Assistant Professor
Critical Media Practices, CMCI, University of Colorado, Boulder
Electric Songlines: Place, Poetry, Play
Monday, October 31, 12:00-1:00, in ATLAS 311
This talk will give an overview of the artist's creative work, which provokes dialogues among the fields of music, sound, visual art, and geography, particularly the physical interaction of bodies with sound, narrative created through the juxtaposition of remembered and ‘real’ sounds, and the stumbling rhythms in the intersection of walking and the sound world. In many ways I consider myself a professional wanderer; I collect scraps of sound and image from my travels, deconstructing and arranging them in ways that I hope are evocative. By slowing down, clarifying, and reworking these sonic and visual fragments, I try to recreate my experience of place in highly abstract ways. For the last several years I’ve also used technology to engage public creativity and exploration, largely by designing playful situations that facilitate creative participation, and often adapting the technology of our contemporary world – mobile audio, digital video, interactive electronics – to engage people creatively with the physical and social worlds around them.At a time when technology seems to seductively and incrementally envelop each of us in a solipsistic bubble, I believe we must learn to use it as a means of connection – to ourselves, to our communities, and to our world at large.
For more than fifteen years, Betsey Biggs has created musical compositions, improvisations, interactive sound and video installations, site-specific audio works, public interventions, relational projects, and multimedia theatrical works that connect the dots between sound, music, visual art, place, storytelling and technology. Biggs has collaborated with Nick Hallett, Pamela Z, Luciano Chasso, Margaret Lancaster, Evidence, The Now Ensemble, The BSC, So Percussion, Tarab Cello Ensemble, the Nash Ensemble and filmmakers Jennie Livingston and Amy Harrison, among others, and her work has been presented at venues as disparate as ISSUE Project Room, Abrons Arts Center, Roulette, the Conflux Festival, MASSMoCA, Sundance Film Festival, Hong Kong’s Videotage, and Brown University, and on the streets of Oakland, CA and Brooklyn, NY. Her largest recent project, “Sunken Gardens”, a large outdoor sound installation for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, employs induction loops to create eighteen fields of audio composed from musical and textual fragments inspired by the Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A new musical work, “Teewinot” is a sonic time lapse of the natural history of the Grand Teton mountains and was premiered at several national parks in July 2016 by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble. Biggs earned degrees in English Literature and Music from Colorado College and Mills College respectively and a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University. She has also held fellowships at Brown University and Harvard University. She has taught at Princeton, Brown and The Rhode Island School of Design, and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder.