Les rencontres de STMS welcome Erin Gee, a Canadian artist and composer who is also an assistant professor in the Faculty of Music at the University of Montreal. Her presentation is titled « Biofeedback and Signal Poetics : Between Experience and Signal ».
A Zoom link for remote participation:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84221476702?pwd=Df3OekHutaC2i6C3ux9s81nEVa6JzL.1
Lien du chat de la réunion
https://us06web.zoom.us/launch/jc/84221476702
Meeting ID: 842 2147 6702
Password: 980339
Abstract :
Through my practice as a researcher, new media artist, and composer, I explore the spaces between experience and signal, investigating how art, computation, and mediation shape what can be felt, shared, and known. Through biofeedback, voice, and computational systems, I approach music and performance as emotional technologies that operate alongside the software and hardware of computational systems.
In this presentation, I revisit Jonathan Sterne and Tara Rodgers’ notion of the poetics of signal processing (2011) through the history of biofeedback music and my own artistic practice. I argue that biofeedback complicates conventional models of signal processing by placing living bodies, emotions, and social relations directly within the signal chain. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies, I use biofeedback as a lens through which to examine contemporary computational systems and their claims to immediacy, authenticity, and access to experience. Rather than attempting to resolve the distance between lived experience and its computational representations, I treat this gap as a productive site for research-creation.
Biography :
Erin Gee is a Canadian artist, composer, and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Music of the Université de Montréal. Her work explores relationships between voice, emotion, technology, and embodiment through music, performance, and interactive systems. She is known for developing biofeedback instruments that transform physiological signals into sound, including BioSynth, an experimental platform for interpersonal musical interaction. Her paper /The BioSynth—An Affective Biofeedback Device Grounded in Feminist Thought/ received the Best Paper Award at the 2023 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME). Her current research includes a SSHRC-funded Knowledge Synthesis project on functional music and sonic wellness in Canada, reflecting a broader interest in the ways sound acts upon listeners and participates in the production of affect, attention, and social experience. Her work has been presented internationally in venues such as Ars Electronica, MUTEK (Montreal/Argentina), ISEA 2022 Barcelona, and the Toronto Biennial.
