For anyone walking the streets of Amsterdam, his small bites of poetry spray painted around the city have become something of an angel on the shoulder to many of the cities residents. Whether its shining light in dark times, or simply providing observations or ideals when it is most needed, Laser 3.14 has become the dutch capitals unofficial social commentator. We caught up with the reclusive Artist in the middle of lockdown to talk origins, what drives his social narrative and what’s wrong with the movie industry /
TNO / Thanks for taking the time link and chat…it’s certainly strange days we are living through right now. Before we dive in to other stuff, is there anything in particular you have been missing during lock down?
Laser 3.14 / I was thinking about this earlier…I am a real movie buff. So I really miss that. Every week my best friend and I go see one or two movies and talk about them. So I really miss that. And she does too by the way.
I can imagine, what kind of movies are you into or is it a mix?
It's really a mix. A good movie is a good movie, I like all genres. My favourite genre is Science Fiction, but there's not a lot of that around at the moment.
Yeah there is a lack of good science fiction right now right. Or at least it does feel that way.
For sure, there is some great series as well of course, but I seem to miss those more cerebral films at the moment, it seems there is more action and general fiction.
Don’t you think that is indicative of the times we live in? I mean not to point out some obvious correlations with 80’s American cinema but we have recently had another Rambo movie, a Top Gun movie in due for release…not forgetting that Top Gun was one of the biggest US navy recruitment drivers during peace time in the last 40 years.
I have to be honest, I hadn’t thought about that. It sometimes feels like the companies who make movies underestimate the public’s intelligence. But then you look at films like The Joker, which is not a perfect film but it at least tries to take the viewers seriously. It blows up you know… and there is a message there.
That’s exactly what I loved about the Joker, the cause and effect cautionary tale. Which has never really happened in the Super hero film genre, not that I would class Joker as a super hero film of course. But you normally don’t get to see what creates the bad guys, you don’t know what drives them a lot of the time.
Right, I mean you sometimes get a glimmer but here they really dive into it and man you actually feel for the guy, You can understand him.
I wonder if anyone is still going to be going to the cinema when we get back out of this. But in terms of you being a big movie buff, does that ever feed into your work at all? Either consciously or sub-consciously?
Of course! Because I think as an artist, you’re a product of everything you experience. And music is another thing that I really love. I collect records, vinyl and I listen to a lot of music and all this stuff like movies, when I write, it seeps in. Let me explain it the other way. I didn't start out as a writer. I started more as a visual artist. So when I write, I see images in my head with what I'm saying, scenes with characters that are there and they play out, they share a line and I just write it down. You understand what I’m saying? Its not that I go down and write for writing's sake. But it's just these images that are connected with emotions, ideas, feelings, and sometimes it's just a little scene that plays out and I pick out a sentence from it. So yeah the cinematic aspect actually it’s always there.
“I'm just writing from my ideas or thoughts, from what I see at the moment”
I've been following your work for a little while now. And It's like one of those things when you see something you're like, yeah, that’s dope. You know, it makes sense. And a big part of what goes into the magazine is very much like that. And thats how I felt when I saw your work… There was a visceral reaction to it. But outside of music and film what else feeds your work or inspires you?
News, I read a lot of news. I watch a lot of what's going on in the world. I love politics. I always say I'm politically very homeless, so I'm neither on one side or the other, I just see what happens. But yeah it still fascinates me what's going on in that realm, but also socially what’s happening right now. And I comment on that because it's everywhere around us and you are part of society. All the information and all the situations that happen, it's going to trigger something. It’s been said that you can look at some of my work from 10 years ago and you get a picture of what was happening either socially or politically, like these small messages correlate to a certain period. But it’s not like thats the only these thing I write about. I write about love, most of the time unrequited love. I am not sure why. It’s the idea of sharing these thoughts, what I think and feel, and if it connects to people then I am very happy. I have had people say to me a few times, I was feeling really down or depressed and I saw one of your lines and it really spoke to me. And that helped me through a hard period. That’s really great!
Like a serendipitous therapist…
Yeah yeah…without the fees haha.
Exactly. And that's kind of interesting, that you can be that little symbol of hope sometimes. That you can shine a light for people when they are in their darkest spot is a really nice analogy.
