Jaap Drupsteen – Designer | Explorer

To celebrate fifty-years as a practicing designer, Museum Hilversum held a retrospective exhibition on the work of Jaap Drupsteen. The exhibition showcases Jaap Drupsteen fruitful career and divides this into three sections.

The top floor presents his early audiovisual design (VPRO, Hadimassa etc) and printed objects (money, passport etc). Being a designer for screen, Drupsteen naturally starts working on black, hence the visitor enters a completely black space displaying only video work. After this the visitors moves to white – print work. Also on show are the original title rolls, all made by hand, inspiring a scrolling intro wall.

Since the exhibition features a large amount of video work a special audio system, the Sennheiser guidePORT, is used.  With the headphones on the user walks towards a screen or into a particular area and the audio is automatically heard. This prevents multiple audio tracks clashing and turning the exhibition space into musical chaos.

The Music Theatre is the second floor and displays many of Drupsteen’s theatre productions he created specifically for television. To create these unusual and inventive productions he became revolutionary in his use of chroma keying – the blue/green screen effect. To demonstrate this the visitor can experience live chroma keying by standing in a blue screen area and magically being positioned into one of Drupsteen’s works.

The lower floor presents his most recent work through two large scale projections. These are audiovisual compositions created for DJ and orchestral visuals and use a software developed by Drupsteen himself to achieve a perfect sync between image and sound.

Jaap Drupsteen Designer Explorer

Jaap Drupsteen, legendary Dutch designer/video artist was revolutionary in the use of chroma keying, also know as the blue screen effect. This technique allowed him to superimpose actors or elements into totally different environments.

An accompanying app allows the reader to experience chroma keying firsthand. The app contains a library of video clips from Drupsteen’s productions that can be superimposed onto the solid blue book, thus bringing the monograph to life whilst explaining his process.

Video productions form the majority of Drupsteen’s oeuvre meaning every second holds a uniquely beautiful graphic image. Unlike the traditional graphic designer, Drupsteen creates twenty-five incredible images per second.

Consequently, the inside pages present over 400 stills rarely seen as individual frames, revealing their incredible colour and detail, emphasised by the fact many were created before the use of computers.

Download Jaap Drupsteen from the Apple App Store.

This book was part of the exhibition Jaap Drupsteen – Designer | Explorer  that we also designed.

The gift of Sound and Vision

This farewell gift for the departing president of the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision) translates video and sound across 600 pages. Segments of television programmes are reproduced frame by frame making them still comprehendible even when printed. As well as the vast collection of imagery the book contains a single of David Bowie’s Sound and Vision, pop-ups, a DVD, several flip booklets and a RFID tag all bringing the printed page to life.