WDKA 4.1 C&S 2026
Living in Rotterdam as a fourth-year international student, Albert is attentive to how local “insider” culture forms: the codes, recurring situations, and shared jokes that make a city feel familiar to those who stay longer. His research sits in generative design and looks at how such hyperlocal knowledge can be translated into material form. Rather than conducting extensive fieldwork, he works from everyday observations, a small set of reference photos, and his own experience of moving through the city over time.
Technically, he uses smart chat to generate images of miniature scenes in a classical Delftware style, iterating and art-directing the prompts across multiple generations until the scenes feel recognisably “Rotterdam” in tone and attitude. These images are then turned into 3D models, printed in resin, and hand-painted. The figurines can also be viewed here, allowing the work to exist both as a physical set and as a small digital collection.
How can generative tools help materialise the situated knowledge of a city in physical form?
The outcome is a series of ten figurines, each depicting a specific, recognisable situation from Rotterdam’s everyday life, scenes that longer-term residents and locals are likely to recognise, but that sit outside official or tourist imagery.
A central thread is Rotterdam’s gedogen culture: the Dutch habit of informally tolerating things that do not fully align with the rules, and the pragmatic way people negotiate these grey areas. The figurines stage moments where this attitude becomes visible in daily life - small frictions, tolerated shortcuts, or behaviours that everyone knows are “typical Rotterdam”. By moving from GPT-generated Delftware-style scenes to 3D-printed and hand-painted objects, the project shows how generative tools can support a compact, material archive of lived experience. The figurines function as memory objects, modest in scale but dense with shared references, holding onto stories that usually persist only in conversation and practice.
010 Totems responds to a simple idea: which stories of everyday life are kept, and which quietly disappear. Rotterdam is constantly reshaped by people who pass through - students, migrants, commuters - alongside those who stay long term. Large monuments and official histories tend to survive, while small, street-level scenes and jokes that define how a place actually feels are rarely given space. It is precisely these recognisable situations that shape whether a city feels welcoming, understandable, and like somewhere you can belong.
The project takes this cultural layer seriously by turning hyperlocal Rotterdam moments into ten small figurines. Many of the scenes point to the city’s gedogen attitude - the informal bending of rules, the tolerated shortcuts, the “everyone knows this happens” situations. By putting these moments into physical form, the work argues that this kind of informal knowledge is not just decoration, but part of what makes a city socially sustainable over time.
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Generative tools are used here in a mindful way. GPT helps sketch Delftware-style scenes, but each one is steered, selected, turned into a 3D model, printed in resin, and hand-painted. This keeps judgement, taste, and responsibility with the maker, while still using AI to open up new ways of seeing and combining local references. The resulting figurines are modest in scale but durable and easy to share, both as physical objects and online, offering a small, concrete example of how digital tools can help maintain and circulate situated urban memories instead of flattening them.
Expats have a very different and unique experience of being in a new place compared to tourists or locals. A curious eye notices different things. I kept asking myself: what makes Rotterdam the place it is? Which things are truly local and nowhere else to be seen? Has it always been like this? How long will this be something people recognise? Did my friends also notice? Does anyone archive this in the same way we archive random websites on the internet?
For many people I informally interviewed, Rotterdam was associated with drug users and homeless people infamously standing out from the ordinary. I don’t think this is far from the usual big-city nuisance, and I didn’t want to make fun of these people or turn them into visual clichés. That choice already shaped the project: I actively avoided easy or sensational images, even when they were the first things people mentioned.
On purpose, I rejected the default options: cubic houses, kapsalon, and all that jazz. If something could already be found in a gift shop, I automatically rejected it. My focus became capturing unique, harmless, funny moments that are obvious to most longer-term residents. Some figurines were decided quite early and felt “locked”. The last two were harder to commit to: I considered scenes like broodje dynamite , the Night Mayor, invasive parrots, the water taxi, Koopgoot, a latex couple, a midget on a bicycle, the Giant of Rotterdam, and so on. Looking back, I can see how these decisions reflect my own taste and bias about what counts as “real” Rotterdam.
I drew heavy inspiration from W+K Amsterdam and the UNI_VERSE talks during AdNight 2025. I also used this project as an opportunity to learn more about working with generative tools and art direction. I used the Plus plan of OpenAI GPT 5.1 for image generation, Claude Sonet 4.1 and Opus 4.5 for web development, and Hunyuan 3D from Tencent for 3D models and textures. The tools were not neutral. They already had a certain idea of Rotterdam: the Erasmus Bridge kept popping up, and I had to ask multiple times to get rid of it. Because of safety guidelines, it was hard to visualise laughing gas containers or a thick exhaust cloud for the Witte de With figurine. At some point I also dropped describing text from the figurines completely, because generating text in the 3D workflow became more trouble than it was worth. In hindsight, I think this was for the better; it forced the scenes to work visually without explanation.
I started with 3D printing models at the academy to determine the most optimal scale and figure out the precision limits. The technical constraints pushed the design: everything needed to be well connected and “thick” enough, nothing could be floating or too fragile. In the beginning, the idea was to create the figurines in ceramic, which would have matched the Delftware reference more literally. Quite early I realised how much time, infrastructure, and effort that would require, and with the deadline in mind I decided to switch to plastic and resin. It was much easier, faster, cheaper, and higher quality to order the final figurines from a manufacturer in Hong Kong and get them shipped to Rotterdam (by air!) than to produce them in Europe. I found that a bit concerning: a project about hyperlocal culture ended up relying on a very global, uneven production chain.
Informally, I interviewed my friends and summarised my personal observations throughout the years. I expanded beyond the art academy bubble with a local barbershop, a Rotterdam exchange student from over 20 years ago, and lifelong residents. I found it interesting that some of the references I got from them were long gone and nowhere to be found anymore. Others represented a more “high” cultural layer that wasn’t my focus this time.
In the end, I imagine the figurines mainly in the hands of my student friends—as a memory they can take with them when they leave Rotterdam. For me, the project feels quite nostalgic and makes me aware of how fragile and temporary these moments are. Time flies and waits for nobody; it is very hard to live on in a city’s memory beyond one lifetime. I am genuinely curious which figurines the future would have added \or replaced.
Albert Kozikowski (1997, Poland) is an all-at-once designer, curious observer and AI-optimist, oscillating between the oil capital of Norway and the port city of the Netherlands.
He channels his curiosity into generative, motion, and 3D design, moving then to physical objects you can touch and relate to. He works fast, switching tools and mediums when ideas flatten, using that restlessness to push concepts into something sharper and more compelling. His method is exploratory and conceptually literal: he translates language into form and reduces ideas to their clearest, most essential shape.
He aims for design and tools that meet people where they are, in plain language and familiar rhythms, with room for memory and habit. Albert relies on input and collaboration to spark ideas and drive the creative process.
He has collaborated with studios and brands around the world, including Studio Dumbar, LVMH, Snøhetta, Canada Goose and others. His goal is to end up on Bora-Bora painting.