in his youth, where he actually learned to walk. Through Ilse, he fell under the spell of Vlieland. ‘I find the Wadden Sea magical, however cheesy that word may be. It is always beautiful there, no matter the weather. Every fifteen minutes, the light can be just a tiny bit different, making you see it in a completely new way. Sky, beach, and water share almost the same hue, resulting in an immense sense of vastness. And when there is no one around and you hear a little bird in the distance - I always think: I’m never going back. Just leave everything be.’ 

In everything the duo creates for the festival, the island shines through. Their speckled designs literally breathe Vlieland. Ilse: ‘Everything you see has been plucked directly from the island or extracted from the music. We wanted to capture the movements of the island, in the broadest sense of the word. Not just the sea, but also sound waves and the wind. We had a wishlist of things we wanted to record, which we literally went to harvest on the island.’ 

That harvesting took place during a residency in March. For a week, Ilse and Bas roamed the dunes with cameras, projectors, and audio recorders. They experimented with projections, climbed the lighthouse, and lay in the swaying dune grass to capture as many island details as possible. Once their wishlist was complete, they headed back to Rotterdam for the next step: alchemy. They translated the field recordings into shape using the ‘dithering’ method: a mathematical transformation of image or sound into a grid of dots. This technique formed the basis of all their designs. ‘We needed a single visual language that could visualize both images and sounds. Dithering was fantastic for that. Sound is converted into a visual spectrogram, allowing you to ‘view’ the sounds, as it were. Almost a kind of synesthesia. Incredibly interesting to see how some music has a highly remarkable physical structure. Take those bagpipes by Brìgde Chaimbeul, for example; they produce a kind of blocks you don't see with any other artist.’ Bas adds: ‘That can also help to understand the music better. Is it a lot of noise, long or short tones, or highly rhythmic?’

By presenting existing elements in a different way, Ilse and Bas hope that people will look at what they already know with renewed attention. Bas: ‘We were looking for the right balance between understandable and incomprehensible. If something is too vague, it becomes static, but if it is too direct, it becomes boring. It only becomes fascinating when you don't know exactly what you are looking at, but you can feel that there is a deeper kind of logic behind it. It's almost a metaphor for life itself: there is something larger present - but we can't quite grasp it.’

Ilse and Bas's pixels dance precisely in the grey area between familiar and alienating, thus fitting perfectly into this year's overarching art theme: dis/order. Pure coincidence, according to Ilse: 'When we started designing, we didn't know at all that this was going to be the theme of the art route. But unconsciously, it touches precisely the core of what we made. Or maybe it's not a coincidence. Maybe it makes perfect sense because that's just the way life is.’