Hansup, born Hans Verhaegen, is a Belgian artist who has made almost all of his work since 2000 using no more than eight Tetris-like basic forms. Many of his NFTs are built from text, including a monochrome series based on his cover design for a German translation of a book by the Beat poet Steve Dalachinsky.
Verhaegen studied law before enrolling at art school in Ghent, Belgium, and then studying art history in Brussels. He became a full-time artist and was invited to exhibitions for several years, including one alongside work by Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Beuys, among others. In 1999 he began making websites for a living, and the computer quickly became his main artistic tool. He has said he works “somewhere between chaotic order and calculated intuition”.
The 8-form system began as a name game for a web design and logo assignment, which produced a logo built from 'hands up' characters and gave him his name. He writes algorithms, first in Flash and later in Processing, to generate as many different characters as possible from those eight forms. His series Versatiles on the platform Versum and 200 TXTILES on Hic et Nunc, later Teia, are made by running a processing sketch while changing parameters with a MIDI controller, moving words and sentences set in a custom font across the screen. For the zine Tickle, issue #47, Hansup illustrated a poem by the writer Zosia Crosse.
