Brian House

https://brianhouse.net
United States °1979
affiliation: Lewis and Clark College
en

Brian House is an artist who investigates the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, MOCA (Los Angeles), Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Beall Center, ZKM, and Ars Electronica, among others, and has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, TIME, WIRED, Neural, and Creative Applications. He holds a PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia from Brown University and is Assistant Professor of Art and Head of Digital Media at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

research

research expositions

  • Animas: Disaster, Data, and the Resonance of a River (2019) author(s): Brian House published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    In this paper, I discuss the conceptual framework and development of Animas, an artwork which links sounding materials to the Animas River in Colorado. The Animas River is heavily contaminated by leakage from abandoned gold mines, including a 2015 spill in which three million gallons of wastewater were accidentally released into the river by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), turning the water a bright orange and threatening agriculture, tourism, and an already “disturbed” alpine ecology. Animas draws on precedents in sound art and explores transduction as a means of relating to more-than-human agencies and avoiding over-simplified representations of environmental degradation. Changes in the clarity of the water, invisible indicators of the dissolved metals within it, and the dynamics of its daily and seasonal flows all become sound in the gallery, producing timbral "color" from the river's continually changing composition—these data are provided by the Southern Ute Water Quality Program and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The piece acknowledges how our limited temporal sensibilities are challenged by the imbrication of the geologic time of minerals, the historical time of extractive industries, and the immediate urgency of equitable responses to ecological change.
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