portrait photo of Marije Baalman by Valeria Mongelli Photography

portrait photo by Valeria Mongelli Photography

Marije Baalman is an artist and researcher/developer working in the field of interactive sound and light art, based in Amsterdam. She makes music and music-theatre performances, worked with dancers and has made several installations.

Topics that she addresses with her work are the nature of interaction between and entanglement of humans and technology, the influence of algorithms on society and the human experience, and environmental change.

In her artistic work she is interested in the realtime components of the work, composing processes, behaviours and interaction modalities. This means that the sonic or visual output depends on realtime interactions of the systems she builds with the performer, the audience, or the environment.

This is expressed with tools such as physical computing (performance interfaces and/or installations) and wireless systems, livecoding (both as a skill, as well as a performance interface), digital and analog sound and data processing. In her work with light she uses methods from sound composition and synthesis. To realise her works she mostly uses open source technology (software and hardware) and she is an active contributor to the open source community. In addition she has an interest in creating participative events and environments, drawing inspiration from methods from the larp community in combination with digital technology.

She also works as a cultural organiser and curator and as an activist to improve the rights of artists and promote self-organised housing. She is a member of iii and Grond.

She has performed and exhibited work across Europe (STEIM, WORM (NL), EXIT festival (F), Club Transmediale (D), Make Art (FR), Electropixel (FR), Today’s Art (NL), Artefact (BE)) and beyond (Electrofringe (AU), Translife (CN), Elektra (CA)).

She has collaborated with various people, amongst which Matteo Marangoni and Wen Chin Fu, Alberto de Campo, Chris Salter, Michael Schumacher, Attakkalari Dance Company and Workspace Unlimited.

Marije is a contributor to “The SuperCollider Book” (MIT Press, 2011) and in 2022 she publised a book titled: “Composing Interactions - An Artist’s Guide to Building Expressive Interactive Systems” with V2_ in Rotterdam.

  • She studied Applied Physics at the Technical University in Delft and graduated in February 2002 on the topic of Perceptual Acoustics.
  • In 2001/2002 she followed the Sonology Course at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
  • She completed her Ph.D. on Wave Field Synthesis and electro-acoustic music in 2007 at the Electronic Studio of the Technical University of Berlin.
  • Between 2007 and 2010 she was a post-doctoral researcher in Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal.
  • Between 2011 and 2016 she worked as a hardware engineer at STEIM.
  • Since 2010 she works as a freelance artist and developer from Amsterdam.
  • Since 2016, she is a member of the artist collective Instrument Inventors Initiative (iii) in The Hague.
  • Since 2018, she is part of the loose group of Netherlands Coding Live.
  • Since 2019, she is part of Bajesdorp, building a new artist run space in Amsterdam.
  • In 2023 she cofounded Begane Grond in Amsterdam, an artist collective running the (public) spaces on the ground floor of Bajesdorp.