A painter who shaped light against visual pollution

Livinus van de Bundt (1909–1979) is a key figure in the early history of media art in the Netherlands. His videographics are among the first abstract images made by a Dutch artist using video technology. His oeuvre reveals a restless curiosity across techniques and media – he never belonged to a single movement, nor confined himself to one discipline. What does run through the work, from beginning to end, is a fascination with light.

Trained as a painter and graphic artist, Livinus spent a year in 1930s Paris studying at Atelier 17. Under the direction of Bill Hayter, the atelier treated printmaking as an artistic method in its own right rather than a means of reproduction. Here Livinus became acquainted with surrealism and absorbed the studio's ethos of experimenting with new techniques. Years later, in 1957, an exhibition of his graphic work was held at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; reviews of the show noted the influence of surrealism and Picasso, traces of those early Paris years.

After the war, Livinus developed into an avant-garde artist. He turned to abstract photography and slide projections, exploring methods that let him shape light in different ways. He devised his own photographic procedure, which he called photopeinture: in place of a paintbrush he used a glass fibre rod, discovering he could capture light beams and transfer them onto a light-sensitive surface. In 1964 he won the Sikkens Prize for his light paintings.

The same impulse ran through the videografieken, the video-art prints father and son made by stilling single frames from their moving work and printing them onto paper, transparent film and light boxes – a second, lesser-known body of work now held in the LI-MA archive and only recently the subject of research.

The first generation of Dutch video art

Inspired by Nam June Paik, Livinus began experimenting with video in 1970, looking for ways to combine the moving image with sound. Van de Bundt was the first to build his own video synthesiser, in order to create electronic light paintings, marking the beginning of Dutch video art. His son Jeep ven de Bundt (b. 1951) was a musician working with sound, and the two began to experiment together – giving rise to the first generation of Dutch video artists.

Behind his experiments lay a conviction. As art historian David Koniuszek argues, Livinus saw television as flooding daily life with trivial, commercial imagery, a “visual pollution” that dulled people's capacity to really look. He called the television set “the altar of the home”, and set out to turn the medium against itself: to use image and sound not to sell or distract, but to slow the viewer down and return them to a more conscious, contemplative kind of attention. Beeldmuziek was the means: image and sound fused into a single experience meant to act on the viewer's state of mind.

Alongside his artistic practice, Livinus founded an art school in The Hague, the Vrije Academie and served as its artistic director until 1964. Shaped by the ideas of Maria Montessori, the academy was known for its open approach. It remained in existence for 68 years, closing in 2015.

Jeep van de Bundt

If Livinus brought the fascination with light, Jeep brought the sound that set it moving. A trained musician – he studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and spent the late 1960s and 1970s playing and recording as a drummer and percussionist – Jeep supplied the music that drove the video works.

In Moiré and the works around it, the audio signal was fed directly into the equipment and used to generate and distort the picture: a drum hit, a cymbal, a bass line became the literal source of what appeared on screen. The collaboration between father and son began even earlier, in the 1960s, with Beat and Beams, a live light show in which microphones rigged to Jeep's drum kit triggered banks of lights with every strike, an early audiovisual experiment that prefigured the video work to come.

Jeep handled the layering too. Working with a four-track tape recorder, he could record new instruments back over existing tracks, building sound up against the moving image and tuning the two until they locked. He went on to exhibit internationally as a graphic artist through the 1980s, the videografiek prints among that output. He now lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Relationship to MonteVideo

Livinus's work did more than open up a new medium – it also set an institution in motion. In 1978, René Coelho founded the MonteVideo gallery, inspired directly by Livinus, and opened with an exhibition of his work. Other artists soon followed, drawn from across the visual arts and beginning to experiment with video themselves.

What began as a small gallery grew into a centre for media art – producing, distributing and promoting the work, and making professional equipment available to artists at low rates. Over the decades the institution changed name and shape: from MonteVideo to the Netherlands Media Art Institute, and today to LI-MA. Throughout, its purpose has held steady – to keep the work of media artists alive, accessible, and in circulation.

Highlighted Work: Moiré

Moiré is six minutes of colour and sound that seem to generate each other. Blue blocks edged in red drift across a green field, pulverise, regroup into a grid, fall into a zig-zag, and shift colour, driven by Jeep’s electronic score. The title names an optical effect: the shimmer that appears when one fine pattern is laid over another. The whole work is an attempt to produce that effect not on the screen but in the viewer, by making image and sound cross and resolve into beeldmuziek.

The process of making Moiré is remarkable. The pulsing blocks of the opening come from a Pong console wired directly into a television: father and son fed sound from a tone generator into the set, and the audio signal itself made the shapes move. The strange colours came from physically detuning the TV's RGB convergence, reaching into the back of the set and pulling the red, green and blue out of alignment by hand. The second half is stranger still. Its rippling fields are hundreds of photographic slides, each one shot from a monitor, then re-filmed one frame at a time on a 16mm camera over a single all-night session: a stop-motion animation built slide by slide on a lightbox, ordered in advance in the hope it would produce the moiré shimmer once it ran. The green background that now feels so characteristic was added last, when the film was transferred to video.

The effect was achieved with a machine Livinus and Jeep built themselves, a primitive video synthesiser they called the Lumodinamiese Masjiene (lumodynamic machine): lenses, lamps and electronics controlled from a keyboard. Livinus housed such installations in tall metal cabinets with transparent fronts, tightly sealed to keep the construction hidden from view.

The images were recorded from a CRT monitor onto open-reel tape for high colour saturation; René Coelho later transferred those reels to U-matic, and the work has since passed through successive preservation steps into LI-MA's collection. Moiré premiered on 25 February 1978 as part of the opening exhibition of the MonteVideo gallery in Amsterdam, the first gallery in the Netherlands dedicated to video art, and the institution from which LI-MA descends.

On view now

Works by Livinus & Jeep van de Bundt are on view in Pioneers of Media Art: The First Years of MonteVideo at Nxt Museum, Amsterdam, developed in collaboration with LI-MA – on view until 10 September 2026.

Header: Livinus & Jeep van de Bundt, Percussie VI (1977). In collection: LI-MA. Thumbnail: Livinus van de Bundt.