Biography
Born in 1983 on Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan, Canadian performance artist Erin Gee currently resides in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her artistic practice spans various disciplines, including new media, music composition, art-science, and performing arts. She is Professeure Adjointe (Assistant Professor) in the Music Faculty at Université de Montreal.
Recognized as a DIY expert in emotional biofeedback technology, Gee’s music explores the softer dimensions of sound, gesture, breath, voice, eye contact, and simulated haptics as manipulative elements for structuring the body and its emotions. Her performance techniques, which she describes as “wetware,” delve into the subconscious influence of sound, drawing inspiration from emotional physiology, hypnotism, feminist theory, ASMR, and the placebo effect to challenge the authoritarian aura of quantification. Meticulously structuring the social, emotional, and physical facets of music, Gee transforms biofeedback into a space of posthumanist connection, orchestrating listeners’ bodies within her cybernetic systems in place.
She has received commissions from Montreal-based entities such as Akousma Festival, Totem Contemporain, Ensemble Supermusique, and soprano Andrea Young. In 2023, Gee’s performance at MUTEK Montreal garnered acclaim from THE WIRE magazine, describing it as the most memorable ambient showcase at the festival. Her international presence extends to exhibitions at art museums, electronic music festivals, and new music venues, with performances/exhibitions at the Karachi Biennale (PK), Centro de Arte Sonoro (AR), Toronto Biennale (CA), Ars Electronica (AT), LEV Festival (ES), MUTEK Festival (AR/ES/CA), NRW Forum (DE), and MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA).
In 2021 Gee co-founded Audio Placebo Plaza community sound art collective with Julia E. Dyck and Vivian Li. The more that you believe, the more it works. The more that it works, the more you believe.
Her article “The BioSynth: an affective biofeedback device grounded in feminist thought” won the prize of best paper at New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference 2023.
Gee’s work has been featured in WIRE, neural.it, Scientific American blog, VICE, MusicWorks, and Canadian Art magazine. She has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, as well as the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and recognizes their continued support of the arts.
Gee is the current President of Perte de Signal artist collective (Montreal). Booking: Wicked Artists.
