WOUT

/waʊt/

Wout Fierens is a visual artist, designer, and coder from Belgium who is currently based in Spain. His creative work explores collaboration with machines and autonomous agents through generative art and design processes. His projects vary from interactive installations to ink on paper, objects d'art to furniture, and spatial design.

Education

1997-2002
Bachelor's degree at the Design Academy Eindhoven at the Men and Living department (Human-Centered Design, Sustainability, Innovation and Experimentation).
1999
Socrates exchange programme at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Furniture Design, Screen Printing and Hand-Drawn Animation).

Noteworthy Events

2022 talk
Guest speaker at the University of Oxford, OxBAT Conference, Oxford Blockchain, Art & Technology Conference.
2022-present exhibition
OpenStructures Web Platform v1 at the Design Museum in Ghent, Belgium (permanent collection).
2018 award
FSC Project Award 2018 for QuadriVille, a modular generative design project.
2015-2016 exhibition
“Who's afraid of red, white and gold” group exhibition Kunst Gallery in Sitges, Barcelona.
2007-2015
Work and travel around Europe and Mexico as a digital nomad.
2003-2005 exhibition
Traveling group exhibition with the Poetry Floor in The Netherlands.
2003-2004 exhibition
Confituur Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium; artist-owned art gallery.
2003 exhibition
“Wohnträume – Wohnräume” group exhibition at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Switzerland.
2003 exhibition
Group exhibition in Cultureel Centrum Berchem, Belgium.
2002 exhibition
“Ideaal! wonen: Smart Alice” group exhibition at Centraal Museum Utrecht, The Netherlands.
2002 exhibition
Spotlight exhibition at the Entrance of Interior Biennale Kortrijk, Belgium.
2002 exhibition
“Young Fairytales” group exhibition at Interior Biennale Kortrijk, Belgium.
2002 award
Design for Europe award 2002 for Tilthouse, a tiny housing unit.
2001 exhibition
“Twisted Perception” group exhibition in Antwerp, Belgium.
1997 exhibition
“Let There Be Light” group exhibition in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

In software

Over 20 years experience as a Software Engineer and with DevOps. Most used languages (in that order): Ruby, JavaScript, Crystal, PHP, TypeScript, Python, Shell and Haskell, plus all web-related languages, databases and related tooling.

Senior Software Engineer since 2004 at zwartopwit.be, a Belgian printing company specialising in sustainable and artisanal printing.

Noteworthy Open-Source Contributions

2023-present javascript svg
Creator of punt.js, a graphics library focused on vector output for pen plotters and Gcode driven machines (to be released early 2025).
2023-2024 cardano
Author of the DAT Metadata Standard to efficiently store generative art on-chain on Cardano.
2022-present crystal
Creator and maintainer of base_x.cr, a Crystal shard for base encoding/decoding.
2021-present crystal
Creator and maintainer of Rosetta, a blazing-fast internationalization (i18n) library for Crystal with compile-time key lookup.
2021-2022 Crystal
Contributer to Shrine.cr, the Crystal version of Ruby's Shrine.rb.
2020-present crystal
Creator and maintainer of Mollie.cr, the unofficial Crystal shard wrapping the Mollie Payments API.
2020-2023 crystal
Contributor to Avram, Lucky Framework's Database ORM.
2020-2023 crystal
Contributor to Lucky Framework, a full-featured web framework for Crystal.
2012-2017 javascript svg
Creator and maintainer of SVG.js, a lightweight library for manipulating and animating SVG. Versions 1.x and 2.x.
2011-2024 javascript svg
Creator and maintainer of Raphaël Zoom, a plugin for the Raphaël JS library.
2011-2023 javascript svg
Creator and maintainer of Raphaël SVG Import, a plugin for the Raphaël JS library.
2009-2015 javascript
Creator and maintainer of Q.js, a UI toolkit for Prototype.js (obsolete).
2009-2012 ruby rails
Creator and owner of Paspartout, a portfolio website builder for artists and designers (sold in 2012, shut down in 2018).