CONRAD PREBYS MUSIC CENTER, ROOM 265
Thursday, October 2nd at 2:30 p.m. - Artist Talk
Friday, October 3rd at 9:30 a.m. - Student meetings (CPMC 231)
ABSTRACT: "Mind and Matter: Sound Practice at the Conflux of Soma, Psyche, and Society"
Much like sound itself, the conflux of somatic experience in sensory perception, the conscious and unconscious mind of the psyche, and the many layers of social forces including identity and culture forms an ever-changing space of forces and flows. I have found intermedia sound practice to be particularly suited to exposing the complex, sometimes puzzling, and always rich connections between these three elements, and this talk will comb through some moments and transformations in the last 5 years of my practice. After some description of the theoretical context of my work, I'll share some examples of performance-installation events and recordings, and we can discuss how these works expose or disguise the connections between body, mind, and society.
BIOGRAPHY:
Whitney Johnson is an artist using sound to understand bodies and minds. Based in Chicago, she composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording. As artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden, she composed sine waves, marimba, viola, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and Halldorophone into a multi-channel performance-installation and her latest LP, Hav (2024, Drag City). As Matchess, the Stena cassette (2024, Drag City) embodies an alter ego to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity. Recent performance-installations FIAT (2023-2025, Indexical, Roulette Intermedium, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Death in Trafo (or, The Crater) (2023, Logan Center for the Arts), and Huizkol (2020, Lampo) consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states. These works offer audiences the opportunity to explore their own skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018. She completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala Universitet in 2022 and an artist research residency on gender-based canonization at Q-O2 Brussels in 2025. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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