Mark IJzerman is an interdisciplinary artist and composer working across ecology, sound, and technology. His installations and audiovisual performances draw on fieldwork and collaboration with biologists and ecologists, often incorporating living organisms, custom-built hardware, and self-written software. He treats technology as a participant in ecological processes rather than as a tool standing apart from them.
Increasingly his interest lies in how these concerns can move off the screen and into the room, using space, material, and live presence to close the distance between an audience and a subject. Influenced by eco-fiction, his practice attends to the temporal rhythms of more-than-human worlds and the conditions under which they can be heard and felt.
When approaching a new project Mark usually starts from a hyperlocal place, entity, or phenomenon. He is interested in how computers or the digital behave when you put them back in contact with weather, water, or biological time, and what aesthetics emerge when machines have to wait. He keeps returning to questions about how we attend to non-human worlds without flattening them.
Mark reads eco-fiction and theory around permacomputing, but most of his ideas come from the field itself: the texture of a place, what people say about it, what equipment fails to capture.
One question that’s always on Mark’s mind when creating is whether attention is a meaningful gesture. What he can offer is a place to spend time in, and a tempo that doesn’t match a news cycle. He is drawn to sound for this reason, since it shapes attention without claiming to represent anything.
This is a concept he would like to further explore into the physical: space, material, and live presence, so the subject and the experience become harder to separate, and the encounter is something you’re inside of rather than looking at.