For this installment of Through the Lens, we explore the practice of multidisciplinary artist Boris Acket through the eyes of his father, Rob Acket.For the past three years, Acket’s father has documented the studio’s inner workings, capturing the long hours of testing and the inevitable technical failures that define his practice. This arrangement carries a profound circularity. After spending his childhood following his father (a sound technician and designer) around various sets, Acket has now seen those roles reversed. His father is the one documenting Boris’s complex installations, filtering the work through a familiar, paternal perspective.This process is most evident in Acket’s latest collaboration for the Fred again.. USB002 tour. The project centered on an adaptation of his work “Einder,” a monumental "breathing roof" that floated above thousands of people across ten cities. Unlike a static museum installation, the tour version was nomadic and constantly in flux. It had to be recalibrated for twenty different venues, responding in real time to the temperature, humidity and collective heat of the crowd. The studio spent 12 months perfecting the engineering required to make a 1,200 square meter fabric act as a kinetic architectural form.Acket’s work thrives in this "messy" developmental phase. Whether he is rigging a 20 by 60 meter fabric or simulating weather patterns in a warehouse, he is preoccupied with the vulnerability of a project before it reaches its final form. For Acket, the polished end result is merely a byproduct; the true substance lies in the repetition and recalibration required to reach it.We spoke with Boris about his transient studio, the stubbornness of minimalism and why he has made peace with his physical work being experienced through the flattened perspective of a phone screen."A work can exist for one day and remain with someone for years, while another work can stand in place for a decade and remain almost invisible."Can you describe your artistic upbringing? I heard you studied graphic design, which led you to photography?Looking back at your 11 year old self making music, was there a specific moment you realized sound wasn’t enough and that you needed to work with physical space?It was a gradual expansion of the question. When I was 11 and making music, sound was completely fulfilling because it already felt spatial to me. Even inside a very basic sequencer program, you are arranging atmosphere, tension, release, rhythm, and emotion. You are building a world with one element, in that moment I never felt a lack, perhaps more like a challenge.Later, when I became more involved with clubs and nightlife, I started understanding that what moved me was never only the sound itself. It was also the fog hanging in the room, the way light hit people’s faces at 5 in the morning, the density of bodies standing together, the architecture of anticipation, and the strange social agreement of all entering the same condition for a few hours. I began to notice that music was only one layer in a much larger composition.That was probably the real shift. I became interested not only in what sound does emotionally, but in what it does spatially, socially, and physically. I was no longer only composing sound, but also becoming fascinated by the room that receives it and transforms it. At some point I understood that space itself could behave like an instrument, and that light, air, material, rhythm, and architecture could all become compositional tools. I never really felt that I moved away from music, instead sound and music became an element within a larger body of work.How does having a transient studio moving between storage and testing sites affect the way you think about the permanence of your art?It has made me less attached to permanence as a fixed object and more interested in presence as an active condition. Our studio is quite transient. Its shape as well as it’s location moves between storage, workshops, testing spaces, fabrication sites, exhibition contexts, and temporary technical environments. The work is very rarely born in one consistent space. It emerges through movement, through temporary setups, through recalibration, through a lot of negotiation with circumstance. In a strange way, the studio behaves a bit like the work itself. It is always in transition, always adjusting, always becoming.What changes for me is that I no longer think of permanence first in terms of material duration. Of course material matters, and of course we build works that have physical demands and physical realities, but what matters more to me is whether something leaves a lasting trace in perception or in memory. A work can exist for one day and remain with someone for years, while another work can stand in place for a decade and remain almost invisible. So I think the moving studio has made me more sensitive to afterimage, to intensity and to the way temporary experiences can become deeply durable internally.It also keeps the work honest. Because we are constantly moving between storage and testing, things cannot become too precious too early. The works have to survive friction. They have to survive transportation, failure, improvisation, weather, technical limitations, and all the boring practical conditions that are actually very revealing. I like that. It prevents the work from becoming too isolated from reality. It has to exist in the world, not just conceptually but logistically, and I think that gives it a certain toughness and humility."For me, the mess is not some backstage material. It is the substance. It shows that the work accumulates itself over time."What has it been like having your father document your process for the last two years, and why is it important to show the messiness of that testing phase in your upcoming book?It has been three years now, which makes it even more meaningful to me, because in this time it has become less of a documentation project and more a