Client Work is a section dedicated to recent client projects.
I met experimental sound artist and hybrid performer Anastasia Clarke several years ago when I was hosting my old radio show Live Presence on Know Wave. As a guest on the show, they did a private performance at SITUATIONS gallery in Chinatown which we broadcast live on air. Anastasia and I quickly became friends and I’ve seen them perform in many settings. I always enjoy the particular physicality and presence they bring to their performances – the aforementioned piece at SITUATIONS involved handmade copper instruments that Anastasia played by stepping on barefoot – as well as their infectious curiosity for novel systems and technologies in their work.
Earlier this year, I helped Anastasia refresh their artist bio, which you can read below.
Composer, performer, technologist, sound designer, and archivist Anastasia Clarke’s live embodied electronic music performances consider the artist’s role as a healer and activist. Working as a performer-composer and artist-engineer, they use creative music technology such as controllers, custom-built instruments, and performing systems to hack apart narratives and spin ineffable new shapes and stories. Embracing the heightened sense of risk in live performance settings, their work makes room for the possibility of failure in execution or reception, intentionally playing upon the natural fault lines in technological systems, perceptive faculties, and social structures.
In recent years, they’ve performed live ambient soundscapes designed for relaxation which explore the power of music and sound to “tune” an audience’s attention, focusing on the present moment to invite shifts in thinking and perception. Informed by research into extra sensory perception and energy work, Clarke navigates non-linear spaces and connections between disparate modalities and “mediums” such as analog electronics, systems thinking, and sound healing. Having worked for more than a decade as an archivist at several notable artist studios and organizations, the influence of network topologies is woven into their holistic practice of teaching, speaking, professing, sharing, and creating soundworlds.