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. Through her work, Gee delves into the subconscious influence of sound, drawing inspiration from emotional physiology, hypnotism, feminist theory, ASMR, and the placebo effect.
Recognized as a DIY authority in emotional biofeedback technology, Gee’s biofeedback music defies scientific confines, exploring the softer dimensions of sound, gesture, breath, voice, eye contact, and simulated haptics. Her performance techniques, encapsulated as “wetware,” challenge the authoritarian aura of quantification, transforming biofeedback into a feminist space of posthumanist connection and expression.
Gee’s artistic engagement spans diverse mediums, including musical composition, networked performance, VR, AI, and robotics. She meticulously structures the social, emotional, and physical facets of music, orchestrating listeners’ bodies within her cybernetic systems in place. Noteworthy commissions since 2021 include projects for 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 recent showcases at the Karachi Biennale (PK), Centro de Arte Sonoro (AR), 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 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 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.