Yeah. And it's not something that I consciously do because when I'm writing, I'm not like, Oh, I'm going to help people think this or that about it. I'm just writing from my ideas or thoughts, from what I see at the moment.
Well I guess it would be hard to remain impartial if you did approach it like that.
Yeah, I don't know if it would work. I reckon the moment I start to overthink it or hope for a certain effect or care too much what people might think, I probably can't do it. Because then it's not spontaneous, it takes away the honesty of the work. Do you understand where I'm coming from?
For sure, and I find that interesting because obviously a lot of your art exists (or at least in terms of people taking pictures of it) on Instagram. And I find Instagram both the darkest place in the world, and also the brightest. But more over it fuels the competition trap…the need to get more likes or to program your content to what people want to see or hear in order to remain relevant or get that level of engagement. And a lot of people get sucked into that. And I thought it was refreshing that they were taking away likes for certain markets, or at least trialling it. And I thought that was actually brilliant because it creates a more honest place, and gets rid of the need for people to want their posts to get likes and the anxiety that brings.
Right, completely, I agree with you on that.
I mean you use Instagram and obviously some artists really don't fuck with it at all. Some artists do, and they make it a platform for themselves to reach people. I have no comments on what is right here, but what are your thoughts on that whole area in terms of art and how artists interact with places like Instagram?
What I like about it is that I can discover good artists that would be out of my reach otherwise. So sometimes I scroll and I just see these amazing pieces of art that I normally wouldn't have even noticed if I didn’t find them in a book. So I think it's a great way to expand your knowledge of what's going on in and around the art world. And that's what I like. I use it, but I'm not one of these guys that is very much interested in how many likes I get, or I don’t. Once or twice I went into a discussion with people on this. But I just want to post it and forget about it. It's not my main drive to be on Instagram, you know?
It's very seductive though isn't it?
Completely! But honestly, the thing you said before, I understand the danger, because if you’re driven by how much people will like you or if you’re saying the right or wrong thing then It's going to drive you insane, and it's going to constrict so much positive energy out of you. I try to keep away from that as much as possible. For me I try to use it more as a catalog that people can interact with if that makes sense?
Yeah. Somewhere people can go and reference the work like a library or something?
Exactly, so you can see what I was doing at that time, you know? But I don't post any personal stuff. It’s just art.
You also keep your identity pretty low key. And I mean, I don't know how the legals work in Amsterdam, but obviously over here in the UK, graffiti is not legal per say. I assume is it the same in Amsterdam?
It's still illegal, but what I'm doing is this grey area you know. I used to paint on everything when I was growing up, but everything was covered anyway, so it didn't really matter. But when I started to do the poetry, I started on walls and all the surfaces. Then I also started to write on wood. And what I noticed when I was writing on wood, which actually frustrated me in the beginning, I would write something and the next day I wanted to go and take a picture and it would be gone. It would be taken down and I was getting very frustrated by it. But I also came to the conclusion that it's also very interesting because I connected it with the idea that it has this here today gone tomorrow effect. And that you cant put an expiry date on it. So I started incorporating that more.
Were people collecting them at this point?
No it was like builders finishing jobs or they were just being taken away. I don’t think they were being collected at this point.
Is it happening now, people taking the work away to collect?
I think it happens now because people maybe see a certain value in the work…it comes down to if they can physically take it. And If so, then it probably does happen.
So how does your work exist within the gallery system then…as it exists on a street level on a canvas that is technically the property of someone else?
When I started working in the nineties. I was already doing exhibitions with galleries, but under my own name. It was different work. So when I started to do the poetry here on the streets, I also thought like ‘how do I translate it to gallery work? It took me like a long time to figure that out and I suppose I still haven’t exactly. I just started using different techniques for it; because I thought that there should be a difference between what you do on the street and the work in the gallery. With the work on the street, the effect is totally different because you have the light, sunlight, the weather, people walking on the streets. You just have a completely different thing that is going on.
So if you move it to the gallery, you need to translate it in a different way, but don't make it too different that it loses the connection. But it was so hard for me to define. And yeah, there should be a difference between the work that is for consumption and then for the consumers…the work that is consumed on the streets. I have to say I’ve been asked this before, and I find it such a hard question to answer because I’m not fully at the answer yet. I'm still in the phase of figuring it out, but I think I am coming quite close at the moment.
