Damian Stewart (NZ, PT)
Participating Artist
Damian is a musician and artist who works with sound, light, software, and electronics to create performances and interactive installations exploring relationships between performers and audiences. Originally from New Zealand, and bringing with him an
artistic background in music, a technical background in interactive software programming, and an education ranging from interior architecture to computer science via music, mathematics, art history, and philosophy, Damian draws inspiration from a diverse range of fields.
As a musician working with electronic performance since 2002, Damian has performed alongside Biosphere (NO) and Deadbeat (CA), and in collaboration with Chris Sugrue (US), Emil McAvoy (NZ), and the Variable Geometry Orchestra (PT), among others. He was a founding member of While_you_were_Sleeping, an A/V collective in Wellington, NZ and has a deep interest in connections between audio and visuals. A long time audience member to free jazz/free improv concerts, Damian aims to bring to his work the sense of immediacy and communication you feel when a really great percussionist and a skilled free guitar player perform an improvised musical duel in front of your eyes. To this end he develops his own software instruments with PureData, using a constantly evolving performance style where gestures and movements over an electronic instrument become directly connected to sounds being produced, forging a strong empathic bond with the audience and allowing rich collaborative/improvised performance with other musicians.
More recently Damian has begun developing interactive installations. His piece Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound, which won the Best Visual Arts prize in the Wellington Fringe Festival 2007, uses interactive sound and light to transform a space into a kind of musical instrument. It allows the audience/visitor to perform this instrument through their movements, by building intuitive connections between the motion of their bodies and the sounds and lights they are seeing and hearing. It augments their consciousness of the space they inhabit with a layer of playful magic, and allows them to experiment with and perform that magic in whatever way they see fit.
Damian’s N.I.P. interests:
New ideas, new techniques; new friends, like-minded folks; good times, unique experiences; opportunities for collaboration and collective projects; professional development, artistic critique, and a deeper understanding of my artform and my work, and where it stands in relation to the work of others.
Technologies I’ve used:
Hardware: Arduino/
Software: C/C++, PureData,
DIY software using computer vision, 3d graphics, sound, …