Hans Hoogerbrugge

Hans Hoogerbrugge, the fabulous Dutch digital artist, is gracing the net with his unique style. Originally producing paintings and cartoons, Hoogerbrugge discovered the internet in 1996 and began channeling much of his work in an online setting. 

Some of Hoogerbrugge’s most exciting online works lay within his videos.

In the mid 90's, Hoogerbrugge produced his "Modern Living Neurotica" series, 

 which very well may be his best known work. In each episode, Hoogerbrugge himself plays the main character, as he likes to refer to it as an "ongoing self portrait". The flat, black and white character bares a striking resemblance to the artist, and this character amongst others like it seems to pop up in all of Hoogerbrugge’s work. The earlier episodes of “Neurotica” consist of animated gifs, but eventually evolved into macromedia flash which allowed the viewer to interact with the piece. This was his first use of interactivity on the internet with his artwork and shows how Hoogerbrugge's art changed as technology became easier to work with. When clicking a thumbnail to the left, a short interactive video plays displaying themes of neuroticism. Simple and to the point, these videos leave the viewer satisfied and looking to see what will happen when clicking upon the next one. Hoogerbrugge’s early works with the animated gifs are not as exciting as the interactive flash video which start about half way through.

“Hotel”, another interactive flash based video series, differs from Neruotica because the viewer actually navigates through a storyline with different chapters. In this series, a crazy doctor conducts various experiments on volunteers, and the viewer is able to witness what happens to the patients as the doctor does various things to them. When clicking on different characters within the room, the viewer starts to feel mad as well from all of the awful sounds and strange dialogues and movements. Again, the familiar black and white themes with minimal movement and dialogue become the norm. It is easy to distinguish Hoogerbrugge’s trademark style after navigating through his website for only several minutes.

“Nails” features the same sort of characters featured in all of the other videos, where a self-portrait-esque character does various small tricks as the viewer chooses thumbnails from up above. On Hoogerbrugge’s personal website, “Nails” is described as: “a continuation of Hoogerbrugges Neurotica Series in his exploration of human emotion. The lack of visual backgrounds and borders of the NAILS animations however gives these works an even stronger feeling of an a internal struggle rather then an actual fysical battle.” 

Alongside of these videos, Hoogerbrugge has a seperate website, prostress, which

Hoogerbrugge calls “a daily comic about life” in which he discusses things he does or thinks about. Hoogerbrugge calls it prostress because people have so much going on in their lives it’s hard to focus. Each day he posts three interactive images with text, usually regarding pop culture or “fucking around with celebrities”. In an interview Hoogerbrugge commented on how “creativity is not a thing you think about, it’s something that happens”. He goes on to say that he has to come up with an idea every day for this website, and sometimes his ideas are bad ones. This shows that Hoogerbrugge is refreshingly human.

Hoogerbruge combines many disciplines within his work. He finds minimal differences between online animation or illustration because they all involve the same creative processes. He also does not believe that disciplines should be brought in with prejudgemnets of what they should do.

“I stopped making plans but I really would like to become really rich” says Hoogerbrugge in the interview, which tells us he is a very straight forward man who says what he thinks. This idea is very much reflected within his artwork. In an internet blog from basement.org, a viewer suggests that “what’s great about Hans’ work is that it doesn’t serve any other end other than to entertain you. It’s not navigation. It’s not informational. It’s a mildly interactive form of art that is both stylish and engaging”. Another blogger comments that “his art can be macabre, confusing, and yet always amusing”.

In the same interview, Hoogerbrugge mentioned that he never saw himself working for a band like the Pet Shop Boys, but they contacted him and he ended up directing their video “Love etc”. This video is awesome because it features Hoogerbrugge's usual characters yet the video still has roots to the original band. The characters and designs are set to a fun, bouncy beat in which his designs make perfect imagery. It is also a nice change to see more colors being intermixed with Hoogerbrugge's usual black and white. This tells us that Hoogerbrugge can take on the challenge of a full length music video, so who knows what he will do next. A blogger on globalsoul2soul commented on this video saying “Hoogerbrugge is humorous, innovative and refreshing”

Hoogerbrugge is an inspiring net artist whose work is exceptional and made possible because it is in fact on the internet. Work like this would not be the same held in a gallery. It's greatness can be shared by all because of it's availability via internet which makes it more fun for everyone.