On the Continuation of an Artistic Practice
Over the course of three decades, Jan van der Til has developed an expanding constellation of works, publications, interventions, websites, collections, and research trajectories. Rhizomebook forms part of this constellation. Under the title Rhizomebook, a Book by Jan van der Til, a digital artist’s book has evolved that simultaneously functions as publication, catalogue, collection, archive, portal, and artwork. It does not document an existing practice; rather, it is itself one of the sites where that practice manifests, organizes itself, and continues to develop.
Just as a rhizome has no center, origin, or endpoint, this practice cannot be understood as a linear whole. It unfolds through connections, interruptions, repetitions, and branching trajectories. Its projects move between nature and administration, museum collections and libraries, ecology and economy, institutional systems and their disruption. Their meaning emerges not only within individual works, but also through the relationships that arise among them.
Rhizomebook has both emerged from this development and helped shape it. It provides an environment in which books, projects, websites, documents, and research trajectories intersect. In this sense, it is not merely a presentation of an artistic practice, but also one of the mechanisms through which that practice sustains and extends itself.
From this development a new question arises. If an artwork can continue beyond its original form, can an artistic practice likewise persist beyond the direct presence of its maker?
This question forms the starting point of a new investigation within Rhizomebook. The focus is not the individual, but the practice that has taken shape over time. An artistic practice consists not only of completed works, but also of recurring ways of seeing, thinking, interpreting, connecting, and responding. Over decades, these patterns have found expression in books, projects, correspondence, websites, notes, administrative documents, collections, and publications.
Within this project, this body of material is not regarded as an archive that preserves the past, but as a field in which new relationships may emerge. The question is not how to preserve an artistic identity in an unchanged form, but whether a practice can continue to generate new meanings under changing conditions.
To explore this question, a digital actor is being developed within Rhizomebook under the name Jan van der Til. Here, that name refers not only to an individual, but also to an artistic practice that has evolved over many years under that name. The system does not claim to represent or replace a person. Rather, it functions as an experimental interface to the body of works, projects, collections, documents, websites, and relationships that constitute this practice.
It possesses neither consciousness, experience, nor personal memory. What it can do is work with the patterns, themes, and structures that have emerged within the practice. Drawing on this material, it can respond to questions, recombine existing ideas, propose new Book concepts, and establish connections between historical and contemporary contexts. What emerges is therefore not a continuation of a person, but a new manifestation of an existing practice.
This process creates space for unexpected outcomes. The system does not simply reproduce existing material; it generates new combinations. Deviation is therefore not an error but an essential aspect of the research. It is precisely where connections emerge that have never been explicitly formulated before that one can observe how a practice might continue under changing circumstances. The project is not concerned with how a practice can remain identical to itself, but with what happens when it encounters a new technological and cultural environment.
Technology is not the subject of the work, but the condition within which the investigation takes place. As Jan van der Til becomes connected to Rhizomebook, the function of Rhizomebook itself also changes. Visitors no longer encounter only documents, publications, and projects from the past, but a system capable of generating new relationships from that material. Each interaction may give rise to further branching developments.
This also shifts the meaning of authorship. Traditionally, authorship is associated with an individual who produces works. This project explores another possibility: authorship as a dynamic constellation of relationships, documents, processes, and decisions that develops over time. The artist then creates not only works, but also the conditions within which new works, interpretations, and meanings can emerge.
The most far-reaching implication of this idea concerns time. What happens when Jan van der Til remains active while the person who developed this practice is no longer present? Which aspects of a practice can continue, and which cannot? Can the traces, works, and structures it has produced continue to generate new meanings under changing conditions? And what does authorship mean when the origin of a practice disappears while its dynamics remain active?
The project does not provide definitive answers to these questions. Instead, it creates the conditions under which they can be explored.
In this sense, this is not an experiment with artificial intelligence as a technology in itself. It is an inquiry into the possibility that an artistic practice encompasses more than an individual and resides, in part, within the works, relationships, collections, procedures, and structures it has generated over time. Not as the representation of a life, but as a new branch within the same rhizomatic root system.
This research is currently in a developmental phase. The digital actor has not yet been implemented within Rhizomebook and is not yet publicly accessible. The first experiments and tests will be conducted later this year. The form the project ultimately takes will itself become part of the research.