durational relationship. What moves me most is that there is a generational return happening within it. When I was a child, I used to go with my father to his work. I was present during shoots, during shows when he was a sound technician and designer, and often helped out. I was seeing his world through proximity, through admiration, through the routines and rhythms of someone else’s practice. And now that relation has reversed. He is the one following me, looking through the lens of his camera at my work, at my testing, at my world. So there is something very beautiful in that: his work is looking at my work, and my work is being filtered through his eye.That is also why I do not want the book to only show polished, finished images. The testing phase is essential because that is where the work is still uncertain, still vulnerable, still searching for its own form. A lot of what we make comes out of trying something, misunderstanding a material slightly, adjusting a system, scaling something up too far, stripping it back again, and learning by staying with it. If you remove that messiness, you remove the actual life of the work. You are left with the shell of it, but not its becoming.The book is being developed together with writer and philosopher Victoria Trumbull and Studio Airport, whose contribution feels very natural to this project. Victoria has such a strong sensitivity for time, memory, and the instability of the present, and Studio Airport has this very distinct and intelligent visual language that can hold complexity without making it heavy. So what I like is that the book itself becomes a meeting point of different temporalities: my father’s camera as a long observational gesture, Victoria’s writing as a way of thinking through memory and recurrence, and Studio Airport’s design as a structure that can carry all those layers. For me, the mess is not some backstage material. It is the substance. It shows that the work accumulates itself over time.Your (practice) documentary explores three core pillars: Duration, Amplification, and the Infinite Paradox. If you had to define these as simple emotions rather than technical terms, what would they be?If I had to translate them into emotions, I think Duration would be longing, Amplification would be openness, and the Infinite Paradox would be a kind of tender unease.Duration feels like longing to me because it is never just about the present as an isolated point. It is about the present as something already thick with memory and expectation. So even when you are standing fully inside a moment, part of that moment is already haunted by what just happened and by what you feel might happen next. That creates, for me, a slightly melancholic atmosphere, but not in a tragic sense. More in the sense of being stretched across time, of feeling the present as something layered and unstable.Amplification feels like openness because it is really about loosening filters. In the studio’s sense, amplification is not just making something louder, bigger, or more intense. It is about making something more available to perception. It is about widening attention. Small variations become emotionally large. Peripheral details begin to feel central. You start noticing what is usually edited out by habit. That kind of perceptual widening feels to me like openness, or maybe even receptivity in a more childlike sense. Check out the practice of acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, he got me thinking about this topic a lot, as well as topics of listening and silence.And the Infinite Paradox is a tender unease because it contains something unresolved that I do not want to solve. We use technology to feel closer to things that technology has often distanced us from. We simulate weather to remember weather. We use microphones to relearn listening. We build artificial systems to recover some sense of presence. There is something beautiful in that, but also something uncomfortable. It is not pure optimism and it is not pure critique. It is a productive tension, and emotionally I think it feels like a very gentle but persistent unease.“A minimal gesture can become very intense in a high energy context because it creates another temporal register inside it. It changes the pulse of the room.”Many of your works function as loops, systems, or environments that behave almost like instruments. Where does this fascination with building systems come from, and what attracts you to these kinds of structures?It goes quite far back into my background and even into my parents’ professions. I was trained as a graphic designer, and my mother is also a graphic designer, so I grew up in a world of grids, typography, layouts, proportions, systems, and structure. Graphic design is very much about invisible systems that organize what you see. You are not only designing an image, you are designing a logic behind the image. That way of thinking has influenced me a lot. I am often not thinking about single objects, but about underlying structures that can generate many outcomes.At the same time, my father was a sound technician among other things, and I spent quite some time around mixing desks, cables, signal flows, and technical setups. Mixing desks are also very systematic objects. They are very structured environments where many inputs, outputs, signals, and transformations happen at the same time, but all within a very clear overarching system. I think seeing those environments at a young age also shaped how I think about work now. A mixing desk is almost like an instrument for space and sound at the same time, and I think in a way my installations are also mixing desks, but then for light, air, movement, sound, and people.How do you ensure your minimalist signature remains visible when collaborating on massive, high energy projects like the Fred again.. tour?I think by being very stubborn about reduction. Even in a project with that level of scale and energy, my instinct is still