Moments Deconstructed: Receipt for Your Time
Pop-up Exhibition: Café Conrad, Amsterdam
Thursday 23 October 2025 · Presented by the Creative Coffee Club
The Fragmentation of Identity
Reconstructing the Familiar in Portrait
After exploring the abstraction of letters and their blurred familiarity, we turned toward the human face. Working first with disposable stock portraits found online, we began dissecting them, breaking each one down into its elemental parts: eyes, noses, mouths, ears, hair. Reassembled, these fragments formed new identities: familiar yet wrong, recognisable but disjointed.
The familiar human face, something our brains are wired to trust, became a canvas for distortion. Each rearrangement pulls you into focus and simultaneously pushes you away. The results carry the unease of an image that almost makes sense, echoing the uncanny polish of beauty filters and AI-generated likenesses.
What, then, is real in our digital lives?
In a culture of constant editing (through apps, surgery, filters and or algorithms) this project exposes the seams instead of hiding them. By leaving the cuts and overlaps visible, the work draws attention to how we reconstruct ourselves for public consumption. Each fractured face becomes a mirror of our curated realities: the raw, the artificial, and the spaces in between.
The Pop-Up: You Become the Material
For this special pop-up with Creative Coffee Club, the process moves out of the studio and into the café. Visitors are invited to bring or take a portrait on-site, watching as custom-built software deconstructs and reassembles their image in real time.
The program developed specifically for this project, fragments your face into random patches, scaling and re-pasting them over dozens of loops until a new version of you emerges. As it evolves, a timelapse captures the transformation. Then, in a final gesture, the image returns to the physical world: it’s printed onto receipt paper using a thermal printer.
Why the Printer?
Thermal receipt paper is humble, fast, and unforgiving. It flattens and exposes. By choosing this format, the work refuses the slickness of screens and embraces material limits: 576 pixels wide, monochrome, dithered. It’s a physical echo of the digital edit. Proof that the manipulation happened and a reminder that even “throwaway” surfaces can hold memory.
But there’s another layer.
A receipt is what we’re handed in exchange for time. We spend our hours earning money, then trade that money for goods or experiences — and the proof of that exchange is a small, disposable strip of paper. When you look at it closely, it’s a strange artifact of modern life: evidence that something once happened, but not the thing itself.
Here, that idea becomes personal. Visitors spend a few minutes of their time, and in return receive a printed receipt for that time, a distorted portrait of themselves. It isn’t a transaction or a souvenir; it’s a record of presence. The paper you take home is the residue of a shared moment, a tangible trace of the exchange between artist and viewer.
Each print is fleeting and permanent at once: easily torn, easily lost, but undeniably real. By printing these fragmented faces on receipt paper, the work turns a medium of commerce into a medium of reflection; a quiet challenge to how we measure worth, how we spend our days, and what remains when the transaction is over.
A Coffee Shop as Gallery
Café Amsterdam becomes both studio and exhibition space for one day. A setting where people already come to exchange time for experience. Between cups of coffee and conversation, art quietly happens.
The Creative Coffee Club AMS initiative brings (Artist, Musicians and Social Media-ists AKA Culture) into community spaces during their quieter hours, creating moments of connection in the everyday.
An exploration of how even a few minutes, shared and transformed, can become something lasting.
Details
📍 Café Amsterdam, Amsterdam
📅 Thursday 23 October 2025
🕓 Afternoon to evening (3-6pm)
☕ Part of the Creative Coffee Club series
Bring yourself, take a photo, watch it fragment, and leave with your receipt for time.