How long has that process taken? How long have you been doing this?
Exactly 20 years now.
Wow! OK, and I am assuming most of your work is in Amsterdam? Or have you managed to work a lot in other countries?
Yeah in fact I was tagging in and around east London 12 or 15 years ago because I was there every month for like a year on and off. I met some good people there in the scene.
Is any of your work still there?
No I think most of it has gone. Shoreditch has changed a lot right? It’s like Disneyland now compared to then. Back then there was still Banksy’s and a lot of galleries in the area. I loved it back then.
“I remember when I started and people loathed it. but I always explained, you have to get into the culture and understand why we do it”
So just going back to the wider graffiti culture, I think it’s quite misunderstood on the greater scale by people outside of the scene? It was seen as a bit of a nuisance, kind of similar in many ways to how skateboarding was. When I was a kid we used to get kicked off everything, we were seen as pests, you know, just trashing stuff. And it was never really appreciated as an art form or an outlet for the youth in the same way. I think people never used to understand that we were doing it for a reason and it wasn't just to trash something. I think that it’s now kind of changed a bit but then it goes into a grey area with your work where it’s easier to digest for the population who see it and it offers some thing positive or thought provoking to a larger extent.
Yeah completely, I remember when I started and people loathed it, but I always explained, you have to get into the culture and understand why we do it. And it's not just tagging. It's also acknowledging that you're there, that you're part of the city. It's also a discipline because I understand it, and for some people who don’t have a trained eye, it's just scribbles. I can see if that's a good tag or a trashy tag, or that one is amazing.
So for me, if you learn to read it in a certain way, it becomes something else. When I started doing the tags, I made a conscious decision not to do it in a tag style, I used capital letters because I knew people didn't understand it. I wanted it to be more readable because my thoughts were that graffiti writers, write for graffiti writers. The people or the public around it either gets it, and that’s good, or they don’t. But generally you are mainly writing for other graffiti writers first. So I thought, since I'm going to write poetry, whether you like it or not it has to be relatable for everybody and it opens the world a bit more to the work you know.
Yeah for sure, and in terms of like how far afield have you managed to work, as in terms of internationally?
Internationally, hmm…I've recently been in Hong Kong to do some work with Denham. And yeah I also went around tagging, which was the most scary thing to do to be honest.
Yeah I guess when you go to a new city, you have to understand that the ecosystem and culture, or how the political and legal system work right?
For sure. I was in St. Petersburg and before I went I asked some people, do they know some graffiti writers out there? I got in contact with a guy who was very nice, but a quiet guy. We met up in front of the hotel and we went through the city, but he warned me like, okay, I checked out your work, don't write anything political. You can write anything you like, just don’t do political stuff because they really don't like it here. So that was also a bit nerve wrecking because Russian jails were something I really wanted to avoid. I hope with all the coronavirus stuff, we roll back to where it was and that it not going to be this police state with overregulation and too much power in the governments hands.
So finally speaking of Denham, how has that collaborative process with them come about?
We did a couple of shirts together around 8 years ago. And Jason (Denham) has always been supportive of what I was doing. He is a street art collector so he's been also collecting my stuff for a while. If you go to some of the stores and the office, there's a lot of work of mine hanging there. So we’ve always been on friendly terms. I think one and a half year ago, I was invited to be one of their guest artists, and it became a bit bigger than we anticipated in the beginning. I think it was going to be a couple of styles again…a t-shirt and sweater. There was a lot of interest in it so we expanded on it. What I like about it is that we're both Amsterdam based. He started out in Amsterdam with his line and I grew up here and started also my street poetry here. So it was nice to combine these two things together. And I actually only met Jason last year which was weird because we had been in orbit of each other but just never physically met. And he is a great guy!
Thanks for your time man, its been good to chat and further understand the work and what drives it.
This has been great - thank you for this opportunity. Can you allow me just one thing? As it continues to be a really interesting year I’d like to share some love to a few special friends and partners; Anne Akua Barlinckhoff, Jason Denham, Unit 44 Gallery, The Garage and Marc de Groot.