Ben Byrne is an artist, musician, curator, researcher, tutor and writer whose work traverses musical performance and improvisation, installation, composition, radiophonics and sound theory.
He has just begun work towards a doctorate addressing the history of research into the nature of sound as an attempt to ontologise sound and seeking to understand sound instead as fundamentally a haecceity that is unknowable.
Performing regularly both solo, improvising with others and in various groups as well as presenting works in gallery and radio contexts, he is an active artist and musician. Performances include sets at ¼ Inch, Disorientation, Electrofringe, If You Like Improvised Music We Like You, Impermanent Audio, the Make It Up Club, Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Arts, the Now Now Festival of Improvised Music, What Is Music? and the Melbourne International Biennale of Exploratory Music as well as in Auckland, Wellington, Helsinki, Berlin and New York. Gallery shows include Tracts at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne as part of 2008 Next Wave Festival, It’s All Been Done Before at First Draft Gallery in Sydney and The Business Of Being An Artist at Serial Space in Sydney.
He has worked on a number of radio programs on 2SER, 2MBS and Radio National, including Generation HECS, Wednesday Overdrive, Playlist, Furthermore and The Night Air.
After starting the monthly Disorientation series in Sydney five years ago, he has organised and curated numerous one off events, exhibitions and festivals, including ABC Radio National’s Finding The Signal In The Noise in 2005, the UTS Music.Sound.Design Symposium in early 2008 and the musical portion of the upcoming inaugural Seven Thousand Oaks Festival of Sustainable Arts in 2010. He was a director of the Electrofringe Festival of Electronic Arts in 2006 and 2007 and a founder and director of Liquid Architecture in Sydney. Gallery shows he has curated include Potent at First Draft Gallery in 2006 and Tracts at Blindside Gallery in Melbourne in 2008. He founded the Avantwhatever label in 2008 as an outlet for his own work and that of other artists and is gradually working on its development.
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Email: ben[at]avantwhatever[dot]com.
