Critical Senses

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About

Biography

Somaya Langley is a sound and media artist (www.criticalsenses.com). Her work has been presented and performed in festivals and conferences throughout Australia and internationally including including Transmediale.08, Tuned City, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), das kleine field recordings festival, Liquid Architecture 6, the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Sound Lab Channel III, Electrofringe, the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC), the Australasian Sound Recording Association (ASRA) Conference, the Totally Huge New Music Festival, the Melbourne Fringe Festival and Skylounge at the National Museum of Australia. In 2005 she completed commissions for Experimenta’s New Visions and the National Film and Sound Archive’s Ten Minutes of Passion, for which her piece Passion in the Protest also received a finalist’s award. Highlights over the past two years include surround-sound compositions for Telepath, a trilogy of video works by media artist David McDowell, funded by artsACT, sound for the solo theatre work The Minutiae of Inertia, as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival, participation in the Performance Space’s Time_Place_Space 5 workshop which was supported by an artsACT 2006 Travel Grant and participation in the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s Create_Space 2005 New Media Lab which was supported by an ANAT workshop grant. In 2007 she attended the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s re:skin Media Laboratory which was also supported by an ANAT workshop grant, and subsequently received an Australia Council for the Arts Run_Way grant to attend the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in New York, the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) in Montreal plus a collaborative residency at STEIM in Amsterdam.

In recent years she has received funding support for her sound installation works through artsACT and the Australia Council for the Arts. Current projects include a solo live performance endeavour – ID-i/o – supported by an Australia Council for the Arts Sounding Out grant and live multichannel audiovisual performances as one half of the duo MetaSense. In addition, from 2002 to 2004 Somaya was a member of the Australian sensor-based trio, HyperSense Complex. For over a decade she hosted a weekly radio programme, SubSequence, broadcast across the Australian Community Radio Network and until mid-2007 was the National Library of Australia’s Digital Preservation Officer. During her five years at the Library, her work included creation of MusicAustralia and the Library’s online Digital Collections, and in addition, development of models and workflows for long-term sustainability of complex digital objects as part of the Library's Digital Preservation Project. In 2006 she was the recipient of a Friends of the National Library of Australia Travelling Fellowship to research models for archiving complex born-digital objects, in California USA.

She is currently co-director of the 2008 Electrofringe festival in Newcastle, Australia, is guest co-curator for Transit Lounge 2009 and works for the Australian Network for Art and Technology as their international media correspondent. With suitcases spread across the world, she lives in transit - mainly between Sydney and Berlin.

somaya & her bike - berlin photo: Maria-Eleni Alesandre

CV

Current Positions

  • Co-Director - Electrofringe, National Festival of Electronic Arts and Culture (Newcastle, Australia)
  • Guest Co-Curator - Transit Lounge, partner event of Transmediale (Berlin, Germany and Sydney, Australia)
  • Media Correspondent - Australian Network for Art and Technology (International - based in Europe)
  • Freelance - artist, arts writer, independent media art researcher and consultant
  • National Library of Australia - Leave without pay (May 2007 - May 2009)

Grants

Awards

Commissions

Qualifications

Workshops & Residencies

Peer Review Boards

Publications & Refereed Conference Papers

Conference Presentations

Audio & Visual Releases

  • tele path, a trilogy of audiovisual works, single channel video and 5.1 surround sound DVD (2008)
  • out | side | in, Unfenced, the Australian Computer Music Society Compilation Double CD (2008)
  • Shimmer, Electricity 2, Blatant Propaganda, Compilation CD (2004)
  • Shimmer, ACMA2004, the Australian Computer Music Society Compilation CD (2004)

Reviews & Articles