Philip Vermeulen provokes emotional reactions with kinetic installations that listen in on unexpected conversations among everyday materials like elastics, textiles and fluorescent lights. He tempers danger with attraction: to make Berghain less overwhelming as a 2018 venue for his monumental installation Boem BOem in which tennis balls fly at sound boxes at 150 km per hour – he turned out the lights and turned on a strobe.

Vermeulen’s sensorially powerful audiovisual installation More Moiré² premieres at Sonic Acts. In a panoramic Ganzfeld environment, with no horizon or anchor, the immersive cinematic experience puts visitors’ senses to the test. Inspired by the work of light artists such as Doug Wheeler and James Turrell, Vermeulen plays with human perception. In a virtual and abstract landscape of light, sound and moving moiré patterns, he constructs new worlds and dissolves others. The tension between the experience of bodyless digitality and material physicality is palpable in More Moiré², which resets the senses in stimulating the awareness of one’s own material existence.

Philip Vermeulen is an artist based in The Hague whose large-scale installations are part of his research into altering psychological states by manipulating the primary phenomena of light, sound and movement in a lineage of Zero, sound, kinetic and audiovisual art. His ​‘hypersculptures’ move at high speeds, changing perception of their physical properties: fans spin at such a rate that they split white light into colours (Fanfanfan), soft materials ripple so fast they stand still (Flapflap) and with the stimulation of stroboscopic lights, ghostly images are summoned into the retinal surface (Int/​Ext). Playfulness, seduction, self-destruction and delirium place audiences on high alert as his work dissolves the borders between mind and material. A 2017 graduate of the ArtScience Interfaculty, his work has been bought by Rijksmuseum Twenthe, showed at galleries like Arti et Amicitiae, W139 Amsterdam, clubs (Berghain), and festivals like Mapping, Geneva and Novas Frequências, Rio.

Photo Re-Imagine Europe