ASMR Tag

Poster for Akousma 2021

Akousma Montreal

I am thrilled to present the world premiere of my ASMRtronica work We as Waves (2020) as part of the 30th anniversary Akousma Festival in Montreal, Canada.  The programming features an exciting collection of composers that I am happy to be presenting my work alongside.

For more information on the full week of programming and/or to purchase tickets for the festival, click here.

Mélanie Frisoli / Frédéric Auger / Roger-Tellier Craig

Hugo Tremblay / Rouzbeh Shadpey / Erin Gee

– 14 octobre 2021 – USINE C // 7pm

ABOUT AKOUSMA –

Composers Jean-François Denis, Gilles Gobeil, and Robert Normandeau founded Akousma in Montréal in 1991 as a concert production company that showcases works by electroacoustic artists and collectives in Montréal. These works are presented via an immersive sound system, and they take several forms: acousmatic (tape music), mixed (tape and instruments), live (live electronics), video music, or music integrated into other art forms such as dance, performance, or installation.

ASMRtronica

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.

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.”

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).

credits

To the Farther released September 8, 2020 by Erin Gee. Music composition and art by Erin Gee.
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.

Audio Placebo Plaza: Montreal Edition

Audio Placebo Plaza is a community sound art project conceived by Erin Gee and Julia E Dyck in collaboration with invited artist Vivian Li .

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?

Audio Placebo Plaza – Montreal

/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

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

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

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 !

MUTEK ES/AR

My electronic music in ASMRtronicaTo 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/

Festival Inmersiva – Mexico City

FESTIVAL DELAYED DUE TO COVID19 – FEBRUARY 2021

In a very exciting presentation, the Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City will be presenting the most ambitious version of telematic artwork Presence (2020, Erin Gee and Jen Kutler) to date.

Presence – Erin Gee & Jen Kutler (Quebec / USA)
Telematic sound performance

Presence is a telematic sound work where two networked performers (Gee and Kutler) send and receive each other’s heart, sweat and respiration data from Canada and the USA, which in turn triggers strong electronic pulses in devices across their skin in response to one another. The two performers listen to a whispered roleplay of verbal suggestions on the topic of impossible and imaginary touch as music is generated live from their embodied reactions in live feedback over the network.

Video and audio livestream will be received at CCD in Mexico City, where a subject will also receive the live electric pulse signals from Jen and Erin’s bodies on both arms.

For more information on this hybrid streaming/real life event: Click here for a preview article published in Cronica MX (Spanish language)