Martijn Tellinga's artistic work occupies an intermedium between installation, music composition, and durational performance. Drawing on both concert and exhibition practice, it engages site, sound, instrumentalism, video, movement, the temporal and the textual within iteratively evolving gallery or intervention settings. Exploring score-based and open-form composition processes, he aims to address questions of agency and mediation across evental situations of a diverse materiality. His works often pose situated reflections on the rudiments of form and formation, and the (inter)subjective production of our sense of self and environment through a generative formal aesthetics inquiring into aleatoric modes of repetition, multiplicity, and spatiality. Indeterminate composition and performativity are used to expose the ambiguity of system and considered devices to speculatively evoke idiosyncratic and asynchronous dynamics, depicting a world defined by difference, irregularity, and reinterpretation, commenting a socio-cultural situation pertaining standardisation and chrono-normativity.

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Guided by such notions, Tellinga produced performance works which repeatedly dismantle and reassemble an instrumental concert setting over extreme durations, (performative) sound installation work which investigates the part-scientific part-poetic practice of on-site resonance tuning, and documentary pieces that expand upon methods of acoustic measurement as intervention style negotiation of locality. More recent work develops both a critical and poetic stance on technologically mediated contemporaneity and stages a radically slowed-down silent choreographic construct between 2 - 4 individual performers conducting strategies of slowness and stillness to induce and equally protest a system of expanded video telematics.

 

At research level, he is committed to contributing to the imagining of an integrative concept of musicality drawing in different practical and discursive perspectives, capable of connecting with the generic space of contemporary practice and interface an unfixed phenomenological and conceptual field beyond the audible and the concert stage. To this end, his speculative practice reinterprets music's allography and its unique thickness of time into propositional object-specific instances of performative installation across an evolving mediality, aiming to prompt engagement with the fundamental ideas of composition and the very notion of a musical situation.