INTRODUCTION

As an artist, De Nijs shows how culture acts upon our senses, and he expresses this in a great variety of ways, making use of continually-changing technology. This allows him to emphasise a new role for the artist that seems to have been established by our developing culture of technology. De Nijs describes his work as a recognition of the dynamic collision of bodies, machines and other media.

The interface between the body and technology forms an important basis for De Nijs's work. Technology must literally merge, become absorbed into the body so that it becomes a co-determiner of perception. And here perception not only refers to how external stimuli are interpreted by the five senses, but also the feelings that come from within the body itself, the information that is derived from one's own muscles and nerves (the technical term being proprioception). Because De Nijs's work often involves the entire body of the observer, they therefore become less of an observer and more of a participator; someone who experiences the work. The techniques employed in the construction of his work mediate this experience.

One of the characteristics of a technological culture is that change is constant. Everyone who wants to keep pace is continually required to adjust; which does not happen automatically and can, in time lead to cultural-pathological anomalies. In this way, travellers had to get used to the first trains and aeroplanes. The introduction of such travel technology initially led to disorientation and required a new outlook. It is pre-eminently these cultural processes that are given artistic form by Marnix de Nijs.

Marnix has presented his works at most major national and international media-festivals and worked with Edwin van der Heide, Montevideo_lab, V2_lab, ZKM, TU Darmstadt and resently with Tsinghua University.