STERRE PAKKERT

ABOUT

My practice operates at the intersection of interactive installation, performance, research, and digital-analog hybridity, using sensory-rich environments to investigate the friction between human vulnerability and rigid social, technological, and medical architectures. Navigating the world through a neurodivergent lens, I experience everyday life as an invisible, overwhelming grid of social algorithms and constant sensory input. The world operates on an assumed standard of human efficiency, seamless communication, and emotional legibility, constantly threatening to tilt into overstimulation. My work questions these unspoken rules and intense sensory realities.

At the core of my search is a questioning of the constructs, labels, and linguistic systems that govern personhood. In a society shaped by capitalist ideals of productivity, diagnostic labels often reduce complex human conditions into rigid operational categories. Rather than treating these classifications as objective truths, I interrogate how being named, mapped, and policed by external frameworks reshapes our self-perception, agency, and behaviour. Through physical metaphors, customised software interfaces, and chaotic soundscapes, I attempt to dismantle these systems to expose the gaps between who we are and how we are defined.

Communication, in my work, is approached as a fundamentally flawed interface, a process constantly derailed by misunderstandings, sensory noise, and cognitive overload. Language often fails to hold the fluid weight of lived experience, acting as both too shallow to capture immediate emotion and too burdened to allow genuine connection. I challenge this static architecture by creating installations that thrive on unpredictability, nonlinear logic, and overwhelming sensory intensity. By triggering and combining the senses, inviting audience participation, or engineering moments where observation itself disrupts the system, my works reveal the profound exhaustion of masking and the disorientation of existing within environments—both digital and natural—that are indifferent or hostile to non-normative ways of being.

Ultimately, my work is a search for new ways to articulate the complexity of being human without flattening it to fit established norms. Through taking apart systems, sensory overload, collaboration and research, I aim to create spaces where flux, failure, overstimulation, and mismatch are not treated as glitches to be fixed, but as critical sites for reimagining relation, agency, and intimacy in a hyper-mediated world.