2022 Tag

La Lumière MBASMR

14.11.2024 , Digital Media, Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

La Lumière MBASMR (2022)
Performance

2022

In 2022, Canadian composer and media artist Erin Gee was commissioned by the Broodthaers Society of America (NYC) to perform a remote concert inspired by 20th century Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers’ La Lumière Manifeste.

The performance was part of the programming celebrating a new vinyl album of Broodthaers reading some of his late poetry recently unearthed and remastered by Raf Wollaert (Doctoral Fellow at the University of Antwerp). Gee uses the original French versions of Marcel Broodthaers’ poems as the basis for her online multimedia song book, aided by English subtitles, the tools and gestures of ASMR, and the inherent immersion and drift of the internet.

Gallery

Video

La Lumière MBASMR (2022) Performance

Sensitive Superpositions

14.11.2024 , Digital Media, Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

Sensitive Superpositions (2022)

2022 / 2023

Focused on expanding virtual space, Buenos-Aires based visual artist Magdalena Molinari and Montreal-based composer Erin gee created a visually rich musical performance of about 30 mins based on the aesthetic world of our VR work Sensitive Superpositions (2021), which premiered as part of MUTEK Argentina in 2022.

“The sky is not something far away: it is something all around you. The weather is never far from you either: it craves your intimacy. Air, pressure, heat and humidity penetrate and rewrite your autonomic and unconscious nervous system, influencing your thoughts and feelings, corroding the metals of a harddrive reading and writing in clicks inscribing yourself as a person on the network as you move on and offline. When you really think about it, everything belongs to nature: Plastic, silicon, toy dogs, genetically modified corn. What you typically think of as nature–organic, carbon-based materials and cyclical time – is a reflection of your own body, which is only one of many bodies in the natural world. Let’s unpack this.”

Sensitive Superpositions is a landscape that is as technological as it is natural: light and sound interact to transform perception, using raw vocalizations to bring warmth and vulnerability to a seemingly cold and inhospitable world. What does it mean to meet a digital system on an emotional level? Color, light and circular movement are key to loosening knots of perception, creating an atmosphere, a physical experience in a digital universe. Sensitive Superpositions combines the 2 of 5psychosomatic power of orbital, circular and looping light patterns in combination with the tactile intimacy of whispered vocals and verbal suggestion. The work of Gee and Molinari is characterized by slowly rolling landscapes of light sculptures, informed by Molinari’s research into the encounter between natural light and the earth’s atmosphere, as well as Gee’s smart and self-aware sensual voice, claiming to be “your mother, father, lover and best friend.” The sensual minimalism of the collaboration proposes new technologies of attention, psychosomatic loops, and the affect of information in contemporary digital life, working the subconscious in an attentive and receptive state through a seductive “tech poetry.”

Exhibition History

VR version – MUTEK Argentina 2021
Performance version – CaSo Buenos Aires, 2023

Fulldome performance – commissioned by Buenos Aires cultural municipality, 2023

Virtual Reality Experience

Screencaps

Gallery

Sensitive Superpositions (2023) in Buenos Aires

Video

Sensitive Superpositions (2023) in Buenos Aires

Intimacy Alphabet

13.11.2024 , Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

Intimacy Alphabet (2020)

2020 / 2022

This is a piece for emotional survival in difficult times.

I wrote it in October 2020, during a deep state of mourning for the intangible social connections that were absent not only in my life, but in the lives of others that needed support. The pandemic had me in a state of emergency, and craving repair. Queer studies scholar Eve Sedgewick once said that the reparative is a reconstruction of shattered objects so that they can bring us pleasure, and that the affect of the reparative is love. I symbolically shattered music not into notes, gestures, or textures, but into an alphabet of affect and intent, hoping to inspire myself and others to create moments of intimacy, care and repair through microphones and camera. The shattered pieces are assembled in the score, and are reassembled through performance.

”Each performance of Intimacy Alphabet is organized through psychosomatic “triggers” in the spirit of internet phenomena Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). Each trigger is its own universe, but there can be some overlaps. Some listeners might recoil in horror from these sounds, but others draw in closer. Under musical aesthetics of affect, the invitation is for one to open to the performer’s intent to transfer touch and reparative intimacy through sound. Imagination closes the circle.”

Performance history

Performed by Andrea Young
https://redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/track/intimacy-alphabet

Performed at Vancouver New Music concert 2022

The work was performed by soprano Andrea Young on her 2020 album Echo to the Sense.

In 2022 I scored the work for choir, which was assembled through a week-long ASMR performance workshop. The choral version debuted in 2022 at a concert with Vancouver New Music.

Publications

Included in new publication A Year of Deep Listening (2024)
https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/ayodl/

 

Score

Intimacy Alphabet (2020)

Gallery

Intimacy Alphabet (2022)

Video

Intimacy Alphabet (2022)

AFFECT FLOW

17.07.2023 , Digital Media, Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

AFFECT FLOW (2022)
Performance at MUTEK Montreal 2023. Photography by Vivien Gaumand.

2022

AFFECT FLOW is a music performance work of approximately 30 minutes that initiates listeners into a state of “non-naturalist emotion”: emotional manufacture as a technology for survival or pleasure. It is a hybrid of electroacoustic music with live-spoken verbal suggestion, an ensemble of live biofeedback created by hardware synthesisers, and song.

