"Critical Mass: Pure Immanence"
HD video, 2015. Including music by Phill Niblock, Thomas Ankersmit playing Serge synthesiser & others.
Anne de Vries explores the limits of human agency and the relationship between technology and mass experience. He is interested in using the format of hardstyle electronic music as a means of presenting texts to an audience and has created a large-scale diorama of a hardstyle show, including a miniature stage with specifically designed VJ/light effects, DJ sets, and promotional posters as well as the infrastructure of an outdoor festival. From a fly-over perspective the viewer looks down on thronging crowds within a scenario orchestrated to push the audience into states of sensory overload and generate alternative experience—including light shows, visuals of masks and mutants, manipulated voices, and alien landscapes. For “Pure Immanence”, he uses hardstyle samples with voice-overs sourced from contemporary philosophical texts that share an affinity for reoccurring themes in this genre of electronic dance music: thinking beyond human scale, rejecting an essentialist view of nature, and embracing the ephemeral.
The work of the artist Anne de Vries is diverse and combines different subject matter and media, One can find spoken word, sculpture, video, experimental photography or large scale installations. Some say Anne de Vries explores the relationship between technology, media and mass experience and the limits of human agency.