2021 Tag

We as Waves

14.08.2021 , Digital Media, Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

We as Waves (2021)
Premiere performance at Akousma Festival, Montreal.
Photography by Caroline Campeau.

2020

ASMRtronica is an ongoing project developed in the artist’s home-studio during the novel coronavirus pandemic: a manifestation of a desire for intimacy in sound, when touch was not possible. This is a style of music applied to several works as Gee develops her own vocabularies of psychosomatic performance.

Through ASMRtronica, Gee brings to life a combination of electroacoustic music and the sounds of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos: clicks, whispers, soft spoken voice, taps, and hand gestures inspired by hypnosis, tactility, intimacy, and verbal suggestion. Through ongoing development of this genre, she explores the sonic limits of the sensorial propositions of ASMR, journeying into embodied and unconscious feedback loops in sound.

Credits

We as Waves (2020)
Released August 2021 by Erin Gee.
Music composition and performance by Erin Gee. Text by Jena McLean. Videography by Michel de Silva.

To the Farther (2020)
Released September 8, 2020 by Erin Gee.
Music composition and art by Erin Gee.

We as Waves

We as Waves (2020) is a collaboration between myself and queer playwright Jena McLean. The text in this work is inspired by an essay by feminist theorist of electronic music Tara Rodgers. What does it mean to enter into an affective relationship of touch with sound? The work embodies a dark narrative of sonic becoming aided by hypnosis and physiological relationship to sound and voice, closed by the the following quotes from queer theologist Catherine Keller:

“As the wave rolls into realization, it may with an uncomfortable passion
fold its relations into the future: the relations, the waves of our possibility,
comprise the real potentiality from which we emerge…”

“We are drops of an oceanic impersonality. We arch like waves,
like porpoises.”

We as Waves (2020)

To the Farther

In September 2020 I launched To the Farther as part of MUTEK Montreal’s online exhibition Distant Arcades. It is first a series of music that explore the limits of tactile whispers, proximity, and hypnotic language through ASMR and electronic sound.

To the Farther is the title of the first iteration: A fresh take on texture, form, and the plasticity of reality under digital transformations, also is a “remix” of my ASMR recordings made in Machine Unlearning (2020).

To the Farther (2020)

Audio PlaceboPlaza

Audio Placebo Plaza

22.06.2021 , Digital Media, Embodied Media/Performance/Scores, Gallery Artwork, Music Composition, Portfolio, Sound Art

Poster for Audio Placebo Plaza: Montreal Edition (2021)

2021 / 2022

In June 2021 the trio transformed a former perfume shop in the St Hubert Plaza of Montreal into a pop up radio station, sensory room, therapist office, and audio production studio, uniting these spaces through the aesthetics of a sandwich shop or cafe to offer customizable audio placebo “specials” and “combos” to the public.

Founded upon principles of feminism, socialism, and audio production excellence, Audio Placebo Plaza invites everyday people to take appointments with artists to discuss how an audio placebo could help improve their lives. These appointments are entirely focused on the individual and are in themselves part of the process. Common topics of discussion included increasing productivity, self-esteem, self-care, social interactivity, brain hacking, mitigating insomnia, and pain management, but also one’s aural preferences, sensitivities, and curiosities. Intake sessions were conducted in a blended telematic/in-person structure to determine one’s familiarity and comfort levels with a variety of psychosomatic audio techniques including but not limited to soundscapes, binaural beats, simulated social interactions, positive affirmations, drone, participatory vocalization, ASMR, guided meditation and deep listening.

After the consultation is complete, team members met to discuss each participant’s case to fulfill their “prescription,” and also to divide the labor amongst the three creators. The collaborations are non-hierarchical, adaptive, and simultaneous: one might be working on up to four projects at a time, or trade tasks depending on one’s backlog of labor. Labor is divided into recording sounds, conducting intake sessions, writing scripts, performing spoken or sung content, writing music, editing and audio mixing, cleaning and maintaining the shared spares, and communicating with visitors or walk-ins.

Audio Placebo Plaza Radio broadcast was facilitated through a pirate radio transmitter as well as an internet radio station. We broadcast completed placebos, shared technical advice and performance practices during informal critiques, work sessions in progress through the DAW, and sometimes informal chats with visitors. Intake sessions were also broadcasted (with the consent of visitors).

Through Audio Placebo Place, we explore and develop methods for sound and music that propose emotional labor, listening, collaboration and “music as repair” (see Suzanne Cusick, 2008) as key elements that shape the sonic-social encounter between artists and the public.

