Photo by https://mickmichel.art

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.

A series of profile pictures of Wout taken by mickmichel.com

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).