Like Dust is an interactive Graphic novel that tells the story of Sam Yazdanpanna and also symbolizes a much more universal story.

Every day thousands of young people flee from one country and travel to another country full of hope and expectations.

This journey is always accompanied by uncertainty and danger. You never know who you can trust and where you might end up. The Graphic novel ‘like dust’ shows that there is a whole story behind every refugee. It’s always easy to dismiss people as fortune seekers, or just numbers, but every individual who leaves their home goes through some kind of identity transformation.

This graphic novel is an ode to Sam’s mother Sahin Wakili and Yilmaz the human trafficker who gave him the future.

https://likedust.nl

Credits:
Script and Director – Sam Yazdanpanna
Producer – Bas Broertjes / Sam Yazdanpanna
Art Director / Illustrator Artist – Meysam Barza
Motion Design – Mustafa Kandaz
Motion Design Assistant – Nevzat Aydin / Savalan Godshi
Web Design and Coding – Maarten van der Glas
Web Coding Assistant – Lindsey Schaap
Audio Design – Olivier Rekers
Script Coach – David Henrich

THIS PROJECT IS FINANCIAL SUPPORTED BY

I have been asked to create an AR artwork for the climate museum addressing climate issues.

With the AR artwork, I aim to express the challenges posed by the climate crisis. Challenges that humanity can ultimately overcome if the right choices are made in time. These challenges can be seen as opportunities – opportunities for a clean environment, a better balance with natural resources, and justice for indigenous populations.

The climate crisis is also a crisis of the exploitation system. A deep layer of our history and system is based on an exploitation system, exploiting both nature and people.

Those who benefit from this system resist change, which is why the necessary energy transition is taking too long. Now that the consequences are being felt firsthand, there is some shift noticeable, but is it timely and sufficient?

My artwork expresses the necessary revolution that is needed – a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, from competition to collaboration, from greed to satisfaction, from selfishness to the joy of life on a livable planet.

Why an AR artwork?

With AR, you see a virtual world projected onto the ‘real’ world. AR allows you to create vast worlds that would not be possible otherwise: images can move, be larger than life, and impossible worlds can be created.

AR also enables a visitor to view the artwork in multiple locations: on the street or in the comfort of their own home.

You can load the artwork here:

https://ar.klimaatmuseum.nl/

Credits:

Art and AR development: Maarten van der Glas
Production: Laura van Rutten / Klimaat Museum

TRANS ECOLOGY was part of “Klimaat op staat”

Artist page @ Klimaat Museum

De Vrolijkheid (The Happiness) is an organisation that gives art workshops for kids in asylum centers in The Netherlands. It was a great honour for me as a multi media artist to be given this complex task. I designed, made a technical plan, and programmed the game, from 2021 – 2024. Additional programming was done by: Lindsey Schaap (back end, and svelte code), Eelke Feenstra (svelte code, UI improvements). UI concepts and icons by design studio Harris Blondman. In-game graphics are made by Max Holicki, and are not open source.

In the 3D game world children can explore art works and make their own.

The children can draw, make stopmotion animations and compose music. The children can also make their own avatar and personal space. To me it was important that selecting an avatar was not done with pre made templates but that the children can express their own unfiltered creativity.

I tried my best to design the app to be as simple as possible. Harris Blondman Studio designed the icons and cleaned up the design. Eelke Feenstra later refined the UI/ UX.

By 2024 about 700 children have made use of ARTWORLD and many touching and surprising art works have been made.

I am very excited to have been granted the opportunity to work on this project. I have worked with De Vrolijkheid before on a videomapping for a small museum project.

ARTWORLD is a multi user game, so players see and can interact with each other.

ARTWORLD is open source and hosted on Github

Documentation on Github

ARTWORLD project page on De Vrolijkheid website.

ARTWORLD blog:

Starting work on ARTWORLD

Technical Paper for ARTWORLD

Reflecting Forward is a Digital Immersive Art exhibition that shows endless connections to reveal what the future can look like. 

Reflecting Forward is Irma de Vries first solo show. In MOCO museum, Amsterdam, the exhibition explores how digital technologies can connect us in new ways. she creates an all-accepting place and experience, where space, people, and modern technology blend in harmony. Reflecting Forward includes different installation art rooms.

