OUSIA
OUSIA is a live audiovisual performance by sound artist, composer and performer Márk Bartha and the visual artist duo MakróVJ, formed by Anikó Skribek and Dávid Kara. The piece was first presented at INOTA Festival in 2023, an experimental music and light art festival taking place in the spectacular industrial buildings of Inota, Hungary.
The project explores the interplay of sound, image and perception through a live performative setup. Using a high-resolution digital microscope as the basis of the projection, MakróVJ reveal hidden details of fabrics, plant fragments, insects, dust, synthetic materials and found objects. These microscopic landscapes are magnified into abstract moving images, shifting between the organic and the artificial, the recognizable and the alien.
The visual world is accompanied by Márk Bartha’s live sound composition, built from field recordings, environmental noises, drone-like synthesizers and processed textures. Each performance is shaped by the given site, incorporating materials, objects and sounds from the immediate surroundings. In this way, OUSIA creates a unique, wordless narrative for each location: a sensory environment where sound and image emerge from the same physical context.
The title refers to the idea of essence or being. Yet rather than searching for something pure or stable, the piece focuses on fragile, decaying and transformed materials. Natural and artificial elements merge into dynamic audiovisual artifacts, evoking a world of entropy, conflict and melancholy.
OUSIA reflects on humanity’s fragmented relationship with its environment, imagining a post-human perspective in which objects, traces and residues continue to exist beyond their original function. Between live cinema, sound performance and microscopic observation, the work invites the audience into a shifting landscape where the boundaries between physical and digital, authentic and constructed, living and non-living become uncertain.