Koert van Mensvoort

Koert van Mensvoort studied at Eindhoven University of Technology and Sandberg Institute. Places of work recorded in the authority are Amsterdam. Employment is recorded with Eindhoven University of Technology. Work by Koert van Mensvoort is recorded in the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Van Mensvoort is currently a Next Nature Fellow and the former head of the Next Nature Lab at the Industrial Design Department at the Eindhoven University of Technology, a position he has held from 2003 until 2015. In 1997 Van Mensvoort received a Master of Science degree in computer science, specializing in computer graphics from the Eindhoven University of Technology. In 2000 he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. In 2008 he was Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Van Mensvoort received a doctorate from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 2009 for his thesis What You See Is What You Feel. Van Mensvoort is the founder and director of the Next Nature Museum based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

Van Mensvoort works in many different media to materialize his philosophy. Most of his multi-media projects are concerned with how technology becomes so omnipresent, intricate and uncontrollable we start to perceive it as a nature of its own. Notable projects • The Retro Future exhibition about the future thinking of the past, in the Evoluon. • The VR Timemachine: Trip to Big Future, in the Evoluon. A virtual reality experience that sends its visitors billions of years into future. • Letter to Humanity Addressed to all 8 billion people on Earth and translated in twenty-five languages. It encourages humans not to be slaves or victims of their own technology, but to use technology to enhance our humanity. • The Rise and Fall of Rayfish Footwear online film project on the fictional company Rayfish.com that offered personalized sneakers crafted from genetically modified stingray leather. • The book Next Nature: Nature Changes Along With Us. Scientific American magazine wrote in a review that “next nature can give us a new vocabulary and a new philosophy to see and design the world.” • The NANO Supermarket a mobile exhibition featuring nanotech products that might be on the market within the next ten years. • The Datafountain, is an internet-enabled water fountain connected to money currency rates. • The documentary Daddy! The Woods Smell of Shampoo, exploring the intimate role media play in our society: how the media have become fundamentally part of the cycle through which we create meaning and it effectively becomes impossible to distinguish media from reality. • The Fake for Real memory game on the tension between reality and simulation. • The online interactive dance film Drift, featuring a dancer without a body but kinetic points in space, dance and choreography by Nancy Mauro-Flude. • The Biggest Visual Power Show, a pop conference held in Amsterdam, Zollverein and Los Angeles.