audio art Tag

Imagined Futures Festival: Warsaw

Digital Cultures Festival: October 17-25, 2020

of the soone (2018) made in collaboration with Sofian Audry, is featured amongst six other audio works as part of the Digital Cultures Festival in Warsaw, Poland. Organized by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, the Digital Cultures Festival acts as an international platform for meetings between digital culture professionals and enthusiasts.

Audio Programme curated by Joseph Cutts featuring work by:

Rebekah Ubuntu
Karolina Bregula
Zorka Wollny
Katarzyna Krakowiak
Erin Gee & Sofian Audry

A programme of six provocative audio artworks from Polish and international artists that act as a users guide, with tools for support in your routine setup. This collection of artworks will entail field recordings, forms of ASMR, as well as meditation and direct methods of engagement. It will challenge the notions of what it means to be given guidance by something “or someone” or a release from the monotony of the current day-to-day conventional series of events.

A programme aimed at being tailored to the user’s personal needs, whether in a solitary state indoors or experiencing the sensations of the outdoors in tranquility.

Click here to access the festival’s website: https://digitalcultures.pl

Presence

Presence (2020)
Screen capture from performance at Network Music Festival 2020. Online.

2020

In Presence, artists Erin Gee and Jen Kutler reconfigure voice and touch across the internet through a haptic/physical feedback loop, using affective and physical telematics to structure an immersive electronic soundscape through physiological response.

(March 2020) I was quarantining intensely during the coronavirus pandemic when Jen Kutler reached out to me asking if I would like to collaborate on a new work that simulates presence and attention over the network.  We have never met in real life, but we started talking on the internet every day. We eventually built a musical structure that implicates live webcam, endoscopic camera footage, biosensor data, sounds rearranged by biosensor data, ASMR roleplay and touch stimulation devices delivering small shocks to each artist. We developed this work at first through a month-long intensive online residency at SAW Video, while in conversation with many amazing artists, curators and creative people.

Presence is a telematic music composition for two bodies created during the Spring of 2020, at the height of confinement and social distancing during the COVID19 epidemic in Montreal and New York state. This work has been performed for online audiences by both artists while at home (Montreal/New York), featuring Gee and Kutler each attached to biosensors that collect the unconscious behaviours of their autonomic nervous systems, as well as touch simulation units that make this data tactile for each artist through transcutaneous nerve simulation.

Audiences are invited to listen attentively this networked session for physicalized affect through the sonification of each artists’ biodata, which also slowly triggers an ASMR roleplay that is actively reconfigured by the bodily reactions of each artist. Music and transcutaneous electronic nerve stimulation is triggered by listening bodies: these bodies are triggered by the sounds and electric pulses, everything in the system is unconscious, triggering and triggered by each other through networked delays, but present. Through this musical intervention the artists invite the listeners to imagine the experience and implicate their own bodies in the networked transmission, to witness the artists touching the borders of themselves and their physical spaces while in isolation.

Credits

web socket for puredata (wspd) created for Presence by Michael Palumbo. Available on Github here.

Biodata circuitry and library created by Erin Gee. Available on Github here.

Electronic touch stimulation device for MIDI created by Jen Kutler. Available on Github here.

Performance built with a combination of puredata (data routing), Processing (biodata generated visuals), Ableton Live (sounds) and OBS (live telematics) by Erin Gee and Jen Kutler.

Presence was created in part with the support from SAW Video artist-run centre, Canada.

Exhibition/Performance history

SAW Video “Stay at Home” Residency March-April 2020

Network Music Festival July 17 2020

Fonderie Darling – As part of Allegorical Circuits for Human Software curated by Laurie Cotton Pigeon. August 13 2020

Video

Presence (2020)
Performance by Erin Gee and Jen Kutler at Network Music Festival.

Gallery

NYC Remote Music Hackathon

I have been invited with Jen Kutler to present the open-source technologies behind our first collaborative work Presence (2020) as part of the NYC Remote Music Hackathon. As part of this workshop we will walk through the various technologies we are using, which include open source hardware and software, in order to allow fellow hackers and makers to create their own wild togetherness apparatuses.