to strip things back until one gesture becomes the focal point. I do not really believe that scale automatically asks for more information. Very often it asks for less. In a large production there are already so many moving parts, so much infrastructure, so much emotion, so much expectation, that the danger is not emptiness but overload. The work can very easily become decorative or overdetermined. I always try to resist that.With a project like my collaboration with Fred what mattered to me was that the installation did not function as scenery in the conventional sense. It had to remain a very simple but very alive system: fabric, air, gravity, heat, light, movement. That simplicity is where the signature sits for me. Not in a branded visual language, but in a certain restraint and in a certain honesty of material and motion. I want people to clearly understand what they are seeing, while being able to loose themselves in it..I also think minimalism is sometimes confused with quietness, and for me that is not always the same thing. A minimal gesture can become very intense in a high energy context because it creates another temporal register inside it. It changes the pulse of the room. So the way I protect that signature is by making sure the work still breathes on its own terms, even when everything around it is louder, faster, or more charged.“The best work can be shit on a phone, the best image can be shit in real life.”Your work is deeply physical, but most people see it on a phone screen. How do you feel about your art being consumed through a digital first lens?It is a strange contradiction, but I have accepted that it is part of the ecology of the work now. My pieces are deeply physical. They depend on scale, tactility, air pressure, bodily orientation, slowness, temperature, and the sensation of being inside a space with other people. They really ask for presence. At the same time, I know that many people first encounter them, and sometimes only encounter them, through a phone screen. So I cannot pretend the digital presence comes secondary to how people experience my work. It is part of how the work circulates and how it lives publicly.What interests me is that this digital first condition almost reinforces one of the central paradoxes in my practice. We use mediation to reach for presence. A phone screen flattens the work enormously, of course. It compresses scale, atmosphere, and duration into an image or a short clip. But it can also function as a threshold. It can create curiosity for a type of experience that is slower, more bodily, and less instantly consumable. The funny thing is the ‘more real’ footage wins, even through a phone screen. So even there we’re looking for the tangible physical qualities, not a slick edit that already packages the work in a certain way.The danger is that the work becomes reduced to spectacle. The potential is that the image travels further than the physical piece ever could and opens the door to a deeper encounter later.I do feel resistance to it at times, because the phone tends to reward immediacy while a lot of my work is really about what happens after a few minutes, after repetition, after staying. It is often not about the first image but about what slowly shifts in your perception. Still, I think part of the challenge now is to make work that can survive that tension without becoming obedient to it.The best work can be shit on a phone, the best image can be shit in real life.How do you ensure your minimalist signature remains visible when collaborating on massive, high energy projects like the Fred again.. tour?I think by being very stubborn about reduction. Even in a project with that level of scale and energy, my instinct is still to strip things back until one gesture becomes the focal point. I do not really believe that scale automatically asks for more information. Very often it asks for less. In a large production there are already so many moving parts, so much infrastructure, so much emotion, so much expectation, that the danger is not emptiness but overload. The work can very easily become decorative or overdetermined. I always try to resist that.With a project like my collaboration with Fred what mattered to me was that the installation did not function as scenery in the conventional sense. It had to remain a very simple but very alive system: fabric, air, gravity, heat, light, movement. That simplicity is where the signature sits for me. Not in a branded visual language, but in a certain restraint and in a certain honesty of material and motion. I want people to clearly understand what they are seeing, while being able to loose themselves in it..I also think minimalism is sometimes confused with quietness, and for me that is not always the same thing. A minimal gesture can become very intense in a high energy context because it creates another temporal register inside it. It changes the pulse of the room. So the way I protect that signature is by making sure the work still breathes on its own terms, even when everything around it is louder, faster, or more charged.