Bio
Education: BFA, Emerson College; PhD, The London Consortium, University of London. Books: Against Ambience and Other Essays, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013; In The Blink Of An Ear: Toward A Non-Cochlear Sonic Art, Bloomsbury Academic, 2009; One Reason To Live: Conversations About Music, Errant Bodies, 2006. Selected Journals, Magazines, Edited Volumes, Catalogues, Talks: “Gnostics of the North, or Music to Recolonize Your Anxious Capitalist Dreams By” Law, Culture, Text, special issue, “The Acoustics of Justice” (forthcoming); Review of the exhibition, Eavesdropping, at City Gallery Wellington, NZ, Art Review Asia, 2019; “Against a Falling Fabric: Neoliberal Acousmatics,” Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, 2019; “Forming, Informing, Recording, Erasing, Documenting, Deleting,” Talk presented at the Colloque International: Spectres de l’audible, Paris, 2018; The Pages Are In French,” Talk presented at the Seminar in Ethnomusicology and Sound Art, University of Oxford, 2018; Review of the exhibition, Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Art Agenda, 2018; “Yet each knew he saw only aspects: on Art & Language and the Red Krayola," Catalogue essay for the exhibition, The Unfinished Wish, Musées d’Angers, France, 2017; “The Sound Canon of Samson Young,” Catalogue Text for Samson Young’s Songs for Disaster Relief, Hong Kong Pavilion, 57th Biennale di Venezia, 2017; “N.B.” Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, University of Toronto Press, 2017; “Music in the Abyssal Maw of Autophagia,” Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, special issue, “Sound and the Modes of Production,” 2016; “Dams, Weirs, and Damn Weird Ears: Post-Ergonal Sound,” Routledge Companion to the Sounding Arts, 2016; “No Depth: A Call for Shallow Listening,” Talk presented in Halmstad, Sweden (later included in Against Ambience and other Essays), 2016; “The Chladni Ostrich,” Keynote presented at the International Computer Music Conference (printed in the journal Array), 2012. Exhibitions: My work (performance, audio, video, text, and installation) has been presented in not-for-profit spaces around the world, including London, Paris, Ljubljana, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Singapore, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Fellowships: 2021 - Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship, Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, University of Chicago. Project: Economic Objects: Capitalism as Medium. Collaborators: Leigh Claire La Berge (CUNY), Salomé Aguillera Skvirsky (University of Chicago); 2016 - LABEX Fellowship, Université of Paris 8. Project: The Fabrication of the Sonic Arts.
Personal Statement
I teach courses related to sound, conceptualism, and art in the age of neoliberalism. I take an anti-essentialist, (old) materialist approach to my research and teaching, insistent that art is always in dialogue with the economic, social, political forces of the time of its production, as well as the time of its reception. The meaning and effects of the artwork, are not produced internally, but through relationships the work forms with history, its audience, ideas, materials, economics, sociality, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and ideology. I am committed to dismantling systemic white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation.
I am also a practicing artist and musician. My creative and scholarly practices are deeply entwined. I understand the role that history, theory, and criticism can play in studio work and vice versa.
Some of the courses I teach:
- Singing LeWitt: Conceptualism and Sound (grad seminar)
- How to be A Neoliberal Artist in 14 Easy Lessons (grad seminar)
- Rock and Roll vs. Modernism (undergrad lecture)
- History of the Sonic Arts (undergrad lecture)
- Survey of Modern and Contemporary Art (both undergrad and grad
Disclaimer: All work represents the views of the INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS & AUTHORS who created them, and are not those of the school or museum of the Art Institute.