Audio Interference: Heard in LA is an intra-active initiative—between Integrated Media/Art and Technology artist, Tom Leeser and Composer, Performer, Tim Feeney.
Audio Interference: Heard in LA is an extension of past Center for Integrated Media online and site specific sound projects developed for the Center’s web-based initiative, archive, and virtual studio, viralnet-v4.net—The Lament Project (2008), Dry Run (2012), Imagining Tellus 28 (2017), Project Scream (2019) and Release (2021).
As a nexus, Heard in LA is interested in the turbulent nature of the 21st century and cross-disciplinary collaborations that employ text, media, science, performance and art. We insist on provoking an “indiscipline” that moves us beyond protected borders of history, geography, identity and privileged cultural assumptions. We want to provoke, not predict future tendencies in art and technology.
According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary, interference is defined by “the combination of two or more electromagnetic waveforms to form a resultant wave in which the displacement is either reinforced or canceled.”
This project grew from our desire to curate a group of sound and spoken word artists that engage with extra-musical and textual strategies in their work. We are encouraging the artists to create new ruptures within our critical and conceptual understanding of sound and language through the use of “imperfect metaphors.”
We invited the artists in Audio Interference: Heard in LA to respond to the word interference and to submit recent or new personal projects that explore a full range of sonic “waves and forms”—spanning spoken word, noise, electronics, acoustic and multi-instrumental compositions and improvisations. As the title implies, Audio Interference: Heard in LA draws from a diverse group of artists whose practice resonates as an intimate collision across the greater Los Angeles region.
Artists
Artist Bios
(A)Provisional Collective is the cultural practice of media artist Tom Leeser. Since 2012, (A)Provisional Collective has employed a wide range of media, resulting in public artworks, digital videos, immersive installations, sound-based works, and socially engaged educational projects. The collective was founded with the intent of exploring temporary experimental practices that can occur in and around public media spaces, alternative cultural institutions, and in our everyday environments. This multidisciplinary practice has engaged topics such as climate change, education within a globalized context, cultural memory, and speculative futures. With backgrounds in photography, film, video, and sound, the point is to perform within a critical relationship between art and life through a reconsideration of media, aesthetics, technology, and the body politic.
Nic Brannen is a multidisciplinary artist, composer, and educator with a strong background in experimental sound practices and jazz piano. Nic blends creative compassion with diverse artistic disciplines, including sculpture, film, and poetry.
C57BL/6 consists of Caleb Steinmeyer and Kyle Leeser. Through synthesizers and tape cut-ups, they probe the growing discomfort of life inside technological systems. Emerging from the Los Angeles punk scene, their sound seeps into other genres until it settles into something like an unidentified and undesirable sludge.They developed an eternal mechanism of the recovery of digital artifacts deemed worthless by consumption, the bog of lossy objects of sound that are unidentified and undesired.
Roper is known for blurring the lines between traditional musicianship, spoken word, and sound art. He incorporates extemporaneous spoken word into musical contexts, treating his voice as an instrument. His compositions explore histories of place, ethnicity, and self-history, often utilizing non-traditional instruments like primitive aerophones.
Naomi Sam is an interdisciplinary artist from Vienna & Hamburg, based in Los Angeles. Her work spans installation, sculpture, painting, animation and video game, combining physical and digital elements into hybrid objects. Her practice creates speculative spheres for collective imagining of posthuman futures, through wordbuilding and play, exploring relationships between bodies, environments, landscapes, nature, technology, and hope in times of hypercapitalism. Her work reflects on relics of the Anthropocene, posthumanism, environmentalism, digital alchemy, and spirituality and encourages attentiveness to nonhuman voices and alternative temporalities, and the planet. She holds an MFA in Art and Technology from the California Institute of the Arts where she currently teaches in the Integrated Media specialization.
Cassia Streb and Tim Feeney are both LA-based sound artists who have been performing, recording, and creating sound installations together since 2019. Their sound pieces explore instrumental and found sound, movement, tape recorders, door frames, window panes, rainstorms, pine cones, concrete floors, and children’s cartoons. They have collaborated to create sound projects for High Desert Soundings in Wonder Valley, Sound Symposium in St. John’s Newfoundland, the Evergreen Cemetery in Santa Cruz, and other special places and unique circumstances. Their collaborative albums have been released by Kuyin, MAPPA, Infrequent Seams, Full Spectrum, Harmonic Ooze, Sawyer Spaces, and Extradition.
Nina Sarnelle makes research projects, participatory performances, music composition, video, and many experiments in pedagogy and collectivity. They facilitate many improvisational somatic & vocal workshops, including many with Selwa Sweidan under the collaborative project Touch Praxis. They have shown work at the New Museum (NY), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Hammer Museum (LA), Getty Center (LA), Ballroom Marfa (TX), MoMA (NY), Black Cube (Denver), Mwoods (Beijing) and many others.
Perfect Band is an experimental LA-based group featuring Paul Carter, Kensaku Shinohara, Dylan Marx, and Zaq Kenefick. They blend guitar, bass, drums, and vocals to create fluid, improvised soundscapes rooted in music, dance, and performance. They have performed at 2220 Arts + Archives, Elysian Valley Lodge, BRS Studios (Los Angeles) among others, and have curated performance event DRINK IT UP NIGHT since 2024.
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