Books That Inspire – #SolutionsWatch

After reading Amy Lawrence’s Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, I immersed myself in perception and semantics. I studied the entire film theory collection of the Amsterdam Film Library, gave lectures, and developed my graduation project The Toilette of Venus (Project 83, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Monique M. Sparla, 1993) as part of a mixed-media installation.
The project examined the commercialization of women—body, hair, skin, beauty, identity—and the linguistic and visual codes that construct femininity. A projection with a deliberately broken compass pointed to the deeper question that would shape my work: How does information become perception, and how does perception create meaning?
Years later a book on women and media art appeared. My research had already shown that in the early 1990s almost no Dutch artists were exploring the intersection of women, new media, perception, and meaning. After graduation I was interviewed by the author, who concluded I was not a media artist because my focus was perception rather than media as a discipline. The Toilette of Venus was therefore excluded.
The omission revealed how cultural history is shaped as much by prevailing conceptual frameworks as by ideas themselves. I believe the project deserved recognition as one of the early Dutch works linking women, perception, and new media. Whether I later pursued a professional art career is secondary. The history of ideas should record the emergence of new perspectives, not only the careers that followed.
Rather than adapting to institutional frameworks, I continued investigating the same question independently: How is information transferred, organized, interpreted, and transformed into human experience? The inquiry expanded from art into perception, communication, learning, cognition, and consciousness.
In 2010 this research produced TriberFile—a framework that maps the unique informational architecture of every individual. Instead of assigning fixed personality types or learning styles, it shows how each person perceives, prioritizes, processes, and communicates information. Every profile is unique.
My central hypothesis is that many misunderstandings, educational difficulties, and conflicts arise not from unwillingness to understand, but from different ways of organizing and perceiving information. We often assume we disagree because we think differently, when in fact we may first perceive reality differently. Knowing and, where appropriate, sharing one’s informational profile can increase self-awareness, improve communication, and reduce unnecessary conflict in education, healthcare, organizations, and personal relationships.