Jack Straw New Media Gallery

Trimpin is a German-born composer and sound artist who has lived and worked in Seattle since 1979. His sound sculptures, installations and set designs have been developed in collaboration with artists such as Merce Cunningham, Samuel Beckett, Conlon Nancarrow and the Kronos Quartet. His work has appeared at museums, galleries, and festivals across the Pacific Northwest. The documentary film TRIMPIN: The Sound of Invention premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur “Genuis” grant.

Combining digital technology with everyday salvaged materials, Trimpin has invented ways of playing everything from giant marimbas to a 60-foot stack of guitars using MIDI commands. Taking inspiration equally from the junkyard as the museum and the concert hall, Trimpin often creates these eccentric and interactive instruments from found materials, including saw blades, toy monkeys, duck calls, beer bottles, bunsen burners, slide projectors, turkey basters, and pottery wheels. Trimpin’s computer-driven musical contraptions defy the constraints of traditional instruments.

Richard Lerman was born in 1944 in San Francisco. He has worked in electronic music since 1963 and taught performance art, film making and sound art at the Boston Museum School from 1973-1994. Lerman has performed at many International and American festivals and has worked with John Driscoll, The Merce Cunningham Dance Co., The Dance Exchange, and others.

Lerman works in the mediums of music, film, installations, performance, and video. He often constructs functional microphones from diverse materials, and then composes using these transducers to amplify and pick-up sounds of the environment. These site-specific sound pieces allow the sonic flavor of each material to emerge. They also develop strong connections between the recording locations and the installations in which they are used. Recent works combine sounds from his self-built microphones with computer and MIDI techniques. He has performed and screened his work nationally and internationally since the 1970s, and has received numerous awards and grants supporting his work.

Now a Professor of Media and Digital Arts at Arizona State University-West, he has also screened his films and videotapes at numerous media centers including Pacific Film Archives, Millennium Film Studies, The London Film Co-op, Grierson State Cinema (Melbourne), Image Forum (Tokyo), and in 1999 at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC as part of “Big as Life: A History of Super 8 Film in America.”

New Media Gallery 2005-06: Fences/Borders

Kichul Kim, who holds a BFA and an MFA degree from Hong-Ik University, Korea, has taught sculpture and computer graphics at Korean universities, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, and was a sound director for two Korean companies. He has had three solo exhibitions and participated in over 40 group exhibitions in Korea.

Kim came to the United States to study Audio Production at the Art Institute of Seattle from 2003 to 2005. At Art Institute, he took courses such as Acoustics, Music Theory, Electronics, Recording and Microphone Techniques, Audio for Digital media, Html, and 3D application, in the hopes of finding inspiration to pursue his sound art career. When Kim attended the Human Computer Interaction workshop at Stanford University in the summer of 2005, it changed his artistic path. There he acquired the use of specific technologies and computer programs related to sound: Electronics, C language for AVR, and Pure Data.

New Media Gallery 2005-06: Rapport

S. Lyn Goeringer is a mixed-media composer/performer/sound artist who currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island. She writes music and creates sound art using whatever tools are available, from found objects to string quartets. She creates and builds her own electronic instruments and plays theremin, computer, piano, found objects and sculptures. She also makes interactive sound and video installations using various spatially oriented triggering devices and surveillance equipment.

Lyn Goeringer has played at Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY; Lincoln Center Out-Of-Doors Home Made Instrument Day Festival in NY, NY; Berwick Institute, Boston, MA; Fort Thunder, Providence, Rhode Island, as well as many other locations throughout the United States. She has also presented her work at CCMIX in Paris, France.

New Media Gallery 2005-06: Huldre

Joe Colley is a self taught artist investigating the conceptual possibilities of sound through music production, installations, or collaborations with video artists, dancers, and even prisoners. His earlier works were also created under the moniker Crawl Unit. His latest installations attempt to dissimulate the artist by concentrating on the instigation of unstable situations unique to the composition of random sound.

His performances have been seen as part of festivals including Activating The Medium (SFMOMA), Observatori (Valencia, Spain), Phonotaktik (Vienna, Austria), Beyond Music (Venice, Ca.), Songlines (Mills College, Oakland), CEAIT (CalArts, Valencia), and the 2006 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. His recordings have been released internationally on various underground record labels such as Groundfault Records, Auscultare, and 23five. He currently resides in Oakland, CA.

New Media Gallery 2005-06: Lonely Microphone