Driessens & Verstappen is the collaborative name of the Dutch artists Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen, who have worked together in Amsterdam since 1990 building self-generating systems that evolve or replicate according to their own rules rather than a fixed design. “We like to create systems that themselves create other things”, the artists have said of this approach, which they call “meta creation”.
Both studied Visual Design at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Maastricht in the 1980s, then Art Media Studies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, before beginning to work together as a duo in 1990. Their practice spans sculpture, installation and generative software, and centres on self-organising systems drawn from nature, ones that either replicate endlessly or evolve almost imperceptibly over long stretches of time.
