SOUND TYPE Concert: Victoria Shen

Join us at Victoria Shen Live in Concert on Saturday, March 23 at 8PM with an opening act by Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江.

Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco.

Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.

In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences.

Shen’s multimedia practice extends beyond musical composition and performance to include installation and non-traditional methods of distribution. Her DIY approach to deconstructing the concepts of “materiality, value and mass production” both integrate and re-contextualize the formats of the readymade and assemblage techniques.

Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, and in Europe as a member of a turntable trio with Mariam Rezaei and Maria Chavez, as a member of hip hop group 1 Above Minus Underground, and as a collaborator with the Kronos Quartet. Some notable venues in which she has performed include Boston City Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ISSUE Project Room NY, DOMMUNE Tokyo, Petreon Sculpture Park Cyprus, MUNCH Museum Oslo, and Museo d'Arte Orientale Turin. Shen has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE, WORM Rotterdam NL, Kurimanzutto New York US, The Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen DK, and AUDIUM San Francisco, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha, and Headlands Center for the Arts.

As part of the SOUND TYPE Festival and presenting before the evening concert, AAI’s Executive Director, Anne Ishii will lead a conversation with designer and technologist Mindy Seu and Victoria Shen from 4-5:30PM.

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Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江 (they/them) is a Beijing-born, NYC-based performance artist, vocalist, experimental improviser, composer, and lecturer. For their solo performance art practice, Lu designs Max/MSP-based electroacoustic feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism, which include special microphones and speakers placed within bodily orifices, augmented amplified laptop, and a custom-mapped flight joystick controller. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations that build on ancient Chinese drumming traditions and explore body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality, linking together sound, movement, and violence in divine ceremony. As a composer, Lu writes instructed improvisation pieces for acoustic and electronic performers and improvisers. Lu’s commissioned works often take a meta, unorthodox approach to music technology, exploring human-machine relationships, audio-visual interactivity, mind-body connection, and the phenomenology of musical performance. Lu holds a Master of Music in Computer Music from Peabody Conservatory and currently works as a lecturer and an audio engineer in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

This concert is part of (re)FOCUS that celebrates the 50th anniversary of Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts/1974, a citywide festival recognizing women artists.