• Baken

    (work-in-progress)

    Baken (beacon) is an interactive light artwork that registers the local climate and living environment and translates these to light simulations visualising the changes in (living) climate in Amsterdam. The beacon will be a 15 meter cylindrical, sculptural light artwork mounted on the corner of the facade of the new artist incubator the Vrijkoop van Bajesdorp.

  • Composing an Interaction

    “Composing an Interaction” is a lecture-performance in which Marije Baalman explains how a modern artist might use her book in the creation process of an interactive art work, in casu quo a sock puppet.

    Composing an Interaction was created for the launch of the book Composing Interactions.

  • Composing Interactions

    Interactive technologies have become a part of many different artistic practices. Nowadays artists make use of sensors, electronic circuits, computation, and algorithms to create engaging aesthetic experiences.

    Marije Baalman applies her extensive experience as an artist and as an engineer to guide the reader through the creation process of interactive digital artworks. She elaborates on different techniques for creating meaningful interactions and presents detailed case studies of a range of artistic work from the field to illustrate the techniques in practice.

    Composing Interactions brings together aesthetic considerations, practical guidelines for project development, and an overview of sensors, circuits, and processing algorithms.

  • Wind Instrument

    The title of the piece refers both to wind instruments as a category of musical instruments, and wind instruments as devices to measure the wind speed.

    Flying and steering a kite, give you a sense of the wind not just as a measurement, but in its details, its variations at different heights, and changes in time. To fly a kite is playing an instrument, where subtle gestures with the hands can have profound changes in the direction that a kite is flying.

  • V.L.I.G.

    Vliegen, liggen, in gedachten

    VLIG is a composition made for a kite.

    Flying a kite is both an eventful and meditative activity at the same time. The wind is unpredictable and can direct the kite in sudden directions and cause the kite to crash land. At other times the wind provides a steady flow, for the kite to stay endless in the air, only shifting sideways slightly, minute pressure changes on the cloth.

  • the machine is learning

    The performance the machine is learning is a theatrical performance highlighting the process of training a machine with realtime gestures: the labour that is absent from most dialogues on machine learning. In an attempt to livecode with gestures, the performer finds herself directed by the machine to repetitively make gestures to generate time series data samples for the machine to learn from.

  • N-Polytope
    N-Polytope is a spectacular light and sound environment combining cutting edge lighting, lasers, sound, sensing and artificial intelligence software technologies inspired by composer Iannis Xenakis’s works named “Polytopes”.
  • Wezen – Handeling

    Wezen is a serie of a music-theatre works where I try to explore the relationship between theatrical gesture and musical instrument, between the body and the sonic world. In Handeling new approaches are explored using the same gloves as in Gewording, extended with gyroscopes and magnetometers. In this performance, the focus is on the role of the hands, giving a distinct role to each hand in the musical control: one hand for selecting, starting and stopping musical processes, and one for shaping them.

  • Half Twaalf (Ongehoord)

    field recordings between 22-01-2021 and 17-02-2021

    A documentation of sounds left unheard during the time of curfew in the Netherlands.

    Listen to the project

  • Sound piece composed in 2012 for a private event themed Verlust (loss). Since then the piece has been released on two different compilation albums on Bandcamp.

    Listen to it on speakers with some bass and listen to it loud.

  • Code LiveCode Live

    or livecode embodied

    Livecoding performance with SuperCollider, using the laptop and the act of livecoding as the sole material.

  • GeCoLa

    GeCoLa or GEstural COding LAnguage is a project that looks at how a coding language written by gestures could function.

    The programming language is a minimal language to create sequences of sounds and manipulate these. All the keywords in the language and the variable names are expressed by gestures.

  • Etudes pour le Livecoding à une Main

    A live performance where I rehearse livecoding with a one-handed keyboard by playing the scripts of other livecoding artists. This piece takes a look at how to practice livecoding and the skills it involves. It questions whether performing other livecoded scripts is still livecoding.

  • Omhels andere gedachtes

    In de installatie Omhels andere gedachtes worden de verhalen van de buurtbewoners van Steigereiland verzameld. Op een intieme manier kan de bezoeker een verhaal van een buurtgenoot terugluisteren: door de mannequin met daarop een speciale poncho te omhelzen.

  • Tinnitus is a half hour composition exploring the sound world of people with hearing disorders, such as hearing loss and tinnitus, based upon an interview with someone suffering these disorders.
  • Sonic Embassy

    in collaboration with Nina Essendrop, Wen Chin Fu, Matteo Marangoni, Erfan Abdi

    Three sound ambassadors visit and show the audience how they perceive the world through sound, by guiding them through three games/exercises and showing them a short sound ritual.

    Each trial was connected to collaboratively playing an instrument. All trials allowed (some of) the audience members to explore the use of the instruments and the sounds they made based on different parameters and with game-like goals for how several audience members could play (with) them at the same time.

  • How to Defend Yourself from Danger

    in collaboration with Wen Chin Fu, Matteo Marangoni, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, Jochem van Tol, Harpo ’t Hart

    How to Defend Yourself From Danger is a participatory performance inviting the audience to take part in a self-defense workshop. Combining elements of slapstick comedy and gestalt psychology, the concept of safety is explored by examining how threats are perceived from the standpoint of our bodies and our senses. The Chinese proverb of the three wise monkeys states “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. Can we take control of our fears by taking control of our perceptions?