Maarten van der Glas was involved in brainstorm sessions from the beginning, along the way developing technical concepts and to do development of part of the physical exhibition. Apart from realising the work technically, I also acted as an intermediair between the artistic vision and the translation in the medium of lights and computer software.

The immersive digital art involved a lot of new techniques: 500 individually controllable diamond lights, a light ceiling with 4000 individual LEDS, interactive video screens.

Diamond Matrix

As humans we undergo great pressures, yet socially, failing is not accepted. Diamonds, made of carbon, go through incredible stress, to emerge as shining jewels and one of the strongest materials on earth, so can you.
This installation of hundreds of light-up diamonds expresses that we participate in a bigger picture, sharing more similarities than differences. Life is messy and hard, but it makes us stronger. Celebrate your indestructible shine.

Who are the diamonds in your life?

Links:

http://www.studioirma.com

https://mocomuseum.com

https://www.iamsterdam.com

https://museumtijdschrift.nl/

Behind the Scenes

For the 18th editing of the Playtime festival in Mongolia Sara Orfali aka ALPHAWHALE and Maarten van der Glas participated in 3 days of VJing at the TechnoStage. Part of the programming was under auspices of TodaysArt in collaboration with Art Counsel Mongolia.

Sara had made a design of a constellation of triangular screens. We video-mapped those screens and mixed our visuals onto them.

Sara was very interested in Voronoi structures for projections and Maarten was experimenting with feedback loop and so called data moshing techniques.

We were very pleased with the result, the DJ’s and the crowd. It was a very special experience at an amazing festival at an awesome location.

Links

http://playtime.mn/

https://montsame.mn/

TodaysArt

TodaysArt interview

Behind the scenes

GREETING FROM THE GOETHE-INSTITUT

Links

Catalog

Behind the scenes

Light art: Maarten van der Glas

The Floor is Lava was a theatrical exhibition in which artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen populated Marres with sculptures and molded portraits of people in everyday environments. Made from different materials, clay, cloth, wood, the figures had expressive faces, but are otherwise sketchily composed with stick legs, half torso’s and loosely hanging pieces of cloth. The faces seemed mask-like, unrelated to the bodies that support them. They lean against a wall, sit on makeshift chairs, queue at a ticket office, or wait on a platform for a train to arrive at the station.They were actors in search of a play, as much as they were compositions of identity, that fictional moment of stasis in a world that is constantly on the move. The artists played with the idea that people always play a role, different in every situation, with specific character traits and body language.

The title derived from a children’s game in which on command the players immediately have to get their feet off the floor and freeze in a certain position, as if they have been turned into statues.The liquid floor in the game suggests the added meaning of a world that is beyond our control, of shared values that are dissipating, and a future that has become uncertain. The figures inhabit the stage that is left when all that is solid has melted into air. In the cahier all the works on display in the exhibition are further explained.

In a Training the Senses session that took place during the exhibition, the artist duo introduced the audience to the performance How can we know the dancer from the dance? they made earlier. The presentation provided a short training for participants to go outside and make their own detailed observations of theatrical events in everyday life.

SANDER BREURE & WITTE VAN HULZEN

Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen both live and work in Amsterdam. Breure graduated from the Royal Conservatory, The Hague, and Van Hulzen graduated from ArtEZ in Arnhem. Their multidisciplinary work is based on research about body language and its interpretation. They are represented by tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam.

PUBLICATION ON GESTURES OF DOING NOTHING

Next to the exhibition, the joined publication named On Gestures of Doing Nothing made by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen came out on 4 August 2019. On Gestures of Doing Nothing documents a performance staged by Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen. The performance took place on April 15 and 16, 2019, in their exhibition The Floor is Lava in Marres. It consisted of eleven performers presenting a series of gestures. The performance – along with the exhibition itself – was photographed by Petra Stavast. This publication was conceived and developed in collaboration with art historian and curator Arnisa Zeqo. The book is published in English.

PRIX DE ROME

In international jury selected Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen together with 3 other artists for the shortlist of Prix de Rome 2019. They received a working budget an were given the opportunity to create new work. The work was exhibited at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the fall of 2019.

