feminism Tag

Poster for Akousma 2021

Akousma Montreal

27.09.2021 , News, Performances

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.

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

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

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/

Cover Story: Prairie Dog Magazine

28.01.2020 , Exhibitions, Interviews, News

“Modernity and the Age of Reason kind of championed the brain as this really important thing that defined us as human,” she adds. “I’m interested in recent scientific studies that [show] it’s not all about the brain. Our thinking process actually happens in concert with our body beyond the brain. What I’m interested in is using technology to create a culture of the body.”

“I’m interested in making a conversation about technology that doesn’t centre on intelligence but on emotion.”

– Erin Gee, excerpts from interview with Gregory Beatty

My exhibition “To the Sooe” at the MacKenzie Art Gallery is front page news in Regina’s Prairie Dog Magazine!  The Prairie Dog is Regina’s top source for what is going on in entertainment and the arts, so it is a great honor to be featured.  I also appreciate the reporting done by Gregory Beatty on this interview.  Click here to read the full article.

As a very brief aside, I want to address to the use of the words “Sound-Shaman” on the cover of this magazine.  I have never used these terms to describe my practice, as I am not currently practicing any form of spiritual faith that would qualify me to do so. These words are not my own, but were an editorial decision that I do not identify with and strongly reject.

Sound Gender Feminism Activism – Tokyo

08.09.2019 , Exhibitions, News

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

23.05.2019 , Exhibitions, News

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.

Elektra Festival Montreal

05.05.2019 , Exhibitions, News

Project H.E.A.R.T. (Holographic Empathy Attack Robotics Team) (2017), my popstar/militainment VR game mashup with an affective control interface made in collaboration with Alex M Lee, is going to be featured at the upcoming Elektra festival XX in Montreal!  Look for it this June!

 

Exhibition opening: June 7, 6pm-9pm

Exhibition Dates: June 7-15, 2019

Perte de Signal 5445 Avenue de Gaspé local #107, Montréal, QC H2T 3B2, Canada

 

Click here to check out the full programming of Elektra Festival 2019

Book: Robotic Imaginary

15.03.2019 , Articles, News, Research, Reviews

My robotic artwork Swarming Emotional Pianos is featured in image and text on p 131-132 of Jennifer Rhee’s newly published book: The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (2018, University of Minnesota Press).  The image above is just a photo of me relaxing with a coffee as I read the first few pages…

This amazing book details AI from a perspective that is driven by emotion and humanity, while referencing the work and the influence of women and poc in a way I haven’t seen before. I found myself constantly thinking: yes, yes as I read the book!

 

From the official description of the book:

The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.

Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.

 

Click here to view more information on the book at University of Minnesota Press

 

Entanglements Exhibition Chicago

11.01.2019 , Exhibitions, News

Laughing Web Dot Space is featured in Entanglements Exhibition curated by Her Environment

Saturday – 1/26 through Friday 2/15

Yards Gallery, 2028 S Canalport Ave
Chicago, IL 60616
www.theyardsgallery.com @theyardsgallery

Click here for Facebook Event Page for the Opening

Entanglements challenges both the logical and emotional connections between us and our technology. The tensions that surface from these dynamics are often all encompassing; they seep deeply into every aspect of the human condition. Through accepting that technology is an integral part of our lives, we explore what it means to have a relationship with it.

This show is a collaboration between the curators and the artists in which we create a space where electronics, wires, and artworks are deliberately installed to visualize the complexities and closeness of the human/technology relationship. We are reminded of the global connection that technology can bring with works such as Erin Gee’s “Laughing Web Dot Space” website where visitors are invited to record their laughter and join in with a chorus of other laughs belonging to other survivors of sexual violence. Jen Kutler also uses the power of human connection as her piece “The Other” is a polyphonic textural synthesizer driven by skin contact between two people. The system is able to recognize very subtle changes in pressure and movement, so when two people touch fingertips what comes out of the speaker is a synthesis of physical connection.

The show also explores the very complicated ways in which there is a mutual balance of power and reveals the ways in which the power of destruction can hide beneath the surface of the interface. With works such as Snow Xu’s “Perfecthuman Harasser,” a machine that catcalls human passersby, we see that because we humans are the creators of the machines, our biases show up in the development of technology and can cause more harm on groups that already experience social disadvantages.

Through the dynamic conversations of all of the pieces we invite the visitors to take an experiential walk through our take of contemporary relationships with technology.

Please join Her Environment at Yards for the opening reception of Entanglements on Saturday, Jan. 26 at 7pm-11pm.

Artists:
Anxious to Make (SF and LA)
Erin Gee (Montreal)
Hannah Newman (Portland)
Snow Xu (Chicago)
Madeeha Lamoreaux (Chicago)
Sara Goodman and Sasha Tycko (Chicago)
Jen Kutler (New York)