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.

I’m super excited to be presenting a new piece at Dislocate 08 in Yokohama, Japan!

The project I’m working on is fun because it’s a collaboration with my Mom, an accomplished fiber artist. She has always been a major influence on my aesthetic sensibilities, so our styles work well together.

The piece is called Nomadic Remix Jacket.

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.