WAIVE x Mark IJzerman

During Dutch Design Week, artist Mark IJzerman kicked off the WAIVE Europe project with his immersive performance Despite Disturbed Waters: a hypnotic audiovisual soundscape in which archival images and sounds came to life in an immersive experience. 

 

WAIVE Europe explores how public heritage datasets can be used to build innovative AI-driven tools for musicians and audiovisual artists. By analyzing and transforming historical audio and video material, WAIVE develops a series of open-source DJ and VJ plugins (VSTs). These tools not only preserve cultural heritage but actively integrate it into new artistic contexts. While much generative AI relies on controversial training data, WAIVE offers an ethical alternative: using public domain material. The project brings heritage quite literally back to the stage – and into the hands of creators. 

 

A key aspect of WAIVE is that its tools are open-source. This means that not only the interface is freely available, but also the underlying code. Makers like Mark IJzerman can dig deeper into the technology, adapt the tools to their own vision, or even develop entirely new applications. WAIVE is not just a platform for creation, but an invitation to experiment and innovate.

 

Mark IJzerman is an interdisciplinary artist who uses technology to tell ecological stories. His work focuses on the more-than-human and explores themes such as biodiversity, water pollution, and climate change. His performances are often the result of intensive fieldwork and collaborations with experts from disciplines like biology and astronomy. WAIVE invited IJzerman to engage with the tools from his own artistic approach — a choice that made sense given his combination of artistic vision and technical skill.

 

 

Despite Disturbed Waters

 

The 45-minute performance took place at Effenaar, Eindhoven’s renowned music venue, during Dutch Design Week 2024. Visitors sat in rows as if in an old cinema. With retro 3D glasses they immersed themselves in an audiovisual journey. 

 

Mark IJzerman stood in a darkened room behind his DJ booth, in front of a large projection screen. His live soundscape unfolded slowly, filled with atmospheric sounds based on samples from his own collection and from the archives of Beeld & Geluid. The sounds of water and machinery took center stage — serving as a metaphor for both progress and pollution. Sound and image merged to form a speculative ecosystem, where technology and nature interact in a layered audiovisual experience. 

 

This thematic tension directly echoed the context of WAIVE: even AI — no matter how innovative — casts an ecological shadow. Its development and application consume enormous amounts of energy and water, and ironically, it too becomes a source of environmental strain. IJzerman’s work made this tension palpable in sound and image. 

 

For this performance, IJzerman worked with the WAIVE Visualizer — an AI-powered VST that creates video collages from public domain archives. The tool overlays videos, cuts out elements, and adds effects, allowing musicians and performers to enrich their sound with visuals that react to the audio in real time. As well, he mixed in AI-generated music samples from the WAIVE sampler. 

 

 

Mark IJzerman didn’t use the tool ‘as-is’. Instead, he took the open-source base code and used it as the foundation for his own experiment. He built a new version in which the video layers no longer sat flat on top of one another, but occupied a virtual 3D space — forming a landscape of archival footage, with elements floating in front of and behind one another. By coloring the layers red and green and using old-school 3D glasses, the final result resembled a retro 3D film. The grainy, historical footage gained unexpected spatial depth: simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic. 

 

The showcase was not only artistically innovative, but also served as a key practical test for the WAIVE tools. By engaging directly with the code, IJzerman demonstrated the value of open-source technology in the creative sector. It allows artists to break boundaries — and actively contribute to the further development of the tools themselves. 

 

With this first showcase, WAIVE proved that public archives can not only be preserved, but reactivated — in 3D, in sound, and in a new imagining of the past. A tribute to the archive, but also a warning: Despite Disturbed Waters makes tangible how close the future lies to the past.

 

WAIVE is an initiative by Thunderboom Records and the Netherlands Institute of Sound & Vision. The VST’s are developed by Superposition and Arran Lyon. WAIVE is funded by Mondriaan Fonds and Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.