Projects
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The Rock County Composers Lab is an educational program for 10 high school musicians in my hometown (Janesville, WI) interested in composing/creating original music. I founded the lab in 2020 with the aim of introducing students to a variety of genres, musical cultures and compositional techniques while also supporting the development of their own creative expression and identity. This program combines lectures, group musical exercises, collaborative projects, individual lessons, and mentorship to foster a new generation of composers. The program consists of a weekend intensive in the winter, followed by individual, monthly Skype lessons and concludes with a performance of the participants works in the spring by Lawrence University’s Else/If Else: a piano-bass-percussion trio experienced in classical, jazz, and free-improvisation, committed to supporting diverse voices and new forms of musical expression.
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In Mediated Intimacy: Chairs, two lounge chairs are placed back-to-back behind privacy curtains. The chairs are embedded with surface transducers (deconstructed speakers), which emit low-frequency waveforms. A microphone in front of each chair triggers the speakers in the other chair, and participants wear headphones that play a drone piece, which obfuscates any other sound in the space. As participants sit in the chairs and use the microphones, the pitch and volume of their voice is tracked, producing vibrating sensations in their partner’s chairs which are felt as variable, dynamic, and quite musical depending on the what the participant inputs. What results is a dialogue that is felt rather than heard. Participants have spent anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes in the chairs, attempting conversations, whispering secrets, and performing wild vocal improvisations.
The work has been exhibited at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016, the Artist Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE) Gallery in Chicago, IL in 2016, and at New Music Gathering in 2017. In collaboration with Maya Livio |
Vein Rays
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Vein Rays is a Madison, WI based music project from Paul Smirl. In March 2016 Vein Rays released a full-length album I'm Going To Regret This Later. I helped record the album and added some sounds. Lots of other friends also contributed. Paul has toured all over the midwest and I join him on electric viola when I can.
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Insecure attachments
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An ongoing experiment with Maya Livio aiming to test the possibilities of intentional data and emotional vulnerabilities in the private and public spheres through practice-based research methods.
Interpersonal vulnerability has been recently embraced in both academic¹ and popular culture² contexts as a quality to be valued and as a potential catalyst for positive outcomes such as intimacy. In contrast, among growing privacy concerns on individual,³ corporate,⁴ and state levels,⁵ the vulnerability of information maintains a negative bias, representing weakness, openness to harm, and exploitation. This project seeks to examine the potential outcomes of making both our selves and our data vulnerable. More info here View phase 2 of project here ________________________________________________________________________ ¹e.g. the work of Aron et. al ²e.g. the work of Brown ³e.g. camfecting, the hacking of webcams ⁴e.g. the organizational doxing of Ashley Madison ⁵The most obvious e.g. being the NSA revelations |