electronic music Tag

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.

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)

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/

image of MUTEK 2020 Distant Arcades interface

Distant Arcades: MUTEK Montreal

04.09.2020 , Exhibitions, News

This exhibition premieres my newest project: “To the Farther” (2020) is a song that combines the aesthetics of ASMR with electronic music. This is part of my ongoing project to produce an ASMRtronica album.  My participation in this exhibition as part of the 2020 Amplify D.A.I. cohort – AMPLIFY D.A.I is an initiative of the British Council in partnership with MUTEK Montréal, MUTEK Buenos Aires and Somerset House Studios in the UK. The programme is supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Fundación Williams.

Distant Arcades

A VIRTUAL EXHIBITION
OF DIGITAL ARTWORKS

September 8-20, 2020

virtual.mutek.org

Featuring work by Aaron Bradbury UK Alex McLeod CA Debby Friday CA Depart AT Dpt. CA/QC Erin Gee CA/QC Frances Adair Mckenzie CA/QC GLOR1A UK Heather Lander UK Isabella Salas MX/QC Jawa El Khash CA Kathryn Hamilton & Deniz Tortum TR/NL/US Kathy Hinde UK Krzysztof Garbaczewski PL Lila Tirando a Violeta AR/UY Lucas LaRochelle CA/QC Quantum Foam UK Raphaël Néron CA/QC Refik Anadol TR/US Sahar Homami IR/QC Scott Benesiinaabandan CA/QC Shelley Barry ZA Sol Rezza AR Tatiana Heuman AR/DE Vicky Clarke UK

“An arcade is an architectural structure of arches and passageways, a place to walk through and to meet, and it is also reminiscent of the video gaming arcades of the 1980s. During these past months in confinement, as we were all homebound, sitting endlessly in front of our screens, we built complex gathering networks through the myriad platforms available to us. Drawing from a new experience of a distance that brings us closer, this exhibition brings together 26 artworks from Québec, Canada and around the world created with a wide range of technologies, from volumetric capture to 16 mm film, 3D animation and neural networks. Presented alongside each other in this digital arcade, they are a testament to how art has the agency to transform unforeseen circumstances into moments of encounter, activism and knowledge-sharing.”