About blurring boundaries, knots and black holes in the creative process of The Lab
For a long time, I thought that being a creator meant making choices. Providing structure, establishing frameworks, finding connections. Transforming the welcome, yet disorganized, flow of inspiration into something tangible and translatable. I had learned to act, to organize, to think, to decide. To create something from nothing.
When I started my latest creation, The Lab, something shifted in my approach as a creator. The work demanded something of me that I wasn’t used to, and I had to find a different way of relating to creation. That resulted in a lot. Chaos. Panic. But also questions and insights, some of which I’d like to share with you, the potential audience of The Lab. I should warn you: The goal of this reflection, like The Lab and its creation, isn’t necessarily to understand it. Quite the opposite. Best of luck.
Success is a choice and I am the creator of my creation
From a contemporary perspective, there’s a strong belief in the malleability of humanity. We moderns are no longer guardians of creation, but rather we create our own destiny. Our liberal society, and thus we ourselves and our fellow human beings, is harsh: you owe your success to your own actions, but failure must also be sought within yourself. There’s a strong belief in the autonomous human being; we choose who we are, how we act, what we create. I think this perspective has also translated into contemporary creative practice. The neoliberal spirit seems to understand the artist as the creator of their creation. This roughly aligns with how I experienced my previous work processes: I conceived, determined, and the work takes shape according to my conditions.
In one of the insightful conversations I had with my partner and philosopher Dr. Max van der Heijden, I learned that this perspective hasn’t always been dominant. He told me that even in Plato’s dialogue “Io,” the idea of the artist as an autonomous creator is challenged. Instead, Plato, through Socrates, offers the image of the artist as the medium of divine inspiration. Io, that is the name of the artist, a poet, possesses no knowledge or craftsmanship, techne, but rather is transported. He is not an expert creator but someone who speaks from a literal obsession:
“For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.” (Plato, 2021, Ion, 535b)
Socrates uses the image of a chain of magnets to illustrate this. The Muses are the original magnets that the poet sets in motion, another magnet, which in turn sets in motion another magnet, the audience. According to this view, art is not a conscious creation of the artist, but rather the result of an artist who has surrendered himself to the work of art. Moreover, in Io’s case, the poet is unaware of what he is saying: he is possessed and not rational.
I’m not writing all this down lightly. Socrates’ interpretation of the creative process closely resembles what I personally experienced during the creation of The Lab.
An introduction
The Lab was founded on the idea that if we want to progress as modern, autonomous people and solve the ecological and humanitarian crises currently unfolding, we need to adopt a different way of thinking and being than the way of thinking and being that created these crises.
As a creator and philosopher, I translated this idea into the (artistic) notion that we must, first and foremost, get lost. Lose direction, stray from the beaten path, become disoriented. Lose control of the world, so that the world, with its ingrained patterns and norms, could no longer have a grip on us and our thinking. From this motivation, I and my team created The Lab.
In short: The Lab is a work-in-progress installation inspired by a labyrinth that visitors enter. It’s a designed—subtle foreshadowing—living space in near-darkness through which visitors wander endlessly, but where they can never see around the corner. I had the desire to literally lose direction, to induce a state of unknowing in (the visitor’s) body.
Don’t do anything
Co-creator Theun Mosk and I decided that if we wanted to make visitors lose their direction with this work, we had to do the same ourselves during the creative process. With a premiere planned and only four weeks of production ahead of us, we radically reversed our course: On day one of the production process, we actively decided to do nothing for eight hours, as much as possible. This resulted in us being sucked into the black hole of The Lab. Here, gravity no longer worked. Those eight hours felt like an endless fall, into unknowing. It was deeply uncomfortable. Since that day, the boundary between creation (The Lab) and the creative (Theun and I) has blurred.
We are looking for B, so we do A. We ended up at Q
On day two, we built a makeshift installation, keeping in mind the idea of the audience experience we wanted to create: losing direction. Instead of Theun and I, as creators, actively making choices about what needed to change, what needed to happen when, and what it should look like, we quickly realized that The Lab, as an installation, as an entity, had something to say to us. It demanded that we pause and listen. It may sound mystical, and at times it felt that way, but the material spoke back. It set boundaries. It resisted.
In the test sessions we did – we’re looking for B, so now we’re going to do A – we lost our way – we ended up at Q – and however impractical or uncomfortable: That was exactly the intention.
