artist bios

Contributor Bios

Alexis Baghat
Paul Demarinis
Douglas Kahn
Brandon LaBelle
Ed Osborn
ADACHI Tomomi

Alexis Bhagat
Alexis (Lex) Bhagat is a logomaniac from New York City. After several experiments with therapeutic silence in Vermont (and inspried by the Neoist "Art Strike"), he burned all of his previous writings on December 21st, 1994 and began a 1-year "Poetry Strike," during which time he became bewitched by mircophones, recorders and radios. Charmed, he fell into a dark and lonely gutter of audiophilia, emerging a decade later to find comraderie with the August Sound Coalition webcasting collective and shelter under the transmission arts umbrella of Free103point9. Notable solo sound compositions include I used to walk all the way from Pleasantdale... (2001), Whitman Death Songs (2002), Lecture regarding Sound as Art (2003), Bandshell Ghost and Lecture on the Possibilitiy of Life without the Sun (both 2004.)

Since 2002, he has been in collaboration with Gregory Gangemi and Jason Quarles on Sound Generation- a collection of interviews with 24 contemporary sound artists, cut up into a polyvocal colloquy. (Forthcoming from Autonomedia.) His tangential musings and investigations on sound and liberation are periodically disseminated through his occasional publication, Tactical Sound.
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Paul DeMarinis
Paul DeMarinis has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations and interactive electronic inventions. He has performed internationally, at The Kitchen, Festival d'Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz. He has also created music for Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His interactive audio artworks have been shown at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York and The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Exploratorium and at Xerox PARC and has received major awards and fellowships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Award, and the D.A.A.D. Berlin Artist Fellowship. Much of his work involves speech processed and synthesized by computers, available on the Lovely Music Ltd. compact disc "Music as a Second Language", and the Apollohuis CD "A Listener's Companion." Major installation works include "The Edison Effect" that uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning ancient phonograph records with lasers, "Gray Matter" that uses the interaction of body and electricity to make music, and "The Messenger" and "Firebirds" that examine the myths of electrical communication. Public artworks include large-scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and Expo 1998 in Lisbon and an interactive audio environment at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport in 2003.

Douglas Kahn
Douglas Kahn is founding Director of Technocultural studies at University of California at Davis. With research concentrations in auditory culture, the history and theory of sound in the arts, and the arts and technology, he is the author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999), coeditor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde (MIT Press, 1992); an editor of Leonardo Music Journal, Senses and Society, and a new book series from University of California Press : Technoculture and the Arts. He is currently researching the artistic and cultural trade in acoustics and electromagnetics under the auspices of a 2006-2007 Guggenheim Fellowship

Brandon LaBelle
Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with the specifics of location. Through his work with Errant Bodies Press he has co-edited the anthologies "Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear", "Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language", and "Surface Tension: Problematics of Site". He initiated and curated the Beyond Music series and festivals from 1997 - 2002 at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in Los Angeles, and in 2001 he organized "Social Music", a radio series for Kunstradio ORF, Vienna. His installation work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including "Sound as Media"(2000) ICC Tokyo,"Pleasure of Language"(2002) Netherlands Media Institute, and "Undercover"(2003) Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, and his writings have been included in various books and journals, including "Experimental Sound and Radio" (MIT) and "Soundspace Architecture for Sound and Vision" (Birkhäuser). He presented a solo exhibition at Singuhr galerie in Berlin in 2004 and an experimental composition for public performance as part of Virtual Territories, Nantes, 2005.

Ed Osborn
Ed Osborn is a media artist who has presented his work worldwide. His artworks take many forms including installation, video, sculpture, and performance. Ranging from rumbling fans and sounding train sets to squirming music boxes and delicate feedback networks, Osborn's pieces function as living systems that are by turns playful and oblique, engaging and enigmatic.

Osborn has received grants and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Arts International, the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Banff Centre for the Arts, and CRCA at UC San Diego. He has performed and exhibited at ZKM (Karlsruhe), the Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Artspace (Sydney), Kiasma (Helsinki), LACE (Los Angeles), MassMOCA, the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), and the Auckland Art Gallery. He is an Assistant Professor for Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco) and Galerie Rachel Haferkamp (Cologne).

ADACHI Tomomi
ADACHI Tomomi, born in 1972, is a performer/composer, sound poet and video artist. He studied philosophy and aesthetics at Waseda University, Tokyo. Known for his versatile style, he has performed improvised music (solo as well as with numerous musicians) and contemporary music (works by John Cage, Dieter Schnebel, etc.) with voice, computer and self-made instruments in Japan, United State and Europe. As the only Japanese performer of sound poetry, he performed Kurt Schwitters's "Ursonate" as a Japan premiere. He also composed works for his punkish choir group "Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus." and has collaborated with many dancers and dance companies. His video work has been screened at some European film & video festivals. CDs include the solo album, "sparkling materialism" (naya records), Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus "nu" (naya records) and Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus "yo"(Tzadik).
http://www.adachitomomi.com