For more information please click here for the event website , otherwise you can check out the live streaming video links below! We are presenting our work at 4pm EST.

 

 

Web Residency: Saw Video

I have been selected alongside three other residents for Saw Video’s Stay At Home Internet Residency.

I am especially pleased to have the opportunity to collaborate with Jen Kutler on a new work for telematic sound and video during the course of this residency.  We are having an insane amount of fun creating feedback systems for music and biodata that integrate transcutaneous nerve stimulation over web sockets.

Over the course of five weeks (April 29th – May 29th), we will meet via zoom/hangouts to discuss readings, media, and art making. Individual web-based studio visits with national scholars, curators and artists will be had, and we will diffuse the artists’ works on May 28th. Please sign up for our newsletter here, and follow us on social media for more information on artists’ diffusion scheduling!

to the sooe @ Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY

Love & Sex Show: Sweet Nothings

Special Event | Friday, February 14, 7–10 pm

My work with Sofian Audry to the sooe (2018) will be featured as part of  The Love and Sex Show: Sweet Nothings at Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Arts Centre in Buffalo, NY. This edition of the annual event focuses on sound and voice, featuring my audio work on a set of wireless headphones that can be worn throughout the gallery, as well as film installations and kareoke and performance by Thirza Cuthand, Jess Dobkin, Caroline Doherty, Lauren Fournier, Erin Gee, Dina Georgis and Sharlene Bamboat, Desiree Kee, Hope Mora, Michael Robinson, and Wayne Yung.

Review: Akimblog, Canada

The first review for my solo exhibition To the Sooe at the MacKenzie Art Gallery is here!  To the Sooe is on view until April 19th in Regina, Canada.

“Gee delivers the output in ASMR style through role play and a sound performance that leave you both mesmerized and tingling to your core. The sterile white walls and scientific jargon of the exhibition texts should not deter you from this immersive and sensory experience. Gee’s complex communication configurations require your time, patience and an open mind.” -Alexa Heenan, Akimblog

Click here to read the full review

Machine Unlearning

Vision calibration from Machine Unlearning (2020).
Photography by Elody Libe. Image courtesy of the artist.

2020

In Machine Unlearning, the artist greets the viewer and slowly offers them a unique neural conditioning “treatment”: sonically reproducing the unraveling outputs of an LSTM algorithm as it “unlearns” through whispering, moving backwards in time through its epochs of training.

This aural treatment is couched in a first-person roleplay scenario that grounds the viewer through a series of simple audio visual tests. At no point is the neural network technology “seen” – it is instead performed by a human interlocuter, translated into affective vocality and whispered text. The algorithm was created by media artist Sofian Audry, and trained on the text of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights (1847). This novel was chosen in part because of its richly poetic syntax, but also for its feminine vocality and conceptual themes of love and intergenerational trauma. Machine Unlearning is a novel combination of neural network technologies and the popular internet genre “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” or ASMR. ASMR is a social media genre that has developed largely through massive social media metrics in the form of upvotes, clicks, comments, subscribes, and likes in response to audio visual stimuli that creates feelings of mild euphoria, relaxation and pleasure. ASMR fans online seek out specific video content that causes the physiological reaction of “tingles” – tingling sensations across the skin, a mild body high, or simply a means of falling asleep. Gee considers ASMR as a form of psychosomatic body hacking. By combining machine learning with ASMR, Gee draws parallels between cutting edge autonomous/non-conscious algorithms and the autonomous/unconscious functions of the human body. Just as ASMRtists use specific sounds and visual patterns in their videos to “trigger” physical reactions in the viewer, machine learning algorithms also unconsciously respond to patterns perceived through limited senses in order to develop learning (and unlearning) results. The artist’s emphasis on whispering the textual outputs of the algorithm as it slowly “unlearns” allows the listener to grasp the materiality of machine learning processes at a human level, but also a subconscious level: allowing one’s body to be mildly and charmingly “hacked” through soft and gentle play.

