This article was taken from the December 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
For his latest work, Arnhem-based Dutch artist Levi van Veluw recreated his childhood dining room using 20,000 1.6cm squared wooden tiles, invited his family for supper, then covered them in tiles, too. "My mother, father, brother and sister spent the whole day sitting in their suits," van Veluw says. "My mother actually started hyperventilating."
It is the last piece in van Veluw's Origin of the Beginning series. "The blocks stand for the urge to organise everything. There was not a lot of structure at home, that's why I had the urge for control." Van Veluw, 27, refused to use any digital manipulation -- or actors: "I thought putting my family in the situation would be the best way of explaining the basic fact of my existence. I could have used actors and no-one would know. But it's not about visuals -- the story is real. These people are real and they're sitting there. It's an uncomfortable situation and that's what it really is."
It took a three-person team a month to create each suit.
The room itself took 11 hours to make, van Veluw gluing on each tile by hand, hence their slightly wonky appearance. "You see the struggle of someone putting blocks in a line. That's similar to how people organise things in life. You try to organise things but it never works -- you're not a computer."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
