A Brief Introduction

My research can be divided into two broad categories. One the one hand I am seeking to develop a theory of art and aesthetics that is consistent with contemporary science by combining ideas and findings from philosophy, sociology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and economics. On the other hand I take an active interest in globalization, economics and urbanization, which feeds and interacts with my creative work.

My background is in mathematics, or rather, econometrics, and philosophy. This sort of explains why I believe in models or numbers. I don’t believe in universal laws, apart from those found in mathematics, physics and chemistry. I do believe in certain tendencies or propensities. This is what data analysis and a model can reveal.

My thinking has been influenced by post-structuralist philosophy and complexity theory. One of the central tenets in complexity theory is that the interaction of a set of simple rules can give rise to complex behavior. Such behavior is often termed emergent, because its seeds cannot be found in any of the individual rules, but only in their interaction.

Reading philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy and more recently Peter Sloterdijk, Jacques Ranciere and Slavoj Zizek, has made me aware of the historical contingency of the categories that guide our thinking and of the philosophical notions embedded in the language with which we try to explain the world and express our thoughts.

My research is truly interdisciplinary. I believe that specialization is one of the curses of contemporary science. Fields of inquiry get ever narrower and most scientists don't have or take the time to also read about what's happening in other areas of research.

Interdisciplinarity for me does not stop at different scientific disciplines. I believe that we would cut ourselves off from many insights if we would ignore the information embedded in novels, works of art and other cultural artefacts.