Can placebos help?
Does sound have the power to process complex emotions?
Can music give you what you need?
Is this even music?

The Montreal edition of Audio Placebo Plaza has been archived by Andy Stuhl at Wave Farm (NY, USA)
https://wavefarm.org/radio/archive/works/kdtgwn

We created a commemorative booklet for Audio Placebo Plaza: Montreal edition with writing by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
https://audioplaceboplaza.com/Publication

Credits

Audio Placebo Plaza is a community sound art project conceived by Julia E Dyck, Erin Gee and Vivian Li .

Graphic design by Sultana Bambino.

Gallery

Audio Placebo Plaza Montreal Poster

In November 2022 Audio Placebo Plaza traveled to Karachi Pakistan as part of the Karachi Biennale.

Audio Placebo Plaza (APP) is a female and non-gender conforming collective of artists (Julia E. Dyck, Erin Gee, Vivian Li) focused on the expansion of intersectional feminist methods of care, emotional labor, collaboration, and community in sound art. APP considers “placebo” as a complex, open-ended, and optimistic conceptual framework for work that embraces irony, play, and co-performativity in psychosomatic sound art. Through performance and interactivity, APP engages with community members to discuss these topics, creating original audio artworks based on conversations in our healing space. We offer everyday people customized positive messages, audio creations, healing frequencies, binaural beats, and ASMR, responding to the needs of our community through a practice of radical sonic care. We promise our fullest intention.
https://audioplaceboplaza.com/

You can listen to the albums from the Montreal edition and the Karachi edition here:
https://audioplaceboplaza.bandcamp.com/

Audio Placebo Plaza – Pillow Talk Radio
https://www.instagram.com/p/CucUFrboaoU/?img_index=1

 

Press

https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/you/1014017-visionary-women

https://mmnews.tv/here-are-artworks-you-must-visit-at-karachi-biennale-2022/

https://www.dawn.com/news/1717389/3rd-karachi-biennale-promises-interesting-display-of-artistic-talent

https://www.thenews.com.pk/magazine/us/1008137-karachi-biennale-2022-where-art-meets-technology

https://www.arabnews.pk/node/2191651/lifestyle

https://thekarachicollective.com/on-coevolution-and-the-spaces-we-build-for-ourselves-dialog-on-kb22/?fbclid=IwAR2IVRyA719mOdAwV4wHo2RIma45pJugdHywE9JAvD7wAc6hffvRx03g1ww

Credits

Audio Placebo Plaza is a community sound art project conceived by Julia E Dyck, Erin Gee and Vivian Li .

Graphic design by Sultana Bambino.

Gallery

Audio Placebo Plaza Karachi

Audio Placebo Plaza – Montreal

28.05.2021 , Exhibitions, News, Performances

/Undefine Radio presents a series of radio interventions under the theme of “Bodies in Resonance / Corps Résonants”.

Co-curated by Martín Rodríguez and Emmanuel Madan, this series enlists three successive artist groups to make performances, installations, and engage with the public through the storefront at 6835 Rue Saint-Hubert from June 4 to 22 in Partnership with Suoni per il Popolo and CKUT.

June 11-17: Audio Placebo Plaza

 

Sound artists Erin Gee and Julia E Dyck transform a former perfume shop vitrine into a DIY audio placebo and online radio centre. For one week only they offer everyday people customized positive messages, audio creations, healing frequencies, binaural beats, and ASMR. They are responding to the needs of the community through a practice of radical sonic care.

Can placebos help?
Does sound have the power to process complex emotions?
Can music give you what you need?
Is this even music?

CHECK OUT OUR PIRATE RADIO and INTERNET STREAM —-> undefine.fm

Recto VRso Festival: France

23.05.2021 , Exhibitions, News

Recto VRso Virtual : April 14-16 2021.  https://rectovrso.laval-virtual.com/

Recto VRso Restitution: July 8-11 2021, Musée Ecole Jardin de la Perrine, Laval (France). 

My ASMRtronica work We as Waves (2021) is part of the 2021 Recto VRso festival

For its upcoming edition, Recto VRso reinvents itself and reshapes its format by combining a virtual exhibition and a restitution in the physical world. The 4th edition of the international digital art festival Recto VRso will take place online from 14th to 16th April 2021 in the virtual world of Laval Virtual World.  A second part of the festival will be organized in a physical space from 7th to 11th July 2021 during the international exhibition Laval Virtual.

Slanted Magazine

20.05.2021 , News

My works Machine Unlearning (2020) and Project H.E.A.R.T. (2017) w/ Alex M. Lee are featured in the beautiful German design magazine Slanted #37 – AI!