Press

• De Volkskrant
• BBK
• De Limburger (1)
• Mister Motley
• Metropolis M
• De Limburger (2)
• e-flux
• Het Parool

   

In opdracht van Gemeente Amsterdam zorgde Artifex met #BeKind2019 voor een vernieuwend en verbindend oud en nieuw in Amsterdam. Irma de Vries en Maarten van der Glas verzorgde een video mapping op de kop van java voorafgaande aan de vuurwerkshow van oud en nieuw.

Oud & Nieuw
In december reflecteren we op het afgelopen jaar en leven we toe naar het nieuwe jaar. De engelen nodigen je uit om een nieuwjaarswens te doen voor een ander. Dit kun je doen door plaats te nemen tussen de vleugels en de wens te delen via sociale media met #BeKind2019. Op 31 december om middernacht worden de nieuwjaarswensen symbolisch losgelaten in het nieuwe jaar tijdens de nieuwjaarsviering van de stad Amsterdam op de Kop van Java. Om twaalf uur ‘s nachts is er een spetterende vuurwerkshow. Vanaf het Java-eiland, de Jan Schaeferbrug en de Noordwal is het vuurwerk te bekijken.

Videokunst

Voorafgaand aan de vuurwerkshow, vanaf ca. 22.00 uur, zullen de meest markante nieuwjaarswensen vertoond worden op de Kop van Java.

Wees lief voor de stad

Artifex bedacht de campagne #BeKind2019. Lichtkunstwerken in de vorm van engelen streken neer in verschillende stadsdelen en vormden een platform waar bezoekers een nieuwjaarswens konden opnemen en delen. Bij het aftelmoment werden deze nieuwjaarswensen symbolisch de lucht in gestuurd, door middel van een kunstwerk met video mapping. Uitzending door AT5 en SBS6 en andere door Artifex gegenereerde PR zorgde voor extra zichtbaarheid van de campagne.

https://artifex.nu/case/gemeente-amsterdam#

https://www.amsterdamsdagblad.nl/uitgaan/bekind2019-engelen-strijken-neer-in-amsterdam

https://www.parool.nl/nieuws/dit-was-oud-nieuw-in-amsterdam~b38a0776/

https://www.events.nl/nieuws/amsterdam-sluit-af-met-bekind2019

Performance, 30 minutes, 2019

Maarten van der Glas: light art, software development

For this piece Maarten van der Glas developed 4 fake TV screens that were emitting light for all of the cast and stage. The screens were lighting up according to film segments selected by Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen, giving the characters a distinct TV glow and a hidden layer for the piece.

In a Flickering Light, the performance by artist duo Sander Breure and Witte van Hulzen, has five characters: four actors, and the light of a screen. The light of the screen–of which the audience sees only the reflection–makes the muscles of the four actors react, contract and contort. Their faces smile, get scared, cry and admire. The facial expressions of the faces lit by the screen change from mask to mask. Are these masks a reaction to what they see on the screen? Or are they a ritualised expression of their feelings? They could also be read as an exposé of a canon of facial expressions, reminiscent of the series of frozen grimaces that Franz Xaver Messerschmidt sculpted between 1770 and 1783. At the end of his life, he obsessively studied himself in the mirror–like a kind of Narcissus–creating self portraits possessed by a spirit that visited him at night. All faces, if we do an exercise in abstraction and see them on a close-up, become masks. Masks evoke the Jungian archetypes, such as those Grotowski worked with in his “Poor Theater,” searching for the expression of a sharpened consciousness.

Concept and directed by:
Sander Breure
Witte van Hulzen

Performed by:
Anneke Sluiters
Chandana Sarma
Karina Holla
Phi Nguyen

Light Art: Maarten van der Glas

Curated by Marta Ramos

Performed at:
MACBA, Barcelona
Veem House for Performance, Amsterdam

Links

Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen

https://loop-barcelona.com/

For the band DIEDE  “Made in China” tour Maarten van der Glas was commissioned to make a system that allowed 4 video screens to move on stage. During the set the screen were moved on stage to provide a suiting atmosphere.

The screens were in sync with the live audio set, mobile on stage and could be controlled with a controller on stage during the performance. My rol was to make a link between the Ableton Live audio set and the synced videos on screen, and program a controller for on the stage.

Official tour video

Visuals created by Glitterende Eenhoorn.

Commissioned and produced by Paradiso Melkweg Productions.

Links

http://www.diedemusic.com

https://paradiso.melkweg.nl

https://cargocollective.com/kloppenburg