Multidisciplinair artist Maartje Simons, AKA Life On Marzj, graduated in 2003 as a drummer at the Dutch Rockacademy. After playing in several bands (such as League of XO Gentlemen, K’s Choice, Duffhuës, The May Bees) she didn’t enjoy this life so much anymore. She wanted to be more creative and versatile than only being a drummer.
She started a collaboration with composer Janco Verduin writing music for a project called ‘Alice in Cartoonland’ and decided to write music for her very own children’s theatre play ‘Een zwerm koeien’. To give the piece a more multidisciplinary feel she made stop motion animations for the live shows and felt in love with the medium animation.
Than she continued develop herself to 2D and 3D and started studying animation at Reducations. After finishing this school she started combining music and animation using Augmented Reality (AR) as the main tool.
In 2022 she made AR works for 2 children’s books by writer Rieks Veenker and she did an AR collaboration with American artist Lee Ann Lander and exposed their work on Lee Anns solo exhibition in Columbus Ohio.
In April 2023 she adds AR and interactive video projections to a live performance by Monteverdi Kamerkoor Utrecht.
She uses the Artivive app for all these AR collaborations and now she is one of the mentees of the Artivive mentoring program. For 6 months she worked on her very own art piece called 'Rhythms of Redemption: Melding past and future through art and sound", with guidance and mental support of her mentor Alireza Mokarram. Marzj made a 3D animated video with music you can only see and hear using the Artivive app. April 14th this piece will be presented, together with the art of all mentees, at the Breakthrough exhibition held by Artivive at their gallery in Vienna.
Next to animation Marzj is parttime theatre technician for stand up philosopher Laura van Dolron.
Marzj makes her own AR artworks you can find at the Artivive Marketplace here
What is Augmented Reality?
Augmented reality (AR) is the integration of digital information with the user's environment in real time. AR users experience a real-world environment with generated perceptual information overlaid on top of it.
For a full understanding you can read this article.
For a full understanding you can read this article.