Through my artistic practice, I centralize on digital culture through human voices in electronic bodies. I obsessively explore the voice, what a voice can mean, how a voice can be represented, performed, and synthesized, in physical and networked contexts. Setting vocal songs within electronic representations and reconfigurations of the human body, I create uncanny and sensual experiences for the viewer in order to expand upon normative conceptions of the body and its subsequent hierarchical positioning in society.
As a composer I am inspired by the structuring of sound into meaningful patterns, always seeking out the virtual structure, alternative means of creating sense and order from noise. Media used to transmit the songs are significant aspects of the song's structure, embedding the organizations of sound into concrete manifestations through technologies, performers, interactive sculptures and performance scores conceptually propelled by a balance of intuitive-narrative and rational-formal elements.
I find inspiration in the collapsed spaces that technology awakens in the perception of time, the senses, and self among others. Acknowledging a tension between technocratic guilt, empire, excess, promise, and historical amnesia, I enfold past narratives into possible futures in seeking pleasure. Sometimes these narratives are relatively new, like the art historical narrative of video and narcissism from Rosalind Krauss that informs my Nancy Holt Choir, or sometimes they are ancient stories such as those that underly my robotic opera Orpheux Larynx in collaboration with media artist Stelarc. Bodies, voices, and selves are mirrored, extended, elaborated, fragmented, and echoed like so many recurrent forms, patterns, and decorative motifs.
Ultimately I work with pattern, historical motifs and interplays between eye and ear because I desire exploration of alternate configurations of identity between the sexually bifurcated bodies of humans, machines, and their respective environments. I conflate the terror and sensuality of the reconfigured body with vocalization, a metaphor for personal identity. The hinge between embodied subjectivity and a new embodiment of posthuman becoming is where I get my aesthetics: this is not a problem to "solve" or decide for anyone, but a place I draw from to make new sound, new media, new selves and cultural designs.
