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RUR is the nickname of Dek for stencils pasting. It is his best friend Spencer, that he met at school, who mades him discover the wonderful world of stencils!

Being a fantasy and SFX lover since he was a teenager, his favorite authors were I. Asimov a of course, but overall Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, William Gibson and William S.Burroughs.

When he discovered K. Capek and his theatre piece "R.U.R.", he became a great lover of this work, and decided to signed his stencils "RUR". These stencils (painted on stickers, posters or directly on surfaces) were mainly visible in Brussels, but some were exported to others countries (from Spain to Ukraine), during travels, or sent by postmail to USA. These stencils represents mainly robots, but also subjects inspired by Soviet Space Pionneers, as for example many portraits of Juri Gagarin, Laïka, Valentina Terechkova, or members of the german antinazi resistance "White Rose" during WW2.

His musical project was in the beginning influenced by electropop, breakbeat and synthwave.

The song "RUR" was one of his first electronic track, made with a oldschool Roland TR-626 drummachine and computer synths, thought as a tribute to Karel Capek work.

The theme of this one was important to Dek, because it was a kind of metaphor for workers exploited in factories, it was important when K. Capek wrote his theater piece, and it is still now.

Making these stencils, pasting robots everywhere as an invasion, and composing these songs was first a way to criticize the industrialisation, nowadays and in the past, and, as he was fascinated by artificial life (explaining his interest for animation techniques) a way of asking people and himself what is life, and what is consciousness.

Is it something surnatural or divine, or can we reproduced it in laboratories? Or the both?

Link:
Dek

[image source: RUR]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]