“The space speaks first, and I try to listen to it rather than impose something onto it.”Since your workspace is always moving, is there a specific object or tool that acts as your anchor and makes any space feel like a studio?The funny thing about moving between so many different spaces is that you develop a kind of super flexibility. You stop waiting for the perfect conditions and instead you learn to build with whatever is present. Because of that, I do not think there is one specific object that makes a space a studio. It is more about a certain mindset and a certain group of people. The studio exists where the conversations start, where something is being tested, where something is being built or questioned. In that sense, the studio is more a network than a room.And that network is very important to me. People like Luiza Guidi, who is really a partner in crime and creative producer in many of the projects, Anne Verhallen, who represents and supports the work and helps position it in the right contexts, and Joris van Welsen, who manages the business side of the studio, have made it possible for me to work much more calmly and clearly. Knowing that the production, the logistics, the representation, and the business side are taken seriously by people I trust creates a lot of mental space for me to focus on the actual work and the systems we are building.So in a way, the studio is less a physical place and more a condition that we carry with us. Shoutouts go to Sarah Schulten as well, who is part of the core team.How do you decide when a piece needs to be massive versus something more intimate, and how does that change the story you are telling?In all honesty, it is often not me deciding first whether a work should be massive or intimate. Very often the space decides. The architecture, the height, the acoustics, the temperature, the way people move through a space, these things often lead the idea rather than the other way around. I usually try not to force a work into a space, but to let the space tell me what it is good at, what its unique quality is, and then amplify that.For example, we are currently working on a project in a gigantic market hall in Amsterdam where we have a free canvas of around 28 meters in height. That height immediately becomes the most important parameter. It would make no sense to ignore that and do something very horizontal or very intimate at eye level. The unique quality of that space is verticality, scale, air volume, and distance, so the work will most likely revolve around those conditions. In that sense, the architecture is not just a container for the work, it is a collaborator.When a space is very large, the work often becomes more about collective experience and shared atmosphere. It can reorganize the entire room and make people aware of themselves as part of a group, as bodies sharing the same air, the same pressure, the same event. That is where scale becomes interesting to me, not as spectacle, but as a way of creating a communal condition.More intimate works do something else. They allow for concentration, subtlety, and a more private relationship between a person and a material, a light shift, or a sound. In those cases, the work can become much quieter and more precise. It does not need to reorganize a whole room, it can just slightly reorganize someone’s perception. The space speaks first, and I try to listen to it rather than impose something onto it."I would like people to feel that the systems are alive precisely because they are not closed. They remain open enough to surprise us."Outside of your own work, what has been catching your eye in the art world lately, and is there a specific soundtrack or genre playing in your testing space right now?I have always been very inspired by friends in the Dutch scene. There is something very experimental but also very direct about it. Artists like Rosa Menkman, Children of the Light, Geoffrey Lillemon, Heleen Blanken, Zoro Feigl, Pelle Schilling, Lumus Instruments, Philip Vermeulen, Nikki Hock, Tina Farifteh and Zalan Szackacks are all very different, but they share a certain clarity in how they work with technology, perception, image, and space. There is often a strong conceptual layer, but also a very physical or visual immediacy. That combination is very inspiring to me, especially because many of them are working with light, systems, media, perception, or technological mediation in ways that feel very contemporary but also very human.At the same time, I have also been looking back a lot and finding resemblance and inspiration in earlier artists and performers like Rebecca Horn, Loie Fuller, and Hans Haacke. They were already working with movement, systems, environment, performance, and invisible forces long before many of the technologies we now use existed. When you look at their work, you realize that many of the questions we are asking now are not new at all. Only the tools have changed. I like that idea that you are not inventing something completely new, but continuing a longer conversation through different materials and technologies. Something that curator Sanneke Huisman really showed me through working with her for Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.And to be honest, the soundtrack of the studio is usually silence. We spend so much time listening to motors, air movement, small mechanical sounds, fabric moving, systems running, that silence becomes very important. Silence is not really empty in the studio, it is full of small sounds and concentration. Sometimes music enters, but most of the time the work itself is the soundtrack.Since the documentary is still in development, what are your expectations for the launch and the one thing you want people to take away from seeing your process on screen?I think what I would ultimately like people to take away is not a specific message, but maybe a certain feeling about why we build these things at all. A lot of the tools I use are technologies that in a way remind us how mediated our world has become. I do not think the studio is trying to solve that paradox. We are more interested in staying inside it, carefully, and building situations where people can feel time, space, memory, or presence a bit differently. And maybe what connects all of this work is not the technology or the installations themselves, but the fact that they create moments where people become aware of their own perception, their own memories, their own emotions, while standing in the same space as others doing the same thing.In that sense, I sometimes think the work is more about this strange condition of being human, where we are all experiencing things very individually, but at the same time together. Maybe that is what the studio is really trying to build: situations where people can feel that we are all, in some way, alone together.