In AFFECT FLOW I use psychological hacks borrowed from method acting and clinical psychology in order to move beyond “natural” emotion, playing with biofeedback music paradigms and group participation through folk hypnosis, verbal suggestion, clinical psychology methods, roleplay, song, and textural sounds.

These performance techniques, which I call “wetware,” challenge the authoritarian aura of quantification, transforming biofeedback into a feminist space of posthumanist connection and expression.

The biofeedback performers (up to 10) in AFFECT FLOW are volunteers referred to as surrogates who meet me a half hour before the performance. After a brief musical interlude, I extend an invitation for the audience to join us in guided visualization and hypnosis led by me and my voice. Each surrogate operates a BioSynth, a musical instrument of my design that responds to physiological markers like heart rate, breathing, and skin conductance as a control parameter for electronic sound. The mechanics of the BioSynths are explained clearly, allowing listeners to perceive the shifting mood in the room during the performance through the bodies of the performers. This collaborative interplay of bodies gives rise to affect as an ecological relation, transcending individual subjectivity.

A lightbulb illuminates at the feet of each performer when their signals are amplified. Because I can control the audio outputs of each body via a mixing board, I can highlight solos, duets, trios, and ensemble moments live in the moment.

A psychosomatic style of electroacoustic music based on the aesthetics of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) as applied to biofeedback music composition.

The result is an expansion of biofeedback music towards performance and stimuli, considering social, affective and gendered dimensions of these sensual propositions that recalibrate the body’s autonomous nervous system (breathing, blood flow, skin conductance).

Press

https://nouvelles.umontreal.ca/article/2022/03/25/erin-gee-quand-la-musique-unit-le-corps-et-l-esprit/

https://www.createastir.ca/articles/erin-gee-vancouver-new-music-parallel-05

THE WIRE

Bilingual MUTEK feature in PANM360 https://panm360.com/en/interviews-panm360/mutek-2023-une-exploration-de-lasmr-et-du-biofeedback-avec-erin-gee/

Credits

Affect Flow (2022)
Music composition and performance by Erin Gee.

Dramaturgy and text by Jena McLean. Poetry by Andrew C. Wenaus.

BioSynth affective hardware synthesizers are an open-source project by Erin Gee. Programming for this iteration by Etienne Montenegro with sonification programming by Erin Gee. PCB design by Grégory Perrin.

Click here for the BioSynth GitHub.

Click here for Tech Rider

Performances

Premiere: ISEA 2022 (Barcelona)

Past shows: SAT Montreal, Vancouver New Music, MUTEK Montreal 2023, Electric Eclectics Festival (Ontario) 2023, Music Gallery Toronto 2024, Particle & Wave Festival, Calgary 2025

AFFECT FLOW (2022) at Vancouver New Music, Vancouver.

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

Song of Seven

03.08.2016 , Music Composition, Performance, Portfolio

Song of Seven (2016)

2016 / 2022

A composition for seven soloists, biofeedback music, and piano.

In this song, young performers contemplate an emotional time in their lives, and recount this memory as an improvised vocal solo.The choir is instructed to enter into a meditative state during these emotional solos, deeply listening to the tale and empathizing with the soloist, using imagination to recreate the scene.  Choir members are attached to a musical instrument I call the BioSynth a small synthesizer that sonifies heartbeats and sweat release for each individual member to pre-programmed tones. Sweat release, often acknowledged as a robust measure of emotional engagement, is signaled by overtones that appear and reappear over a drone; meanwhile the heartbeats of each chorister are sounded according to blood flow, providing a light percussion.

The musical score combines traditional music notation with vocal games and rhythms determined not necessarily by the conductor or score but by beatings of the heart and bursts of sweat. Discreet flashing lights on the synthesizer boxes in front of the choristers allowed the singers to discern the rhythms and patterns of their heart and sweat glands, which therefore permits compositions to incorporate the rhythms of the body into the final score as markers that trigger sonic events.

Song of Seven (2022) for SSAATBB singers, adapted from the original for high voice /children’s choir (2016).

The text in this song is completely improvised from the sung childhood memories of the choir members. Each choir’s interpretation is totally original and could be performed in any language. The seven emotional vignettes are framed by textless song, accompanied by piano and Erin Gee’s original musical instruments the BioSynths. Gee first created the BioSynths in 2016 to measure the empathetic reactions of the choir singers to one another’s song, allowing for shifting intensities in harmonic notes in response to the sung memories. Composing not only notes, but composing physiological states for the biofeedback-enhanced choir, empathy is generated through personal narrative to activate the emotional resonance of the choir members. This performance strategy is one many Gee develops for her “music for alienated emotion”.

Credits

Piano accompanist: Daniel Àñez

Hardware design: Martin Peach

Software design: Erin Gee

Performance history

In 2022 a version of Song of Seven for adult voices was premiered at Orpheum Annex (Vancouver) with Vancouver New Music, featuring members of musica intima choir.

This choral composition was first workshopped for children’s voices over a one-week residency at the LIVELab (McMaster University) with members of the Hamilton Children’s Choir. This residency was hosted by Hamilton Artists Inc. with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Links

Hamilton Children's Choir
Daniel Àñez (Spanish biography)
Hamilton Artists' Inc
LIVElab
Canada Council for the Arts

Video

Song of Seven
Premiere for children’s choir: Hamilton Children’s Choir (2016)

Song of Seven
Premiere for adult choir: Musica Intima (2022)

Scores

Partitions1

Song of Seven (2016)

Gallery

Song of Seven (2016)