Cancelled // Work Residency: Marije Baalman
Published
Marije Baalman is currently writing a book on mapping: how can gestures through the use of sensors and controllers, computational processing be translated to output media, such as sound, light and video. Her motivation comes from her own artistic work, where the topic of mapping has played a core part since 2001, when she started building her first digital musical instrument, the STRIMIDILATOR. Over the past 19 years, she has made digital instruments, participative installations, dance performances, and kites (wind instruments). In the presentation at BEK, she will trace through these numerous projects and discuss the different approaches to mapping that she explored in these projects.
Presentation Friday March 20th from 18.00
Open for all, refreshments.
During her residency Marije Baalman will be working on her book “Just a question of mapping”, a handbook for artists creating interactive works in fields such as music, dance and media art. In the book she will discuss methods and techniques that can be used as, while also making the bridge to the artistic aims and aesthetic aspects of the work. Her focus is on works that in one way or another capture gestures that are transformed to output media such as light, sound and visuals.
Tools for this kind of mapping keep evolving and a lot of knowledge is embedded in these tools. However, this knowledge is in most cases not documented outside of the implementation itself. So the question comes then how we can preserve knowledge of how a performance or instrument works if tools become obsolete, file formats are not accessible (or documented) and source code is unavailable? How can we learn from what other artists have made before us? How can artists communicate about their approaches to mapping if they are using different tools for doing so?
In her research for the book she is drawing from her own experience in the field, research and development projects she has been involved in, analysis of relevant software and hardware toolkits, case studies with artists and developers, and work sessions with artists.
The book will be published at the end of 2020 by V2_ in Rotterdam.
An agenda of planned presentations, workshops and work sessions can be found here.
About Marije Baalman
Marije Baalman has built new musical interfaces since 2002 and has been creating various projects involving realtime data in the contexts of music, dance and installations. In addition she has been developing the Sense/Stage wireless sensing platform since 2007. She has held numerous workshops involving realtime sensing and mapping data from sensors to sound. Between 2011 and 2016 she worked at STEIM developing hardware, firmware and software for artists. She was also involved in the Modality project here ata BEK, a toolkit for SuperCollider to access HID, MIDI and OSC controllers, and the SuperCollider port to the Bela, an embedded platform for creating musical interfaces. She has written several articles about her artistic practice and research over the past years and contributed to three chapters in ‘The SuperCollider Book‘ published by MIT Press in 2011.
She is a member of iii, an artist association in The Hague.