Slanted Publishers is an internationally active publishing and media house founded in 2014 by Lars Harmsen and Julia Kahl. They publish the award-winning print magazine Slanted, covering international developments in design and culture twice a year.

Out Now:
Slanted Magazine #37–AI

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has become—besides being an over-hyped buzzword across industries (that the design world is no exception to)—a reality. The latest issue of Slanted Magazine looks at the impact of artificial intelligence on design and its subsets and highlights how these technologies can change our lives through numerous projects, essays, and interviews. And one more thing: for each cover of the entire edition, a unique motif of CROSSLUCID was printed—an aesthetic between portrait, still life and expressionistic topography, alien to our understanding of the human, the natural, the artificial and the digital …
Slanted Publishers (pub.), 160 × 240 mm, 288 pages, English, Digital Cover Printing (Limego), Offset Printing (Stober Medien), Paper (Fedrigoni), Swiss brochure, ISSN: 1867-6510.

Workshop: ASMR Vocabulary for Composers

19.05.2021 , Artist Talks, News, Teaching
Event by Canadian League of Composers/La Ligue Canadienne des Compositeurs and Erin Gee Studio
Online with Facebook Live
Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 3 PM EDT
Price: Free
Public Anyone on or off Facebook
Register here: bit.ly/CLC-ASMR
You will receive Zoom login the day of the webinar. Please contact [email protected] if you have any issues.
ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a term that refers both to an audiovisual genre that has existed since 2009, and an unconscious, sensory reaction of “phantom touch” an individual might feel in response to soft textural sounds greatly amplified. Focusing on the ways that ASMR sounds “hack” into the subconscious of the listener to create emotional reactions, this seminar introduces audio visual vocabularies through “trigger” techniques, making and breaking patterns, and influences from hypnosis and meditation. ASMR is highly mediated through the camera and microphone, so I will also include these considerations. Through analysis of this genre I invite participants to explore techniques together during the webinar with instruments, voices, or everyday objects.
To learn more about the presenter, visit eringee.net.
*Cet événement sera présenté en anglais, mais les questions en français sont acceptées et encouragées !

Decolonizing the Senses, Roundtable: Montreal

06.05.2021 , Artist Talks, News

Decolonizing the Senses, Roundtable

Organizer: Florencia Marchetti, CISSC, Concordia University, Canada

This roundtable brings together an interdisciplinary team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and scholars who have been exploring ways of decentering Western notions about the body and the senses through an intercultural research-creation lab since 2014. Through talking and making, thinking, reading and researching, team members have shared and learned about each other’s practices, bringing to the table a diverse range of epistemological and ontological doubts and premises. In this roundtable, we will revisit the project’s trajectory, from our early conversations and interferences to the production of three portable sensory environments and the video re-mediations produced to share the works under the new social regulations imposed by pandemic living.

Discussion topics will include:

– Listening Relationalities

– New Media Art and Indigenous Ontologies

– Creative-Knowledge Flow and Protocols (from Place/Land through Non-Human Ontologies into Artworks)

Panelists:

Jennifer Biddle, National Institute for Experimental Art, University of New South Wales, UK,
David Garneau, Visual Arts, University of Regina, Canada

Erin Gee, Music Composition, Universite de Montreal, Canada
David Howes, Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada
Suzanne Kite, Concordia University, Canada,
Chris Salter, Design Art, Concordia University, Canada,
r e a Saunders, Independent artist, Australia

Online Panel: NFTs and Artists

21.04.2021 , Artist Talks, News

Online discussion hosted by Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina Canada

NFTs and Artists with Erin Gee, Jeremy Bailey, Rah Eleh, and Alex McLeod

7pm CST / 9pm EST

This is going to be a really FUN, critical, and informative discussion on NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) with Canadian artists Jeremy Bailey, Rah Eleh, and Alex McLeod!

How are digital artists using NFTs now, and what will their use look like in the future of this rapidly changing landscape?

MUTEK ES/AR

16.04.2021 , Artist Talks, Exhibitions, News

My electronic music in ASMRtronica – To the Farther (2020) and a preview of new work We as Waves (2021) will be featured in MUTEK Barcelona / MUTEK Argentina : Hybrid Edition 2021.

As part of this edition I was invited to speak at the MUTEK ES/AR symposium “A future without gender” April 21-22. The title of my presentation is Unnatural Emotion: ASMR as feminist gesture in electronic music.

Click here to learn more about getting tickets for the online events

For more information about how to experience the festival online: https://mutek.org/