Mauricio van der Maesen de Sombreff

Visual artist

About

"My work is an active effort for understanding the mechanics of nature and cognition. I'm fascinated with the processes of decay and transformation of matter and data."

I'm a visual artist and engineer based in Haarlem, Netherlands, originally from Uruguay. I hold a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Universidad Católica del Uruguay (2009) and a degree in Unstable Media from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (2025). My practice moves between painting, kinetic sculpture, digital fabrication, and electronics — installations that expose the mechanics, data flows, and "guts" of the systems that shape how we sense and inhabit the world.

My process is driven by a technical background: motors, sensors, embedded electronics, and parametric digital fabrication applied to reach algorithmic interpretations of organic and bodily processes — breath, decay, growth, transformation.

Works

Black Box (or Mechanic Ghosts)

A kinetic, data-driven installation staging a choreography of "mechanic ghosts" — motorized elements moving in response to logged environmental and human presence data.

There Is a Closed Door at the End of the Corridor

A series of kinetic sculptures inspired by mechanical ventilators and dialysis machines — not for their clinical function, but for the empathy that arises when witnessing critical, breathing, pumping states in non-living form. Graduation thesis, Unstable Media, 2025 — open-sourced and published on GitHub.