Threshold
51.93°N 4.47°E

We build things that only exist when you touch them.

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Interaction is the material.

The work does not exist until somebody moves.

We make it, then we get out of the way.

02 / 09 · Boijmans Van Beuningen · 2021–2023

A guide that knows which floor you are on.

Plate: a field of mirrored shards reflecting a hazy sky, folded on a vertical axis — the Depot's curved façade as a generative composition.
Plate 02 · mirrored shards

Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is the first art storage you can walk through: 151,000 works on fourteen storeys, none of them hung for you. We built the guide that walks with visitors — a web app, no download, that reads the building’s beacons and tells you what is in the rack in front of you. It was used by 212,000 people in its first year, most of them for longer than the tour.

Client
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Year
2021–2023
Visitors
212,000 in year one
Stack
Web app · BLE beacons · Three.js depot model
Open case study

03 / 09 · Lowtide · “Slack Water” · 2022

An album you listen to by drifting.

Plate: hundreds of fine copper lines rolling like a tide chart under a small bone moon.
Plate 03 · sine-wave tides

Lowtide’s third record was written on the Maasvlakte at low water. The site is a tide table you can play: nine tracks arranged along a shore, the water line moving with the real tide at Hoek van Holland. Time it wrong and the song you wanted is under water for six hours. 1.4 million plays, and a surprising number of emails about the tide.

Client
Lowtide · Excelsior Recordings
Year
2022
Plays
1.4M in eight months
Data
Rijkswaterstaat tide feed, 10-min
Sound
Off · this room has a chord —
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04 / 09 · Aster & Vane · AW24 · Paris

Front row, at 380,000 seats.

Plate: dark satin folds lit from one high spot, the ridges catching a pale green.
Plate 04 · fabric folds

Aster & Vane wanted their Paris show streamed without the two-minute delay that turns a runway into a replay. We built the stream on WebRTC with a low-latency HLS fallback, and the site around it as a second row: a live look index, the fabrics under a macro lens, the music as stems you could mute one by one. Peak concurrency 380,000, glass-to-glass under a second and a half, from a basement on Rue du Temple.

Client
Aster & Vane
Year
2024
Peak
380k concurrent
Latency
< 1.5 s glass-to-glass
Read the summary

05 / 09 · Rotterdam Architecture Month · 2025

An identity that never prints the same poster twice.

Plate: three posters from the generator pinned to a black wall, each a different composition of masses, arcs and Fraunces type.
Plate 05 · three seeds
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For Rotterdam Architecture Month we handed the festival a machine instead of a logo. Every poster, ticket and screen is composed from a seed: masses on a grid, an arc, the month set in Fraunces. Same seed, same poster — so each venue got its own and every visitor could take one home. This is the machine. Press it.

Client
Rotterdam Architecture Month
Year
2025
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06 / 09 · Nederlands Fotomuseum · 2023

A darkroom where the prints develop when you stand still.

Plate: a contact sheet of 72 frames at different exposures, some with a horizon, numbered in mono.
Plate 06 · 72 exposures

For the Fotomuseum’s Wilhelminakade galleries we built a room of 72 blank frames. Stand in front of one and a print develops over the eleven seconds it once took in a tray; walk on and it fades back to paper. Sixteen depth cameras, one projector per wall, and a ban on anything that beeps. Six months, 96,000 visitors, and a guard who says the last hour before closing is his favourite.

Client
Nederlands Fotomuseum
Year
2023
Frames
72 · 11 s to develop
Sensors
16 depth cameras · 4 projectors
Read the summary

The nine.

  1. YYara BelkacemCreative director
  2. RRuben de WitCreative technologist
  3. SSanne VermeulenDesign lead
  4. DDario Costa3D
  5. IImke JansenMotion
  6. TTobias MeyerEngineering
  7. NNour El-SayedStrategy
  8. FFinn O’DonnellSound
  9. LLea BrandtProducer

Nine people since 2017, on the second floor of Schiekade 189. Everyone here has shipped something that had to work in front of a crowd; that is the hiring test. The studio, in full →

How we work.

  1. 01We start with the room, not the screen.
  2. 02A prototype by the second week. Nothing lives in a deck.
  3. 03One person owns the frame rate.
  4. 04We test with people who did not come to see us.
  5. 05We stay for the launch, and the month after it.

09 / 09 · Contact · Rotterdam

Ninefold
Schiekade 189, second floor
3013 BR Rotterdam
+31 10 307 0190

Studio visits on Thursdays, from 15:00.
Coffee is decent. The lift is not.

Book a Thursday

There is no room ten.

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