Selected Work
This page is a portfolio of three recent projects. I have included an artist statement, project descriptions, embedded media, and links to related research, scores, technical information, and courses. You can click the links below to skip between sections.
Artist Statement | Unidentified Sonic Objects | Instruments | Compositions | Video
Artist Statement
My creative work and research focus on how technologies shape and shift how we communicate, and specifically, how we listen. This research takes different forms, including installations, compositions, performances, creative tools, and writing. Regardless of the output, I continually return to the idea of interfacing, the process of connecting with and through our machines. I am interested in how music and sound technologies frame our connections to each other, and change how we hear culture, history, and the environment. I aim to exploit the tendencies and ideologies embedded in our electronic and digital interfaces and I work with sound and music to navigate the complex relationships between people and the listening technologies we create.
Unidentified Sonic Objects
Unidentified Sonic Objects is a sculptural sound project focused on the design and construction of small, self-contained electronic objects that function together as an alien ecosystem. Each USO exists somewhere between a musical instrument and an autonomous creature. Alone, they function as handheld sonic sculptures with distinct voices; together, they become an ensemble of sweeping tones and static bursts, radio squelches and unpredictable clicks. USOs are built to be held, moved, observed, listened to, and discovered through touch. They are electronic systems intentionally designed to be simple and accessible while resisting easy classification. Rather than hiding the electronics inside enclosures, the circuitry is exposed through point-to-point soldering, visible components, glowing lights, and touchable speakers, all held together by carefully bent copper wires that shape the visual and sonic language of the objects as well as their modes of interaction.
This project builds on two long-standing parts of my research: working with electronic sound as a physical and material presence, and framing interactivity not as control, but as encounter. Engaging both playfully and seriously with the forms, accounts, and iconographies of the unexplained, this project draws from writing by Karen Barad, Jacques Vallée, Sara Ahmed, Vivian Sobchack.
More than a project, USOs have become a practice, a ways of experimenting with sound, light and circuitry in improvisatory and imperfect ways. The roots of this practice were developed in my interactive installations, including Transmogrifier and Chorus for Untrained Operator.
In 2024, I exhibited a collection of 36 electromagnetically controlled USOs at the Ah Haa Center for the Arts in Telluride, CO. I sometimes carry them around and spontaneously gift them to friends and strangers. This is not an art project, it’s an improvisation practice that can sometimes produce art and music.
Worth More Standing
Worth More Standing (expanded cinema performance) (documentation from August 2022)
36 -45 mins / 16mm x 6 projectors expanded cinema performance / 2022 – present
A looping 16mm performance exploring the framework of tree/human relationships on unceded Pacheedaht territory at Fairy Creek. A site of civil disobedience rivalling the biggest and longest in Canadian history, it is also a place of recognition, passion and dedication for the more-than-human beings with whom we share the planet. From the seeming silence of these great giants to the invented importance of our daily lives, this performance explores the lines of the forest, the front lines and the lines we cross in complicity. Hi-contrast images are hand-processed, optically printed, contact printed and altered, creating a portrait of this landscape and it’s employ at the hands of humans. Stitching together original imagery of the old growth forest and land defenders, horizontal and vertical planes/plains shift across the width of the widescreen composition, blurring boundaries between space and sight. Features a live sonic collaboration by Peter Bussigel.
Made in a collaborative darkroom space, Worth More Standing is a live cinema performance that embraces and embodies the ethics and the foundation of artist-run film labs and collectives. By taking media and machines into our own hands and making them accessible, we mean to challenge the ways that media is produced and consumed, questioning who is being heard and what voices are being privileged.
Performances:
Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Spotlight on Canadian Film Labs (commission, by invitation) – May 2022
DIM Cinema, Vancouver Cinematheque 50th Anniversary (by invitation) – August 2022
OK LÀ Festival, Montreal, QC (by invitation) – March 2023
FMSAC Conference, Congress, Archive/Counter Archive (by invitation) – May 2023
Pond Folk
Anuran Chorus is a research-creation project engaging with the sonic, musical, and cultural qualities of frog and toad vocalizations, and forms of contact these choruses conjure. Working from more than a decade of field recordings made at the same pond in upstate New York, the project focuses on the temporal organization of frog and toad choruses; the ways individual calls accumulate into dense collective textures, swell and recede together, alternate across a pond, and fall into stunning patterns of synchronization at various temporal scales.
Frog choruses are both ecological communication networks and complex sonic events. Individuals call to attract mates, establish territory, and locate one another, and collectively, the calls produce emergent patterns and textures that betray deeper, seemingly musical, forms of contact. Anuran Chorus asks how concepts like rhythm, repetition, entrainment, competition, and convergence might be reconsidered through a more-than-human perspective and represents these ideas using musical and computational methods drawn from spatialized electronic music and machine learning.
This project combines research in field recording, sound synthesis, acoustic ecology, generative simulation, and machine learning to build a system and a sonic experience that asks questions about communication and contact more generally. Recordings gathered over multiple years will serve as both source material and a dataset for examining recurring temporal and spectral patterns. From this material, we will develop synthesized models of frog and toad calls and construct a generative system in which virtual frogs listen, respond, and synchronize with one another. Rather than simply recreating a pre-existing soundscape, the system will draw from encounters with frogs to explore different theories and mechanisms of emergence, convergence, and contact.
The resulting hybrid frog choir will function simultaneously as a musical composition, an ecological modeling tool, and a speculative listening environment. By moving between observed behaviours and artificial sonic systems, Anuran Chorus considers what frog communication might teach us about collective timing and coordination without centralized control. It approaches the pond not as a collection of isolated voices, but as a dynamic network in which sound becomes a means of organizing relationships across time and distance.
Ultimately, the project uses synthesis and simulation as forms of close listening. By reconstructing, modeling, and experimenting with the temporal structures of frog and toad communication, Anuran Chorus asks how listening to nonhuman systems might expand our understandings of rhythm, communication, music, culture, and collective behaviour.