  • Wezen – Chrysalis

    A cocoon lies on stage, barely recognisable in the dim light. An almost static chord is sounding in the space. The light changes in color – the chord is changing slowly in pitch and texture. The cocoon seems to move – the light seems to get brighter and gradually shift color. Suddenly a fast movement – a sound erupts into the space, the light flashes – then again everything quiets down – the movement, the sound, the light.

    Wezen is a serie of a music-theatre works where I try to explore the relationship between theatrical gesture and musical instrument, between the body and the sonic world. In Chrysalis the focus is on slow movements and the body as a whole - becoming conscious of the minimal movements within and of the body. These minimal movements are amplified through the use of sensors and light and sound, and physical connections to the cocoon-like structure.

  • The Malbody Centre

    The Malbody Centre will be presented as a multiparticipant environment that takes place in a speculative future setting, where wearables have become body protheses that mediate our senses, so-called e-bodilies. Protheses that are connected to networks controlled by large companies or states. The participant takes on the role of a malbody, a person with e-bodilies, who does not function according to the norm and must therefor be cast out of society.

    This project is currently in development

  • Lost Shadows

    ‘There is no light so bright or there is a shadow’

    An invitation to dance with your shadow…
    A shadow always follows you, what if you follow your shadow?
    Your body casts a shadow, but what shape does it take?
    Every light causes a shadow, but what if a shadow alters the light?
    And if we loose our shadow, do we loose ourselves?

    This project is currently in development

  • Wezen – Gewording

    Wezen is a serie of a music-theatre works where I try to explore the relationship between theatrical gesture and musical instrument, between the body and the sonic world. In Gewording (Becoming) the link between physical and sonic gesture is explored during a live performance, combining movement of the body and live coding.

  • Scrempler

    The Scrempler is an instrument for live sampling and manipulation – meant for improvisation with other musicians.

  • Metatopia

    In collaboration with Jaime del Val as a result of the METABODY project.

    METATOPIA is an architectural paradigm of indeterminate space, enacted as a nomadic, interactive & performative environment for outdoors & indoors spaces that merges dynamic physical & digital architectures, with 3D and multisensory immersion, focusing on indeterminacy, unpredictability and open-ended relation to bodies and surrounding environment, an indeterminate space of emergent behaviours and movements that defies prediction and control in the Big Data Era. Metatopia is a unique hybrid of performance art, dance, technology, sound art, interactive architecture, VR, gaming, visual arts, live abstract film, sculpture, design, philosophy and activism. Metatopia is a Barraca of the S. XXIst Century, an Occupy 2.0, a (post-)cyberpunk metamedia Opera, a simchthonic chorus.

  • Sonobotanics – Periperceptoidae Triquetrus
    (2010) In collaboration with Elio Bidinost Sonobotanics is still a widely unknown science; it studies plants whose life experience is predominantly in the auditory domain. The sounds of the Triquetri are accurately modelled using Lindenmayer's system.
  • Just Noticeable Difference
    Just Noticeable Difference (JND) is a sensory environment for one person at a time lying in total darkness, and explores the gaps in seeing, hearing and feeling, the fluctuation of noise and order and the play between sensation and sense making directly taking place at the level of bodily experience.
  • Melodized Pillow Hammock

    Developed for Popkalab in collaboration with Bless.

    The hammock has embedded sensors to detect the person on the hammock and the swinging on the hammock and plays music based on this.

  • In Transit

    In Transit are a number of sonic creatures living in the ceiling of the Gerard building at Strijp-S in Eindhoven, they will co-exist with the people living in the building, following their movements, and initiating their own.

    For the repurposing of two old Philips buildings, Anton and Gerard, on the Strijp-S area in Eindhoven, two sound installations are created to enrich the experience of living in the area.

    In Transit is designed for the passage in the Gerard building.

  • Wezen - residency

    Wezen - translation: be, character, creature, essence, gist, nature, being, intelligence, also orphans

    Wezen is a series of solo music-theatre works where I try to explore the relationship between theatrical gesture and musical instrument, between the body and the sonic world.

    Residency at Constant (December 2012)

    The first stage of development was supported by a residency at Variable/Constant in Brussels.

  • Chronotopia

    Collaboration with Attakkalari Center for Movement Arts, Bangalore, India

    Chronotopia is a dance theater re-imagining of the one of the oldest Indian epic poems: the Tamil epic Silappatikaram. Attakkalari’s multi-media dance production is an episodical journey, which explores the movement of five performers through a physical and emotional landscape of contemporary life: birth, love, marriage, war, devastation, death and transformation. Establishing a link, between the landscape and the emotional as well as spiritual mindset of the protagonist, images from ordinary human existence encounter the intervention of inexplicable forces.

  • Schwelle II

    In collaboration with Chris Salter and Michael Schumacher

    Schwelle II is a live dance theater performance with master improviser and former William Forsythe/Ballett Frankfurt dancer Michael Schumacher. During the fifty minute work, the spectators experience a person undergoing the traumatic transformation of the body in the period between death and rebirth. At first, the spectators witness an almost immobile Schumacher sitting at a table, condemned to execute a series of futile, minute tasks. Violent physical spasms and vocal outbursts interrupt this stasis, overtaking the performer’s body.

  • Sonobotanics – Periperceptoidae Dendriformis

    In collaboration with Alberto de Campo and Hannes Hoelzl.

    Modelling the sonobotanic plants, Periperceptoida Dendriformis Sensibilis and Periperceptoida Dendriformis Imaginaris.

  • Sampling theorem

    Sampling theorem, total playing time: 43 minutes.

    Live performance at Büro Friedrich, Berlin (DE), 24 July 2004.

    Nord Micromodular, low-fi samplers, custom built controllers – overall performance interface.