You are about to enter a room, not a page.
It listens. It answers in light and sound. Headphones recommended.
Lysergic is Jasper Veldkamp — a light and sound artist making participatory installations: works that only come alive when people gather around them. Built with addressable light, sensors, TouchDesigner and spatial sound, to pull people together, not apart.
Commissions open — request a project →
A participatory light art installation for Carbon Events’ 15-year anniversary. 120 bottom-lit glass jars in a wooden wall form a low-resolution screen; each guest draws on a jar and adds it, until together they spell the number 15.
Unveiled at Triple C, Amsterdam. It now hangs permanently in Carbon’s office, and keeps growing.
See the project →A two-metre sphere of hand-cut bamboo, skinned in stretched fabric, breathing slowly — red, almost asleep. Cameras read the crowd: as people start dancing it shifts to amber, and with a full circle it burns warm white through the haze.
The ritual is the interface. When the dancing stops, Sól falls back asleep, ready for the next group.
Read the full case study →
Lysergic is my artist name — I'm Jasper Veldkamp. I make participatory light and sound installations — working with addressable light, sensors, TouchDesigner, projection, spatial sound and music production — building environments that pull people together rather than apart, a deliberate inversion of how most technology operates.
Before the installations there were the rooms themselves. I grew up in De Rijp, a small village north of Amsterdam, and got out in my early twenties. I studied at SAE and spent years on the technical side of events and theatre — stagehand first, then sound engineer, then lighting tech — producing music and DJing the whole way through. Everything I make now is downstream of that: I learned how a room holds a crowd by running it from the back.
The rest of my education happened in Amsterdam's squatting scene. I spent years there organising around immigration rights, queer and trans rights, and the housing shortage that made all of it visible in the first place. Empty buildings sat locked while people slept outside; that contradiction is still the thing I keep coming back to.
When squatting was banned in the Netherlands, the work didn't stop — it needed a new legal shape. So I built one, and founded Stichting Bildung: a framework for giving empty spaces a new purpose instead of simply taking them. We turned a former church into a home for ten people and a social and cultural centre for everyone else. Theatre groups without a budget rehearsed there. A giveaway shop ran out of one room; out of another, people on low incomes collected fresh produce that would otherwise have been thrown away.
The building filled up fast, with people from every background in the city. It worked because it was never organised around difference — not race, not culture, not religion — but around what people actually had in common: needing somewhere to be, and something to make.
A foundation, a bank account, a rental agreement, minutes of meetings. The bureaucracy wasn't the point and it wasn't a compromise either — it was the cheapest available tool for holding ground.
Owners will negotiate over a use they can name. Framing it as purpose rather than occupation changed who was willing to sit down with us, and it is why the church stayed open for years instead of weeks.
None of it was programmed, announced or funded as an activity. It ran on the same footing as the water and the electricity: whoever was there kept it going, and it was open on days when nothing else was.
Nobody was asked where they were from or invited as a representative of anything. Difference was in the building constantly and was never the subject — which is the part that is hardest to reproduce on purpose.
A room you can be unfinished in is rarer than a room you can perform in. Rehearsal was the default use, not the warm-up: things got tried badly in front of whoever happened to be around.
I founded it and I can't tell you who made most of it happen. Everything that lasted was maintained by people who were never listed anywhere, and any account of it that has a single author is wrong.
I have a long history at Ruigoord — building projection mapping installations in the church, designing the visual environments for Wiltgroei and other parties held in the church and around the village. Beyond Ruigoord, my work has been shown at festivals including Berlin Atonal, where the intersection of experimental electronic music and immersive visual art is the central concern.
These days I'm building a fully self-sustainable house — land, animals, and a workshop for designing audiovisual art. The same impulse that drives the installations runs through the house: build the room you want to live in, with your own hands, using what's around you.
Sól is a new direction: moving from projection (light on surfaces) to sculpture (light as object), and from reactive visuals (responding to a performer) to participatory interaction (responding to the audience itself). The core question stays the same — can technology bring people closer together instead of pushing them apart?
For the physical build of Sól, I'm working with kikvors, a collective of makers, programmers and performers active across the Netherlands, who supported fabrication, install and the opening-night performance.
15, made for Carbon Events' 15-year anniversary, takes the same idea indoors: a wall of 120 lit jars that only becomes one image once every guest has added theirs.
From projection on surfaces → light as a held object.
From reactive (one performer) → participatory (the whole crowd).
Same question, different room: how do people choose to gather?
A self-organised group representing different artists in and around Amsterdam. We roll up to unexpected urban places — parks, underpasses, edges of canals — with a vintage cargo bike rigged for sound.
Mostly vinyl, sometimes live sets with hardware. We play the obscure.
