This evening is part of the Media Arts Festival Arnhem (MAFA), which will take place from March 22 to 24, 2024. A festival with film programs, lectures, performances, experiments, workshops and conversations with artists in Focus Filmtheater, around the theme ‘LESS’. Part of the festival is a two-week exhibition in Museum Arnhem, also in March 2024.

MAFA is a collaboration between Focus Filmtheater, Museum Arnhem and ArtEZ Academy for Art & Design. 

During the opening night of the festival, artists will celebrate the potential of ‘Less’ through performances and music. Sophia Bulgakova & Mark IJzerman create an immersive experience through ‘analogue virtual reality’. In their performance, light is projected directly onto the audience, submerging everyone in a universe of colours, patterns and sounds. Isaac van den Akker explores the creative possibilities of PowerPoint in a performance full of feedback loops, glitches and unexpected artefacts. Hugo Remmen performs with fluorescent tubes. After that, DJ Safke makes the audience dance, using a wide range of music styles: form bouncy hyperpop to euphoric trance.

Audiovisual Performance ALL EYES ON by Sophia Bulgakova & Mark IJzerman

ALL EYES ON is an embodied audiovisual performance by artists Sophia Bulgakova & Mark IJzerman. In the performance, light is projected directly onto the audience, submerging and guiding everyone present through a vast universe of colours, patterns and sounds. The collective experience asks the audience members to surrender to the new light and sound spaces in which the audience is placed in an ‘analogue virtual reality’.

About Sophia Bulgakova & Mark IJzerman

Sophia Bulgakova is an interdisciplinary artist working on the intersection between art, technology, and society, focusing on the relationship between light, perception, and imagination. Through various sensorial inputs in her installations and performances, she engages viewers, impacting their ways of perceiving reality and exploring new possibilities beyond it. Sophia studied sculpture in Kyiv and then got a foundation diploma in Photography and Time-Based Media at the University of the Arts London in the UK. After that, she graduated from the ArtScience Interfaculty at the Royal Academy of the Art and Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

Mark IJzerman is an interdisciplinary artist working on the intersection of ecology and media art. IJzerman uses digital technologies to create processes that have their own agency, to make works creating intimacy between us and the other-than-human. His work is always informed by field research as well as working with other professionals. He is the 2022 recipient of the S+T+ARTS4Water ‘Biodiversity in the Rotterdam Port’ residency hosted by V2_, which he is currently working on.

PowerPoint Performance Untitled1.pptx by Isaac van den Akker

An endless PowerPoint presentation, filled with feedback loops, glitches, and unexpected artefacts. A reinterpretation of the office program accompanied by a small repertoire of club music informed pop hits.

About Isaac

Isaac is an artist exploring the limits of software and the physicality of digital shapes and images.

Audiovisual Performance FLASHING/FLICKERING/FLUORESCENT

The tiny moment of unpredictability of fluorescent lighting turning on in an office building is extracted and amplified into an audiovisual performance.

About Hugo Remmen

Hugo Remmen is a musician, sound designer, video artist, vj and a light technician, along with a jack of all trades in the field of digital and tech art. His visual work highlights vernacular culture and unintentional art, and celebrates the remarkableness of the mundane.

Party with music by DJ Safke

DJ Safke is a genre bending artist with a range from bouncy hyperpop to euphoric trance and hardcore, blending bits of loud chaos and soft femininity and nostalgia.