Our first work together in 2001 was a music video for the Amsterdam rock band Coparck. It started as a broccoli forest turned wild, but our ideas on ‘routine’, when working together, propelled to the use of animated stock photography, as a flattened orderly world run amok. This photographic universe was comprised of business handshakes, happy couples on the beach to suburbs and office life. You can still see it on YouTube. Looking back, we still think it's a wonderfully edited video, with many omens for the future. I like especially the plane taking off at 1:55. Later on, we made another video clip for Copark, World of Tomorrow. The quality of the videos on YouTube is terrible, though.

Our work together is more ambitious, and probably also more ambiguous since it is linked to two people. We cannot create something together we could expect to make but we can be sure we will make something we like to create.

There are many artists that started studying philosophy, science or other fields – something that definitely enriches one’s art practice. Still, we think it's important to learn to create and develop your ideas at the same time and to have your work seriously observed and critiqued in relation to art, design history, society, the world, etc. and to learn from other (struggling) artists. So definitely, yes, and maybe no – sometimes, the abundance of understanding can make you partly blinded.

Both. As a kid, Margit dreamt about being a writer, but during the day she wanted to be a concert pianist. Persijn wanted to be a travelling magician with a monkey. All interests are combined in our artistic careers.

Each medium has its own charm, but in each medium, we try to capture a sense of time passing, of reproduction, and of the virtual. That's equally possible in all media, it's possible to copy paste in painting as well as in Photoshop as well as in video. We think it's important, as artist(s), to rethink your position – and the position of your work – amongst all the stray images that surround us in the endless embedding, retweeting, referencing, etc. The feedback loop that we are trapped into. We think it's of utter importance that artists understand the new possibilities that constantly recreate our world and shape our imagination and reality. If we as artists will not fill this void, it will be pervaded by others and imagination will become a commodity.

Both. We are sculpting our thoughts and thinking about our work.

In The Past Future, we appropriated imagery from science-fiction films, so it's all a décor and a reference within a reference within a reference. Nothing is ‘real'. Yes, we set out to make this piece with only fictional material, but at the same time, we do believe in the future-telling and future-creating powers of fiction, especially in blockbusters that are consumed by millions. We don't consider fact and fiction as oppositions. Really, we think this subjacent social critique is embedded within the way we think and hence is part of every part of the process and the result.

Ruins in Reverse is a work in which we appropriated décors from sci-fi movies to show the history of the future as foretold by the blockbusters of before. So, it's actually a look into the past. How was the future imagined in the past century? Future visions, in sci-fi movies, have changed from modernist, futuristic skylines to apocalyptic wastelands over the years. We think that tells something about the way imagination leads to certain beliefs and ideologies. It's fascinating to see how the idea about the future is fixed within time periods and only changes on the surface.
Right now, we are in a time that we consider very ornamental, specifically in the way we are only able to see a vast amount of endless surface, and nothing more. The surface is patterned, copied and posted, it's immutable and morphs constantly, it's motionless while moving and it’s practically impenetrable. Everything that is behind this surface seems to be not there. The construction behind is made unnoticeable.

We created Prime Time Paradise fifteen years ago, a work about the hypnotic powers of television, in which a drone-like camera flies over and penetrates a frozen landscape of television stills. Still, it's a poignant work, even more so in a time of hyper-connectivity, in a world that's constantly changing. We think our work is not only about this moment in time but also about perception in general.

Gustave Flaubert in his paradoxical lyrical critique on the merging of literature and life, while he himself seems to be taken away with his own writing.

We've never been fully aware of being constrained in a way that would stop us from making the thing we needed to make. The constraints can be used as a tool. Our critique is often hidden under the veil of (the depiction of) nature.

We've had solo exhibitions before, but with this larger show, we could really build a story in which many lines converse – the mythical woodlands of Białowieża, the history and journey of the song Nature Boy that originated in the forest, and the story of the virtual perception of time and space. But perhaps, it is mostly a story about contemporary fiction and reality, about cognitive escapism and unconscious realism or the other way around.

‘Point cloud’ is a term from 3D scanning and photogrammetry. It describes measurements in virtual space that can, in turn, be rendered as 3D objects and printed. It's only the shape: the points literally refer to points in space, and not to volumes with mass and weight. It's actually a three-dimensional hollow map that represents and ‘maps' the content, with a photographic texture laid over it as a drapery surface over a hollow mass. Seen in that way, point clouds are ‘nothing', only representing information, so in it selves utterly fictional but at the same time as precise a copy as can be.
‘Old growth’ is its exact opposite. It’s the word for primaeval forest – a forest that is quite untouched by human hands. In this ecology, trees have a far-stretching underground network of communicating roots, which make the trees regenerate in the case of viruses and sickness, reabsorbing the dead trees the way it has for millennia. Everything is matter, vivid with life in this forest: once something dies, it will be taken over by a wild variety of species, it never dies. 

We hope we can share some feelings, some ideas and spark some or more imagination. Perhaps to show nature as a mirror, to show the void of our screens, the daily doses of blankness that circulates time and again, but furthermore the time-travelling, cross-bordering, all-encompassing possibilities of music and image; the pitfalls of imagination and its immense positive possibilities; missing and filling; losing and loving.

We're working on a virtual musical, in which we'll depart from Frank Sinatra's 1939 hit song All, or Nothing at All – a song about control and the fear of losing it, a song that mesmerized millions. Originally performed from an utterly male perspective, the song will be transformed into an alternative, rebellious version from a female point of view. The singer will appear as an avatar, multiplied into masses that ramble through town, following a choreography of a mix between the grand-scale human as machine–musicals of the '30s and the mass demonstrations of recent times.
In collaboration with the local animation school in Viborg, we will develop a virtual game-like structure of the city of Viborg. Viborg, with Viking settlements dating back to the 8th century and with a name that literally translated means 'holy fort', is the perfect décor for this virtual musical army.

Crossing the Rainbow Bridge is the first artwork we’ve made together, it's a split-screen musical about our fictional selves, both locked up in our own screens and thoughts. It's the only work that we perform in ourselves. As this is an honest picture of our fictional love story played by ourselves, it's a wonderful mix of fiction and reality. And it still seems to make some sense.