My Background Studio began as a practical website feature, but it gradually became a form of browser-native art. Technical writing, photography, animated animals, religious imagery, mathematical structures and Internet vernacular now coexist in compositions generated by twelve algorithms. The central page and its moving margins are complementary: each gives the other a context, rhythm and character that it could not produce alone.

A background that completes the foreground

It would be misleading to divide the website into “important content” and…
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Today, while dining at a Chinese restaurant in Heverlee, a scene suddenly came to mind. It was me in high school, probably around 2009 or 2010, on what I think might have been a winter night. It must have been a night during winter break at my grandma’s house, my mother’s mother, whom we call Gaga （嘎嘎） in the Hubei dialect.

I was on a computer that my dad had bought at the urging of my grandma, playing the 3DMark 06 demo.

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（口述转录）

总之，今天我终于看完了候麦——法国导演埃里克·候麦——的一部电影。这部电影的名字大概是《女孩的男朋友》或者《我女友的男朋友》之类的。

总的来说，我挺喜欢这部电影的。它非常有名，据说是他一系列道德寓言故事中的一部。我之前多次听过它的名字，但从未认真看过。过去几天，我一直在等待英国签证申请的结果。我昨天提交了申请，现在正在等待，所以自然有点紧张。因此，我断断续续地看了这部电影，通常每天吃饭的时候看几分钟，最后分几次看完了。

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(Oral transcription)

Anyway, today I finally finished watching a film by Rohmer—the French director Éric Rohmer. The film is called something like The Girl’s Boyfriend, or My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend—something along those lines.

Overall, I quite liked it. The film is very famous and is supposedly one of his series of moral tales. I had heard its title many times before, but I had never watched it carefully. Over the past few days, I have also been waiting for the result of my UK visa application. I submitted it yesterday, and now I am waiting, so naturally I have been feeling a little nervous. I therefore watched the film intermittently, usually for a few minutes while eating each day, and eventually finished it over several sittings.

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