Looking Outwards 08: The Creative Practice of an Individual

Brian House, https://brianhouse.net/

Brian House is a new media and interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on computational and artistic representations of time and location. He has studied computer science and computer music at Columbia University, Brown University, and Chalmers University of Technology. House is originally from Colorado, but is based in Portland, Oregon as a teaching professor at Lewis and Clark College. One project of interest and representative of House’s body of work, which he emphasized during his talk at the 2018 Eyeo Festival, is Animas.

To address the issue of water contamination in the Animas River, he created panels of the metals exceeded EPA tolerances in the river. They vibrated at unique frequencies which updated based on real-time data. The changing makeup of the river generated a unique sound composition. I appreciate that his body of work takes political issues and uses sound, new, and time-based media to make thought-provoking work. I thought he was a very engaging speaker in that he outlined some of his more representative works within his speech and contextualized each of them within society and human relationships, making them more relatable and engaging.