Ralf Jacobs — Making Up for Lost Time

I was born in 1985 in Waalre, the Netherlands, and I work at the intersection of art, design, and science. My practice moves fluidly between disciplines — from cyanotypes and textiles to computational drawings and 3D-printed ceramics. What connects these diverse forms is a continuous fascination with the way light, matter, and time intertwine. I see mathematics and physics not as constraints, but as languages through which the invisible structure of the world can be translated into tangible experience.

My work exists in motion. I move between disciplines — engineering, textiles, computation, photography — as if following a single current that changes form but never direction. From the outside, this may appear as multiplicity, as if I lead several lives at once. But from within, it feels like one continuous act: an attempt to make up for lost time.

Time is the one medium that can never be recovered, and yet I keep trying. Each project becomes a fragment of that attempt — a way to condense years of stillness into seconds of creation. I work fast, but not from impatience. The speed is not a race forward; it is a balancing act against the weight of time itself. Every experiment, every new technique, every translation from code to fabric or from signal to form is a rehearsal for presence — a way of inhabiting the now so completely that the past begins to loosen its hold.

The materials I work with — light, cloth, sound, equations, and data — may seem distant from one another, yet they are bound by the same universal language. Mathematics and physics form the connective tissue beneath everything I do: the invisible structure that allows light to become fabric, vibration to become image, and motion to become pattern. Whether expressed through the interference of waves, the geometry of motion, or the self-organizing behavior of systems, each work is a translation of physical law into sensory experience. What looks like variety on the surface is, at its core, coherence — the same equation written in different alphabets.

My process is not fueled by ambition or restlessness, but by resonance. When something aligns — an idea, a structure, a material — I can move through vast fields of complexity without resistance. The work unfolds through me rather than from me. It is not productivity that defines this state, but continuity — an unbroken dialogue between curiosity and time.

Making Up for Lost Time is not about regret. It is about transformation: turning absence into motion, stillness into form, and the finite into a living signal that never stops transmitting.