November 29, 2025.

Interview about AI-Art in the Saturday Newspaper NHD.
Text: José Pietens
Portret: Marcel Molle
Solo Exhibition: ‘Echoes from Tomorrow‘ in Zaansgroen.

Wat doet het ertoe hoe je iets maakt? Het gaat om het verhaal dat je wilt vertellen.

Link to: Noord Hollands Dagblad, zaterdag 29 november 2025.

Translation from the interview in NoordHollands Dagblad:

Original Dutch text by José Pietens
In daily life, Rein-Willem Gloudemans (58) and his wife Sabin Kech (57) create decorations and sets for major brands and companies such as Adidas, Akzo Nobel and Linda Magazine. In his free time, the Zaandam resident creates cinematic images of worlds that could exist in the near future. He does this with the help of art management intelligence.

Zaandam – Visitors to the annual T*Art exhibition by artist platform Tengel chose Gloudemans’ work as their favorite this spring. It is an image of a woman with stairs. In itself not immediately a spectacular subject, but thanks to Gloudemans’ use of AI, the scene has a somewhat science fiction feel. As if the viewer is taking a journey: the image of the future comes to the present, says the artist. That is why his first solo exhibition, on the weekend of December 6 and 7 in Zaansgroen, is called ‘Echoes from tomorrow’.

Gloudemans has not been making art with the help of AI, artificial intelligence, for very long. The artist, born and raised in Den Bosch, studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, among others. He started as a lighting designer, became a restoration painter, and now runs a company with his wife – textile artist Sabin Kech – that creates sets for theater, businesses, and magazines. In his spare time, Gloudemans painted, until two years ago when he started taking courses with a friend on the AI ​​program Midjourney. “The whole AI story is very American, and those images are often not what you want. Those fairytale-like, over-the-top images. By constantly adjusting and giving different commands, I get the image and the feeling that I have in my head.”

While ChatGPT regularly generates people with three legs and six fingers, Midjourney is, as far as he is concerned, best with people and animals. “But Midjourney makes mistakes too. Sometimes I remove them with Photoshop, sometimes I leave them in. In an image I made of an Iranian- or Indian-looking market, there are two people standing in the background. If you look closely, you can see that they aren’t people at all. I leave it like that. But if someone has three shoes, I do correct that.”

Matter
Gloudemans creates worlds that don’t exist, but could exist. He wonders what a city will look like in the future. For example, with timber construction – a form of building that has the wind at its back – and surveillance cameras, which are also increasingly becoming part of the streetscape. “Via prompts (commands to the AI ​​program, ed.), I dive deeper and deeper into the subject matter. This creates not only a beautiful image, but sometimes also a disturbing one. You see that something isn’t right, but you can’t put your finger on it. Now I am also working on images of what Zaandam will look like in the future. In the images, I look for what is possible and for what might be possible; it is almost an alternative reality.”