Jan 23rd 2013: Salon – Audio in Art Installation
When: Jan 23rd 2013, 7:30PM
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery
Ben Houge is an artist working at the nexus of video games, sound installation, performance, music composition, and digital art. This salon will explore points of convergence between these disparate trajectories. Ben will discuss the properties of real-time, event driven audio through the lens of video games, and talk about the challenges of creating a soundtrack for something that hasn’t happened yet. This will open into discussion about these concepts and how they apply to digital art installations.
About the Artist
A 16-year veteran of the video game industry, Ben Houge has contributed audio to titles including Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, and Half-Life: Opposing Force, spending seven years at Sierra Entertainment, four years at Ubisoft, and contracting for companies including Microsoft, Arena.net, and Harmonix Music Systems. Ben moved to Shanghai in 2004 to take the job with Ubisoft, and during his six years in China became heavily involved in the Chinese sound and art scenes, presenting his work at the Shanghai eArts Festival, Hangzhou’s 2Pi Festival, the minimidi Festival, Beijing’s Today Art Museum, Suzhou’s True Color Museum, and Shanghai’s OV Gallery and Art+Shanghai Gallery, alongside such artists as Yan Jun, Torturing Nurse, Wang Changcun, Yao Dajuin, Li Jianhong, B6, and Hong Qile. Previously, in Seattle, Ben founded the Sound Currents concert series and was a member of Stranger Genius Award-winning collective Seattle School from its inception. In 2010, Ben relocated to the Boston area, where he currently teaches video game music at Berklee College of Music. Recent work has been exhibited at Boston Cyberarts, San Diego Museum of Art, Chapel Performance Space in Seattle, Studio Z in Saint Paul, and Eyebeam in New York City. Last winter Ben was a visiting artist at MIT, working with the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group on the sonification of data from ubiquitous sensor networks. His most recent project was a food opera, a collaboration with chef Jason Bond of Bondir restaurant in Cambridge, in which Ben scored a meal as he would a video game, responding to real-time events with 30 discrete channels of real-time generated sound. For more information visit www.benhouge.com.