Biography

Canadian performance artist and composer Erin Gee ( TIO’TIA:KE – MONTREAL) takes inspiration from her experience as a vocalist and applies it to poetic and sensorial technologies, likening the vibration of vocal folds to electricity and data across systems, or vibrations across matter. She is a multidisciplinary artist that combines music, art-science and performance art to explore emotion as technique or technology, blurring the lines between affect and reason. Inspired by the physiology of emotion, hypnotism, feminist theory, musicology, and the placebo effect, she is also a DIY expert in biofeedback, implicating the body of the listener into her cybernetic systems in place. 

Through principles of emotional labor, emotional measurement, emotional performance, and emotional reproduction, she has made work in neural networks, composition for choir and acoustic instruments, ASMR, virtual reality, networked music performance, quantum-music, and robotics.

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.

Gee’s work has been featured in solo concerts and exhibitions at MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA). Hamilton Artists’ Inc (CA), and Vancouver New Music (CA). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues such as the Karachi Biennale (PK), MUTEK (AR/ES/CA), LEV Festival (ES), Darling Foundry (CA), Toronto Biennale (CA), NRW Forum (DE), and Ars Electronica (AT).

After earning an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Gee was hired as a limited-term Assistant Professor at Concordia University (2015-2017) teaching seminars in Sound Production, Gender and Technology Studies, and Sound Studies. She is currently a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholar and doctoral student in Composition et Création Sonore at Université de Montréal, articulating feminist methods for composing through biofeedback music.

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 artistic research has been featured in 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 support from the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.  She is grateful for their continued support of the arts.

Gee’s work can be found in public and private collections. She is an active member of Perte de Signal artist collective (Montreal) and is represented by Wicked Artists.

Notes on my Practice

Through my practice in sound, new media, and music composition I articulate the materials of the human body and voice through interactive and emergent technologies such as VR, robotics, children’s choir, ASMR vocalizations, and affective biosensors.

Through this work I enact critical technical reimaginings of emotion as instrumentalized, denaturalized, or transformed into a technology in itself. Emotion has been historically naturalized and gendered as something inherently feminine: I create works based off of ambiguous sincerity, acting, and placebos as feminist tactic. While machines and computers may have at one time been solidly conceived of as purely logical and rational machines, the technologies and practices of social media have laid bare how emotional and manipulative our algorithms have made us. Feminist strategies of emotional reproduction contain valuable knowledges for how to read contemporary technology as a reflection of our daily life, to see affect as political, and how we can use technology to reimagine our own bodies, critically embracing emotional performance and production as survival mechanisms in a fully automated world.