I am an artist and systems designer.

A film I co-directed and conducted interviews for with Anja Hiddinga. We visited Europe's only home for elderly Deaf people — they told us about their youth, when sign language was forbidden, about the struggles against embarrassment and indignity. All dialogue is in Dutch Sign Language. My role: interviewer and co-director. The split-screen editing — camera images running as commentary on what we encountered — was a shared formal decision that came out of the collaboration.

Best Documentary: International Disability Film Festival, Moscow. Best Documentary: Seattle Deaf Film Festival. Best Documentary: Sole Luna Festival, Palermo. Screened in Tokyo, Belgrade, New Delhi, and 20+ countries.

A poem from my dream, translated by an interpreter into spoken Dutch, translated back by a second interpreter into Dutch Sign Language. Three videos, three people, recorded separately, synchronised. When the videos run simultaneously, my focus shifts to the difference between me and the interpreter -- not the content but the gap. The tension in that difference is what I find interesting.

Screened at 4th Sadho Poetry Film Festival, New Delhi, 2013.

Seventeen-year-old Deaf twins Ekram and Euphrates in an Addis Ababa slum, and Deaf sisters Hilene and Willemijn on a Groningen farm. Their lives are totally different, yet the same. The Deaf community around the world is one big virtual country without borders. Dutch and Ethiopian Sign Languages with English subtitles. Cinematographer: Bart Koolen.

Screened in Toronto, Hong Kong, Rome, New Delhi.

A social cooperative co-founded with Nunzia Vannuccini, built around hospitality, culture, employment, and accessibility as one practice rather than separate departments. Between 50 and 80% of staff come from backgrounds that elsewhere make them too complicated to hire. Braille menus. All staff trained in Italian Sign Language. Dinners in the dark, guided by blind staff. Multiple locations across Bologna over a decade. Listed in Lonely Planet (via Nazario Sauro). Restructured as a social cooperative in 2025.

We applied for a wheelchair ramp permit in a heritage zone. We waited eleven years. We installed it anyway. Accumulated fines. The ramp is a complete picture of what accessibility means in practice: something obviously necessary, technically straightforward, and structurally blocked by institutions that were never designed with disabled people in the room. We named a beer after it.

Since October 2024 I've been building the cooperative's administration platform -- bank transactions, payment cards, documents, government correspondence, and connected applications, pulled into one system via APIs and SQLite. Authorised staff can query it and move processes forward in plain language, through an AI interface built on MCP and model tooling. Because it touches sensitive organisational and financial data, access rights, data minimisation, and human checkpoints are part of the architecture, not bolted on after. It builds on hands-on experimentation with automation and AI tooling going back to 2019.

TYD is a digital learning environment where users learn sign language in a playful way. I work across the whole arc, from product design to implementation across web, mobile app, and backend. I design accessible user flows in React/Next.js and React Native, and build the features that make learning stick -- practice and progress tracking, gamification, access tiers, a dictionary, profiles, and subscriptions.

On the backend I work in Node/TypeScript and manage Strapi, alongside the services and analytics that track user activity and retention. Part of the job is staying skeptical of the data itself -- flagging production and data bugs, and checking whether a measurement method actually supports the conclusion drawn from it.

Nine collaborators filmed in intimate video portraits exploring the ancient Greek ideal of beauty and goodness in harmony. The research behind it: a mathematical formula for ideal facial proportion (the Marquardt Phi Mask, based on the golden ratio) was applied to real faces. People preferred the original, unmodified faces 63.7% of the time. The mathematically perfected face was less attractive. The formula works. What it produces is horror. The corrected face is more perfect and less desired.

Museum Boerhaave, Leiden -- part of Perspectives on Diversity: The Cultural Life of Absence. Performed alongside professor Douwe Draaisma and comedian-writer Vincent Bijlo. As a Deaf person in a hearing space, presence is always partial, always mediated. The performance asks what culture is built in and around absence.

Technology brings us to the world of illusion. Everything will be fake, and that is the source of inspiration, not a problem. The sky becomes artificial. It dances constantly. Everyone is looking for something while it could be nothing.

A seven-day micro-residency in Bologna, organized and curated. Five Dutch artists -- three Deaf, two hearing. The question at the centre: how do I sense the world, and how do others? Sign language as artistic medium, not as subject. Participants integrated light, sound, movement, and image into multisensory expressions. Culminated in an inclusive public presentation. Funded by Culture Moves Europe's Individual Mobility Action.

A disability culture publication, AI-native from the pipeline up: discovery, source selection, retrieval and generation, verification, and editorial curation, written through four distinct editorial personas, orchestrated across several models -- Claude, GPT, Gemini, local Qwen -- that fall back on each other, with a human editor at the end of the chain. Disability culture has built an enormous body of expert knowledge. Almost none of it reaches the places where culture gets made and interpreted. Not because it is hidden. Because nobody is looking. cripminds.com