Keynote Presentation - Eve Klein

This keynote presentation is part of the School of Music Research Student Symposium taking place Thursday 29 September in the Larry Sitsky Recital Room.

Art, Making & Technology: Reconciling Practice, Academia, and Activism

Making art with technology brands female artists as political actors due to their limited inclusion. Making art should not be a radical act because of the gender of the artist. Nonetheless, as a composer-performer, sometime maker, and academic, my work becomes political because the physicality of my body, sexed female, cannot be erased by those who view my work. Consequently, I choose to occupy a political space to make difficult work, using my location as a cisgender woman to explore the affect of bodies and find ways of connecting notions of social justice to our shared sense of humanity. This talk will unpack how my practice as an artistic researcher has developed to make work that invites audiences into discussions about real-world social issues.

Two artworks will be discussed in detail. The first, Vocal Womb, allows its audience to explore the relationship between voice, identity and power by stepping into and directly manipulating the voice of another. The second, City Symphony, treats Brisbane City like an open-world game space to encourage people to meet someone different from themselves and feel more connected to the city we share. Through interrogating my practice, I have found a way to reconcile making art with academia and activism. I use this insight to shape how I consider my students' learning experiences, themselves developing artists, in search of a practice that locates and speaks for them.

 

Associate Professor Eve Klein is a composer, vocalist and music technologist known for creating ground-breaking immersive music experiences for mass audiences. Her work draws together classical music, electronica and interactive performance to push genre boundaries and invite audiences into discussions about real-world social issues. Importantly, Eve creates artworks in collaboration with community groups, festivals, researchers, and NGOs to achieve community transformation goals. Recent projects have explored gendered and racial violence, climate change, disaster recovery and refugee rights. Eve’s work is described as: “contemporary music at its most relevant – simultaneously inward and outward focused in addressing the challenge of its existence and its capacity to produce something great” (Cyclic Defrost).

Eve is the Convenor of Music Technology and Popular Music at the University of Queensland, where she leads a research group guiding postgraduate composers in creating virtual and augmented reality music experiences. Eve also works as Lead Composer and Audio Director at Textile Audio, a studio designing interactive music experiences and games. Klein’s artistic work has featured at international festivals and venues, including MONA FOMA, VIVID Sydney, Brisbane Festival, Salisbury Cathedral, Underbelly Arts, the Melbourne Arts Centre and New York University.

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