Two hand-made jackets wired with electronics, forming mobile sound samplers. The wearer circulates throughout the city, collecting sounds. The audio samples are continuously remixed into a rhythmic musical collage that accompanies their explorations. At any point in their journey, the wearer may add a new sound to the composition, which they are encouraged to do by interacting with other humans and by recording sounds specific to their current locale. On conclusion of the nomadic sound collecting journey, the sounds can be downloaded into a cumulative collection database.

This piece re-imagines/re-wires clothing for a globalized, media-saturated era.  It situates the wearer as a sonic hunter/gatherer, exploring and documenting the sonic landscape of the postmodern city.

The autonomous machine embedded in the jackets amplifies the contemporary trends of ubiquitous, wearable electronic devices that constantly reassure us with their chattering voices, and, like John Cage’s compositions, seeks to recognize music in the sounds of everyday life. It weaves together sonic fragments of a multiplicity of voices and localities into a perpetually-remixed soundtrack to accompany the wearer’s journeys into public space.

The jackets themselves represent a trans-global remix of textile traditions, incorporating shibori and other Asian, African, and American techniques, as well as found and recycled materials. Brightly-colored and richly textured, they invite curiosity from spectators and encourage interaction with the wearer.

The Sound Parasites returned in a 2nd iteration for an international audience when I was invited to participate in the Digital Art Weeks festival organized by Eldgenössiche Techniche Hochschule Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich).

After presenting my research on self-contained digital sound modules at the conference portion, I fulfilled a lifelong dream by performing with the Parasites at the legendary Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of the Dada art movement and still an exciting venue for avant-garde art. I was part of a ‘wired freak show’ with an international cast of performers who mixed technology with provocation and humor.

The Sound Parasites were originally developed for the Pure show curated by Lisa Lunskaya Gordon. This exhibition, held in an abandoned mall retail space temporarily sanctioned by Harvard as an independent gallery, focused on the confluence of biotechnology and art and featured many emerging and established Boston-area artists.

The Sound Parasites are designed to feed off the verbal energy of sound-emitting hosts, disrupting their sonic integrity but providing an annoyingly/amusingly glitched remix of the original sound material. They are worn by the artist, who then interacts with the public, or they can be alternately deployed by being spontaneously attached to other performers (or any sound-producing medium) to form a simultaneous audio intervention. Their autonomous chatter satirizes both the vapidity of our current culture of ubiquitous communication devices and the elaborately futile surveillance that characterizes our current political regime.

The Parasites are built using a version of my Sound Modules, consisting of a custom-designed circuit board, PIC microcontroller, and control software and pattern algorithms written in C, as well as a condenser microphone and several small speakers.

A prototype for ‘objects that talk back to you.’ This is an actual box of candy that, when picked up, speaks in a small voice that comments on the relationship of humans to the chocolate/cocoa commodity, both historically and today.

In a sense, this is a ‘Marxist’ piece in that it attempts to overcome the alienation that separates the creators of a product and its consumers.

Duet for Alto and Tenor Televisions is a performance piece using an electronic video/music instrument of my own design. In the improvised performance, tiny snippets of historical found footage are obsessively re-examined and remixed into a live sonic and visual collage. Shifting loops intensify the grain of the voice and image, the micro-gestures of the filmed subjects, and the rhythms that fall into and out of phase as the material is dynamically recombined.

The analog synth-inspired instrument consists of a custom hardware controller interface containing a usb joystick control board wired to a variety of knobs and button banks, as well as a pair of mini lcd screens and digital-analog video scan converters. The interface is connected to a Max/MSP/Jitter software application I built, which contains video and audio sampling, triggering, and effects modules.

Video Documentation

After working to help open Zeum, San Francisco’s Art and Technology center for youth, I was offered the opportunity to be their Artist-In-Residence for a season.

For my residency, I taught a 3D modeling and animation workshop to a group of talented teens. The students and I invented, modeled, and animated a menagerie of otherworldly characters. I then created an ambitious interactive six-screen surround presentation, complete with futuristic control console and multi-channel soundtrack, in Zeum’s Media Cone.