The use of the word “intelligence” in the metaphor of AI focuses on higher functions of consciousness that algorithms do not possess. While algorithms have not meaningfully achieved a humanistic consciousness to date, today’s algorithms act autonomously on sensory information, processing data from its environment in unconscious, automatic ways. The human brain also responds unconsciously and automatically to sensory data in its environment, for example, even if you are not conscious of how hot a stove is, if you place your hand on a hot stove, your hand will automatically pull away. These unconscious, physiological actions in the sensory realm points to an area of common experience between algorithms and the human.  For more explanation of these ideas, take a look at the work of postmodern literary critic N. Katherine Hayles in her 2017 book Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious.  In this way I wonder if the expression “autonomous intelligence” makes more sense than “artificial intelligence”, however like posthumanist feminist Rosi Braidotti I am deeply suspicious of the humanist pride that our species takes in the word “intelligence” as something that confers a special status and justification for domination of other forms of life on earth.

Credits

Photography and videography by Elody Libe.

Production Support: Machine Unlearning video installation was produced at Perte de Signal with the support of the MacKenzie Art Gallery for the exhibition To the Sooe (2020) curated by Tak Pham.

The roleplay performance was developed during my artistic residency at Locus SonusÉcole Superieur d’art d’Aix en Provence and Laboratoire PRISM.

Custom LSTM Algorithm created by media artist Sofian Audry

Video

Machine Unlearning (2020)
Videography by Elody Libe

Gallery

This work was first developed as a performance that debuted at Cluster Festival, Winnipeg in 2019.  During live performance, each audience member dons a pair of wireless headphones.  The performance allows the audience members to see the ASMR “result” of the performance for camera, simultaneous with the ability to see my “backstage” manipulation of props and light in real time.

Solo Exhibition MacKenzie Art Gallery

From January 24-April 19 2020, my first major solo exhibition in a Canadian museum, To the Sooe, will be on view at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, Canada.

To the Sooe is curated by Tak Pham, and features a collection of my embodied technological works to date, as well as a few brand new works made especially for this exhibition including video installation Machine Unlearning (2020) and interactive biodata sound sculpture Pinch and Soothe (2020).

The exhibition has already garnered major attention from the printed press in Regina, with front page feature stories in both the Leader Post and the Prairie Dog as well as a french language interview with Radio Canada.  As part of my exhibition activities I also gave an artist talk at the University of Regina as part of their Art for Lunch speaker series on January 24, 2020.

Sound Gender Feminism Activism – Tokyo

My interactive website for survivors of sexual violence Laughing Web Dot Space will be a part of the exhibition at the SGFA Conference in Tokyo!  I am truly honoured to have been selected for this exhibition and conference, and the opportunity to spread awareness, togetherness, and healing through laughter.

SOUND::GENDER::FEMINISM::ACTIVISM – TOKYO

Chinretsukan Gallery, Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo, Japan)

4 & 5 October 2019

A collaboration between

Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), University of the Arts London

Graduate School of Global Arts (GA), Tokyo University of the Arts

FILE Festival São Paolo

FILE Festival – SESI Arte Galeria

Exhibition Opening June 25, 2019

Exhibition runs from June 26 to August 11, 2019

Avenida Nossa Senhora da Penha, 2053, Ed. Findes, Santa Lúcia, Vitoria – ES – Brazil

I am proud to present my interactive web work Laughing Web Dot Space in São Paolo, Brazil through the FILE Electronic Language International Festival. Laughing Web Dot Space is an online website for recording and listening to the laughter of survivors of sexual violence. The site does not collect any data beyond presence.

I’m encouraged that the curators invited me to show this work in the context of media art in Brazil. Currently, the President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro is known for his anti-homophobic and misogynist statements. He has taunted woman about rape and called women tramps. Under this government, artists have been subject to death threats and intimidation, including calls to dissolve the culture department into education. I look forward to sharing the defiant laughter, hope, joy, and solidarity of Laughing Web Dot Space with the public in Brazil during this very important festival for media art.