SPLICE festival VI (January 2025)

I will be giving a talk and a live performance, both themed around composing with water and Michigan waterways, at SPLICE Festival VI at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI, from January 23-January 25, 2025.

TALK: “Putting the Wave in Waveform: Incorporating the Power and Sound of Water in Electronic Music” (January 24, 2025 @ 2PM EDT, Western Michigan University)
While field recordings of water are often incorporated into electronic music compositions, there are a multitude of ways to use water to create movement, sound, and visual interest in performances. This talk will cover techniques including field recording (above/on/underwater), hydropowering equipment, and incorporating water in various states into live performances. This talk will also feature a live demonstration of combining tape loops and ice.

PERFORMANCE: “Michigan: Flow State” (January 25, 2025, 10:30am EDT, Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University)
”Michigan: Flow State” is a 10-minute audiovisual love letter to the lakes, rivers, and waterfalls of Michigan. This performance will combine 1. field recorded and manipulated audio performed with software and Midi controllers with 2. projected live coding video synthesis and 3. live sound creation. Field recordings and video/photography from on, in, and Michigan locations will be supplemented with sounds created by modular virtual synthesis, hydropowered instruments, and by live manipulation of water sources and hydrophones. Sounds and images will flow from one to another, with triggers between the two, highlighting the interconnected of our senses and of our lives with our water sources.

YouTube Link to Live Performance (starts at 54:12, duration ~10 min)
https://www.youtube.com/live/SiEEsFcW3Ew?si=ICqCS9ekhnNasvlC&t=3252

Reverberator: Lansing’s Experimental Music Festival (January 2025, February 2026)

Reverberator was a new, free festival in Lansing celebrating mid-Michigan’s experimental musiciansand was held on 1/11/2025 and 2/14/2026. This festival was funded both years by a Mini Pocket Grant for Art from the Arts Council of Greater Lansing, funding was used to pay performers and the venue.

Re(Evolutions) / Solstice Cycles was a live, ~twenty-minute audiovisual performance which took the audience on a journey through time, space, and the cycles of nature, focusing from the darkness of Winter Solstice 2023 to the luminosity of Summer Solstice 2024. This piece started in darkness, silence, and sparsity before evolving through time, temperature, and luminosity into sounds (recorded, embodied, sampled), objects, and movements from and inspired by the Winter and Summer solstices. (Re)Evolutions / Solstice Cycles ended with opportunities for collaborative/community sound and scene making.

More information on Sound Scene Festival can be found at https://soundscenefest.org/

This 8.5 min performance combined live scoring with a live coding video synthesis presentation to document the artist’s journey through a year of medical interventions and trauma including a bone graft, internal fixation with titanium screws, and intense physical therapy.  Live scoring will be performed with VCVRack, tape loops, and improvised instruments, live video synth coding will be projected and performed using Hydra combined with a presentation of visuals (including X-rays, illustrations, still images). 

Performed computer music for the Groundhog Day Bash at the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum on 2/2/2024.

Performed computer music and found percussion for Spring Fling at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse on 4/27 and 4/27/2024.

While augmented reality (AR) allows us to play games like Pokémon Go or change our appearances on social media apps, it is also a powerful tool that can allow us to merge audio and visual art, present or uncover the layers of historical sites, and reimagine spaces and places. As an artist and researcher, I am interested in using AR to create interdisciplinary experiences that bring together sound, photography, and history to create memorable, immersive experiences.

During a one-week residence at Peters Valley School of Craft, I will be developing at least two augmented reality experiences using Adobe Aero that combine photography-based 3D models, background information and research, and field-recorded soundscapes to create interactive experiences of different sites for visitors to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (DWGNRA). The buildings and sites at the DWGNRA are artifacts of the complex history of this space and I believe that AR could allow users on and off-site to explore the current condition of the park and the history of buildings and sites through nondestructive multimedia experiences.

This exploratory research grant seeks to bring together the physical nature of archival materials with archival content through a proof-of-concept tape loop-based audiovisual performance of archival materials. For this performance, I will focus on archival materials from DuPont and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) that are relevant to the history of magnetic tape recording. Tape loops will be created by directly recording archival materials or through recording readings of archival material. During the performance, tape loops will play simultaneously and a selection of these loops will be exposed to elements that represent common challenges to preserving archival material in order to create unique sounds and textures. This performance will be recorded and will lead to the creation of a Creative Commons document about creating tape loop performances in an archival setting.

Performance/talk can be found at: https://youtu.be/GcYQXKF9eXk?si=FMWZm0lwBW0qkIUG

I will be delivering the festival’s keynote lecture, “Synthesizing the Sound of Space.” This lecture chronicles my digital humanities project of the same name (more info below). The project explores how the development of the silicon transistor has shaped the ways in which the sounds of space are recorded and created. Initial work during the pilot year of this project has focused on archival and online research, creating a beta version of a website, and developing an open-source lesson plan to teach about how to synthesize your own space sounds. This keynote will cover an introduction to this project and deep dive into the sound creation activity, including addressing accessibility concerns, sound samples, and a tools/platforms comparison.

I am also the guest artist for the festival. My performance, “Layers,"“ at the end of the Bleep/Blorp 2022 will feature patches created using VCVRack, sound samples, and tape loops.

Link to the festival:

https://www.stonehill.edu/events/bleep-blorp-festival-of-synthesizer-music/2022-03-26/

I was also accepted into the 2024 Bleep/Blorp festival, but unfortunately, had to decline participation.

Nature therapy, ecotherapy, and forest baths promote physical, spiritual, and mental health through time spent outdoors, immersed in nature. Unfortunately, climate change and limitations to access already threaten our collective ability to enjoy these experiences and to learn about nature in an immersive fashion. Immersive Forest asks if there are ways in which design interventions can preserve or enhance nature-based therapies and education and if the design and built world can create the same types of experiences and healings as our natural one?

This installation featured a series of rooms which combined plants native to Michigan, augmented reality, soundscapes, projections, scents, and ceramic sculpture. Participants visited a series of four vignettes asked them to consider design-based approaches across a variety of built spaces (indoor forest as entrance, classroom, bathroom, museum) and how questions of access and time play out in these spaces.  Participants viewed different vignettes for some spaces that compared levels of affluence and access. The entrance was set in our current time, the first vignette was set in the near future, the next vignette was set in 2030 (when some resources start to become scarce), and the final vignette was set in 2040 (when many resources are only available to the affluent). 

Architectural Digest: Tocks Island, was set to debut in the Summer of 2020 but is on hold until indefinitely due to COVID-19. This piece involves a series of ceramic sculptures paired with an online survey to understand the role of art in public perception of this history of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and the Tocks Island Dam project. Part of the work on this project was done as an Artist-in-Residence at Peters Valley School of Craft (Layton, NJ) in March 2020.

This sculpture represents the rock cores taken to test the viability of the Tocks Island dam, as well as the topology, trails, and features of the surrounding area where the cores currently lie in Worthington State Forest and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

A Moveable Garden is a mixed-media piece featuring blacksmithed and handbuilt ceramic flower petals. The flowers are mounted onto a moveable and mountable surface and each flower can be moved around the surface and petals can be rearranged.

More information about this exhibit can be found at: https://accessibleart.cal.msu.edu/

Photo of blacksmithed Ls and chalked text on top of an anvil chosen for art-based billboard campaign in Lansing, Michigan.

Billboards were located at the following locations from November to December 2017:

1: Jolly Rd (0.4 mi E/O Pennsylvania Ave SS)

2: US 127 Bus (0.5 mi S/O College Rd WS)