Looking at Michiel Knaven's portfolio , one sees that he is involved in a wide range of arts and media, from the making of artists' books to photography, "boxes and assemblages," CD ROMs, and net art. And the net art and sound art he has online reflect that diversity as well.

Many artists who get involved in net art and were previously involved in other practices end up stopping all but the net practice. But Michiel hasn't. And much of his net.work continues to be informed by the "scissors and glue" he mentions in the interview below. It seems, then, that whether he ends up making something for the net or something for a gallery (or whatever) depends on the materials and the form. His approach to multimedia is quite broad.

His Soundboxes have an interesting way of treating sound as object. The first one, "comic", is a simple generative music piece. The sounds you hear are triggered by collisions of the moving objects. In particular, the collisions with the circle are key to the generative music. Whether the music is taken from cartoons or not, the resulting collision-music has a 'cartoon music' feel to it.

Perhaps that is part of the point of the piece: even if the music were not taken from cartoon music, there is probably bound to be an element of comedic mishap to music based on collision detection. And the collision, if not its algorithmic detection, seems to have an important place in cartoons; characters do not so much meet as collide, generally, like the plot lines in comedy.

Another of the Soundboxes called "watch me" develops that 'cartoon music' theme more. And a different one called "kartoffel dampf kanone 'schmidt'" further humorously develops the exploration of sonic generation via collision detection.

We also see other types of fruitful collisions in Michiel's work. In Conversations with FRANCESCA, high art collides with audio from TV soap operas.

But, more generally, we see in Michiel Knaven's work a fine sense of how idea emerges from material. As though he were a writer but with material objects instead of words. Perhaps this means he has an interesting sense of composition and the language of material objects and their relations. His broad sense of multimedia, through netart and beyond, is involved here.

It's interesting to compare the iconography of Knaven, Stanza, and Strasser. Knaven is more inclined to use cut-out art objects than either of the other two, for instance. But, more generally, there is a sense of the physicality of his practice, even in the digital, and the emergence of ideas from physical, animated things.

Michiel Knaven lives in Zwolle, Holland. His site is michaelmedia.org.