I employ sound, installation, performance, technology, and video as my mediums. My work is rooted in noise, indeterminacy, and critique, with an undercurrent of violence. I use sound objects and technologies to untangle social realities and reveal their affects. It is through this process of manipulation that I interface with reality, unearth absurdity, and explore sound’s capacity to change human activity.
Having constantly been told that I make too much noise, I have learned how to harness my expansive sonic space as both a shield and a weapon. My process is informed by my postmodern dance training, catharsis through noise music, and the DIY community that embraced me in Philadelphia. My recent work engages the political capacities of sound- utilizing it to represent our psychological relationships with stigma and power. I am motivated by noise as an inherent disruption and use it in my work to examine our roles in interwoven systems- the economic, internal, interpersonal, and political. By processing everyday noise and speech, I remove them from aesthetically driven motives and explore their social realities.
In my performances and installations, I work with MAX/MSP, Ableton, and sensor technologies to produce an ambiance of dread and unease. These environments beget a shared revealing and extend an invitation to explore ourselves as social actors. By implicating threat, I raise open-ended questions about environment and context: Who listens to what, and why? How do our sonic landscapes differ?
I posit my work in tension with naturalist approaches to sound art. I use technology to challenge the acousmatic and interrogate the desire for decontextualization. Through my process, I reimagine sounds to articulate their social meanings, locating them in our psychological relationships with power and trauma.