As soon as we became frustrated with the elusiveness of The Lab, the reason for creating this work presented itself again: It led us astray, forcing us to abandon the logic and ways of making and thinking we already knew. The work echoed our ideas, thus revealing our beliefs as well. These often turned out to be wrong. Polishing a work doesn’t necessarily make it more immersive, and removing irregularities doesn’t increase disorientation; on the contrary. In retrospect, they were primarily attempts at control.
Learn to speak with The Lab
The process robbed us of our autonomy as creators; as soon as you try to get lost, you know where you’re going, but at the same time, it confirmed it; The Lab as a being ultimately did indeed make us lose ourselves, in its corridors and in our thoughts. (Mission accomplished, right?)
The boundaries between creator, material, idea, matter, autonomy, and surrender blurred. Previous work processes had occasionally communicated with me, but never before had the exchange with the being we were creating been so strong.
The creation of The Lab is best described as an exchange of echoes: We found our resonance as creators in the material, and the feedback from the material resonated in our ideas. Within this, it wasn’t just up to us as creators to determine the direction. Sometimes we had to sit on our hands. Not push. Not control. Trust that the work knew where it wanted to go. And gradually learn to speak with The Lab.
As the creator of The Lab, I recognize myself somewhat in Socrates’s interpretation of artistry, but at the same time, it feels too easy to say that the experience of The Lab already existed and that I only need to raise the funds and be open to bringing it to reality. Ion is a man possessed, not a craftsman. And in some ways, I do feel more like a conductor than a creator. At the same time, I don’t want to reduce myself to a passive mouthpiece for an invisible muse. The Lab isn’t a divine inspiration. It’s a complex interplay of material, ideas, contexts, people. And yes, also money, deadlines, and expectations. Again, the blurring of boundaries.
Together, or not at all
In her book Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway discusses the concept of knots to refer to the interconnections between human and nonhuman life forms.
“Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a French verb meaning ‘to stir up,’ ‘to make cloudy,’ to disturb. We… require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles… as knots. We become with each other or not at all.” (p.17-18)
We become something, in collaboration, or not at all. As Haraway describes, allowing the knot between us as creators and The Lab was necessary for the creation of The Lab. And thus also for the emergence of something else: the knot, something larger than just our human actions. The knot, or in this case, The Lab, as an interconnection between human and non-human life forms. It sounds like a harmonious process. Nothing could be further from the truth.
During the making process, I discovered again and again that as modern, autonomous people who believe in our own ability to create, we are more inclined – or have been taught – to see ourselves as the one who ties or unties the knot and thereby acquires a certain power, than as part of the knot.
Everything within me wanted to direct, structure, and shape. The aggression runs deep. Not as anger, but as a habit, as a survival skill. Surrendering to the unknown, partially giving up control or autonomy as a creator, felt almost violent (“an endless fall”). As if the very thing that keeps me going in this uncertain world was being taken away. (Why did I want to make this work again?)
I experienced how much we’re constantly searching for something to hold onto, meaning, direction, control, and clarity. (Is this too literal or too abstract? Does the audience still understand it? What does this choice say about me as a creator? But also: Why doesn’t he do what I asked him to do?)
And at the same time, there was also the somewhat tragic realization that with the creation of The Lab, I wanted to create an antidote to that need for control and attachment. The creative process mirrored how much I, at least, was stuck in a certain mindset, frantically grasping around for support, while I had just jumped into a black hole with good courage. What if we try to find solutions to a way of thinking by reflecting on it? And what if, just like in The Lab, we shouldn’t fight the confusion, but allow it to arise?
Being human, a player among other players
I’ve been getting better at the latter lately. The Lab isn’t quite finished yet, as far as this creature can ever be, and I haven’t yet been cured of my own thinking, but I see the knot for what it is. Accepting the knot, besides an unpredictable yet layered creative process, has also yielded something valuable: It showed me a different way of relating to others. In this case, the other is The Lab, but this attitude also exists beyond the studio walls. The ecological other as an opportunity to see yourself as part of a larger whole.
For Haraway, too, the notion of the knot is connected to the creation of kinships, which go beyond biological family ties. It is about relational responsibility and care in a complex world, where humans are no longer the center. Humans are not the director of the stage that is Earth, but rather the actor among other actors.
Perhaps that’s what The Lab does, or at least attempts: an exercise in a different attitude. One in which the world doesn’t have to immediately reveal itself as a graspable object, but can continue to vibrate, shift, and evade. Where wonder is more important than control. Where not everything needs to be understood to be valuable.
Annemijn Rijk, July 16, 2025
Thanks to philosopher Dr. Max van der Heijden for the valuable exchange on this topic.