NASA , art and technology all together? Marcel Wesdorp makes it possible .

Talking with an impressive artist

Marcel Wesdorp is a photographer born in Netherlands with an exceptional talent in creating a beautiful relation between art, science and technology. He generates ethereal landscapes collecting NASA´s data satellites and uses coordinates to identify them. But his work goes much further than the software processing, he invites us to take a journey in an infinite universe braking physical and mental limitations. His photographs, black and white and with very big dimensions, absorbs you in the vacuum of time and space and, with a sensitive and enigmatic touch, overwhelms your heart. And there is where you find yourself in the middle of an unexpected love story.

Wesdorp’s work has been shown several times at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2007-2011),at Museum Belvedere, Heerenveen (2012), in Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012), Erasmus University, Rotterdam (2013) and with gallery Helder in the solo presentation at KunstRAI, Amsterdam (2015).

We invite you to discover more about his amazing work on: http://www.marcelwesdorp.nl

Let´s find more about him:

1. Who is Marcel Wesdorp behind the artistic facet and how is this influencing your work and research?

In general you can call me a searcher, but then a seeker who does not know what he is looking for. This gives me the freedom to question my art in an open-minded manner and my question about metaphysics and ontology. This open-minded attitude (as if the world does not exist or even needs to be invented) allows me to stay in this autonomy area from the beginning to the completion of a work of art.

2. What drove you to software photography and how would you define your style?

Within the representation of the image I have always been searching for the limits of photography and its meaning. What is an image and what is its meaning embedded in itself. My result is that there is no difference in the real image or the fictitious or artificial one. The image carrier is the recognizable, and only the inspiration (a necessary thing in the visual arts) gets more access to the structure that arises in the computer.

3. Talking about your work Untitled World File you say: “I realize that the blue sky only exists in my imagination”. How do you see the manifestation of life beyond the immediate of our world and what inspires you the most?

The immaterial has always fascinated me the most in which the experience of a moment or moment does more with us and stays with us than all the material to which we link our identity. The most important thing about art is that it has to produce something;
A mental and a physical experience in which we feel ourselves as one entity. Art has to bring us closer to ourselves, despite the fact that it wants to be confrontational with what is currently happening within a world spirit.

4. Starting from data, analyse it and transform it in a sensitive artistic expression sounds like a very interesting creation process. Can you share with us some details about your creative process from idea to final stage?

I absolutely do not regard myself as a conceptual artist's idea, because the idea brings about a thinking within the creative process, and in it the process is my goal rather than just an idea. Art is a physical process or process that takes place in our central nervous system, that is why art is a thing and theater is a event. For me the starting point is always the landscape, because land is the origin source of everything. But this land also has a past; a history that has been given by man, while at the most the ground itself consists of layers that have formed in millions of years. This input from the outside and the forming from the inside is my dialogue to the life of essens in metaphysics and ontology of man. The form or medium is not the goal there, but the bearer of speech that indicates a place or direction.

5. What are the biggest challenges you have met in your work creation?

Not everything can be solved and often I have to do with too much scaling of the SRTM data with which I work from the Nasa and the USGS. Space is a confusing concept within the mathematical data of the computer, everything is not very big, but everything is very small. In order to convey the spatial experience in something that gives and not to transfer something in my work, I have to examine other perspectives. You get to deal very quickly with something monumental, but there is no movement in the monumental, while it is precisely this movement that concerns me. To investigate this even more, I saw my last film 'Mind over Matter' (2015/2017) as my biggest challenge, but then divided into twelve chapters (as if it were a book)

6. What other worlds, stories or techniques do you feel you need to explore?

I think that it is a beautiful thing to know how to create earth slabs from cracks; it breaks open from the core and forms a mass, but this mass does not stand still and is constantly in motion, only it moves very slowly. Slowness that I question with my films I want to move to the sculptural, such as the dynamics of a mountain, while this dynamic has taken shape in billions of years. How can you capture dynamics that are not about speed, but the dynamics of inertia. In the sculptural, the object as exploration and as possibility.

7. What can you tell us about your current research? what about your future projects?

At the moment I am working not only on sculptural possibilities that under the working title 'Engraving' tries to give an answer to the film 'Mind over Matter', but I also work with the Dutch philosopher Eric Bolle on a translation of the essays of Friedrich Holderlin in Dutch. For the first time I am philosophizing texts with illustrations, although I notice that I immediately get stuck with the word illustration and I want to find a different understanding. Once again it will be an exciting year in research, experiment and making possibilities.

Thank you very much !


Marcel Wesdorp, is one of the most outstanding photographers that participated in the international photography exhibition "The visible invisible" (INSEA-UNESCO, Enredadas, UAM, OsloMet, SOS Children's Villages, As VGS), held in Oslo (Norway) in 2017 , along other artists from Norway, UK, Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Romania, Spain, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa and Italy.


author Georgeta Negraru