Kaj Florens Boonstra
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Kaj Boonstra is a sound artist, architect, and filmmaker. He creates immersive spatial narratives that function as a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total unity of sound, space, and image.

As co-founder of Studio Metaform, Kaj leads the creation of multi-sensory experiences that bridge the gap between scientific research and human emotion.

Approach

I design environments that communicate. My background is in architecture, but my materials are sound waves, light, and data. I study how we shape the spaces around us, and how they, in turn, shape us. From the structural precision of a building to the emotional arc of a film score, I combine diverse media to create tangible encounters with complex ideas.

Selected Prizes

Stimuleringsfonds Talent Development,
for professional development — 2025

Subsidy KLV-Fonds (Wageningen University & Research), for Singing Soil — 2025

Official Selection Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam (AFFR), with Opera for a Melting City — 2023

Competition EXPO2025 Nordic Pavilion, with V8 Architects — 2023

Selected Projects

2026 - Pixel Perfect
2026 - GrondGids
2025 - Singing Soil
2024 - SENSE
2024 - Time Capsule
2024 - Working with Artificial Images
2023 - Opera for a Melting City
2021 - Hidden Myths
2021 - Hotel City
2020 - Embassy
2020 - Digital Heterotopia

Selected Exhibitions & Performances

AFFR
Museumnacht
Dutch Design Week
La Trappe Festival
TAC Eindhoven
Vrijpaleis
Hoogtij
37PK

Singing Soil 2025_ART-SCIENCE

A spatial installation and workshop that translates Dutch soil biodiversity data from different land use types into a dynamic and immersive experience.

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GrondGids 2026_IX-DESIGN

An interactive experience to bring residents in closer contact with their underground world, in order to increase awareness for the energy transition.

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Opera for a Melting City 2023_FILM

What happens if we continue living like we are right now? What happens if we keep on consuming, polluting and exhausting? What happens if we keep on indulging, spoiling and satisfying ourselves? We’re sweltering on summer days, sunbathing with the city as we’re welcoming climate change with open arms, for better or for worse. So what if, one day, we reach a tipping point, and it becomes so hot in the city, that everything and everyone just starts to melt?

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Digital Heterotopia 2020_ARCHITECTURE

Building upon the notion of discrepancy between community and architecture we created the film ‘A Digital Heteropia for the People of Neot Semadar’, which builds upon Foucault’s idea of the Heterotopia: a place acting like a mirror for the current ‘state’ of a society.

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Hotel City 2020_ARCHITECTURE

Hotel City consists of a series of rooms in which one’s tourist experience is housed. The written essay outlines and introduces the theoretical basis of each room to its reader, while an animated film transports the viewer through these rooms and their thought constructs, confronting you with the nature of Hotel City.

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SENSE 2025_ART-SCIENCE

An immersive audiovisual installation that transforms 36 years of environmental data into an 8-minute audio/visual experience, enabling you to feel climate change.

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Time Capsule 2024_ART-SCIENCE

Reacting to the ineffectiveness of our current response to climate change, I co-created an immersive sonic performance with a guided workshop that translates climate change data into an auditory experience.

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Pixel Perfect 2026_AI

An artificial intelligence model continuously improves a masterpiece: Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Are we watching an intelligent metabolism reslurping reality into perfection right in front of our eyes, or are we being irresponsible by letting our historical legacy be rewritten into new meanings of ‘masterpiece’?

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Hidden Myths 2021_ARCHITECTURE

Hidden Myths is a transgressive architectural manifestation. It is a symptom of and reaction to a larger phenomenon; a series of Infectious Voidscapes that can be found throughout the city of Mashhad, existing of sites in which all architectural forms of existence have been erased.

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Embassy 2020_ARCHITECTURE

The city as we know it is overly self-absorbed, its citizens unconscious and in need of reflection: on its footprint, its community, its history, its moral imperative. This project sees the emergence of a new ‘embassy’ inside the city, that is populated by ‘things’ as ambassadors, coming from the periphery of this very city, taking their outside views on what it means to live together in a cramped space that is the city.

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