Biographical and Background Information

"I still believe in the old Renaissance ideal of the universal man, not in the sense of knowing everything about everything but as the ambition to understand universal structures from different perspectives." Pieter Adriaans

Over the years Pieter Adriaans (1955) has built up an impressive unusually broad oeuvre that varies from paintings and sculptures to installations, books, papers and musical compositions. This achievement is remarkable given the fact that Adriaans also has a masters in philosophy, a PhD in theoretical computer science and has, together with his business partner Dolf Zantinge, founded a very successful computer company. He is part-time professor of learning and adaptive at the University of Amsterdam.

"I see no fundamental difference between my work as a philosopher, as a scientist or as an artist" Adriaans states "It all has to do with creating new insights and understanding yourself and the world around you. Since the Renaissance there exists a pact between artists and scientists in Western culture that culminated in the notion of an experiment: the creation of a unique object, situation or event that is intended to test a theory. Only the context is different: in science and philosophy you try to find theories that help us to understand the existing world, in art you try to create new meaning for the future world. On rare occasions the two worlds come together in a work of art that both touches us emotionally and allows us understand the world from a new perspective."

Adriaans is the first to admit that there are tensions between those two ambitions. When he got a patent on the technology embedded in the Instant Composer Tool (a program that could compose music automatically developed with Maarten van den Dungen in the mid-nineties), he decided that he would not publish anything about this material in scientific circles because he felt this might hamper his ability to explore the artistic possibilities of the invention. In a world of extreme specialization commercial art gallery owners do not like experimental artists very much and I the eyes of most scientists colleagues that paint or make art are hobbyists at best. Yet there are signs that the tide is changing. In the Netherlands as well as internationally there is a development where science and art are trying to find new forms of cooperation. Adriaans has been involved in various projects to encourage artist and scientists to work together: at the Vrije Akademie in Den Haag and the Rijksakademie amongst others. Today Adriaans is getting more and more recognition for his work, culminating in the invitation for the prestigious Paradiso lecture "The work of art as a number" in 2007 and the acquisition of his work by research institutes and collectors.

Adriaans got his first drawing lessons at the end of the sixties from the well-known painter Jacobus Koeman in Bergen aan Zee. In 1971, at the age of sixteen he was accepted as a student at the St. Joost School of Fine Art and Design, but, being disappointed by lack of interest in the technical aspects of drawing and painting at this institute he decided to combine the development of his talents with a thorough intellectual training. Ever since this time he has combined a scientific career with artistic activities. In the seventies he was member of Teekengenootschap Pictura, in Dordrecht. He got painting lessons from G.E. Meertens, and from J. Van Kesteren. He studied philosophy (and some mathematics) in Leiden from 1976 till 1983, the Netherlands, under Nuchelmans and van Peursen. In the eighties he worked for a number of computer companies such as Bureau Micro Software, Compu'Train and Info'Products. Here he started research into knowledge based systems and logic programming. This culminated in to the founding of the software company Syllogic in 1989. The success of this company allowed Adriaans to further explore the interplay between art and science. Eight years, later when Syllogic was a leading firm in data mining artificial intelligence and systems management with offices in Holland, Dublin, London and California, it was sold to Perot Systems Inc. This allowed Adriaans to take up one of his most ambitious projects up till now: Robosail, the building and exploitation of a self-learning racing yacht. This high profile project ran successfully from 1997 till 2007. In 1992 got his doctorate at the university of Amsterdam and in 1998 he was appointed professor of learning and adaptive systems at the same institute. In the years 2000 and 2001 he visited the Vrije Academie in The Hague were he got lessons from Ed van der Kooy, Pien Hazenberg en Marijke Verhoef. Since then he has developed his own style of painting. Using multiple layers of acrylics paint he creates large radiant canvasses in his characteristic robust handwriting. These paintings are greatly appreciated by a growing group of admirers. Pieter and his wife Rini live in Kockengen in the Netherlands and part of the year on the island of Sao Jorge, one of the Azores.