Paul
DeMarinis

Born 1948 in Cleveland (Ohio), lives in Stanford (California). Education: film (with Paul Sharits), composition with Robert Ashley. Has collaborated since 1976 with David Tudor and David Behrman (live electronic music, the group Composers Inside Electronics); taught at Mills College. Artist-in-Residence at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) 1979–82 and at the Exploratorium (San Francisco). 1982–84 video game designer for Atari. 1988–97 taught at the San Francisco Art Institute; 1994–97 Artist-in-Residence at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto, California). 1996–2001 collaboration with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Associate Professor for Sound and Media at Stanford University since 2000.
The artist has received numerous awards and grants since 1976, including the Golden Nica for Interactive Art (2006) at Ars Electronica, Linz for his work The Messenger (1998, extensively revised 2005).

DeMarinis’s works playfully consider the inarticulate ideas and dreams that technical artefacts and mechanisms embody, speculating about the origins of metaphors inscribed in such often seemingly archaic and obsolete technologies. Installations and performances imaginatively trace the metaphors’ continuing existence in a society defined by technical media. For instance, The Messenger resurrects early ideas on electric telegraphy, constructing corresponding apparatuses and coupling them directly and in real time with an existing communication medium – e-mail.

The works have been presented in recent years in Berlin at venues such as Tesla (The Messenger, 2006), the Akademie der Künste (Grind Snaxe Blind Apes (A Study for Pomeroy’s Tomb), 2006), the singuhr – hoergalerie in parochial (Firebirds and Tongues of Fire, 2004) and at MaerzMusik 2003 (Rain Dance). In 1996, Gray Matter was shown in the international sound art exhibition sonambiente.

During his stay as guest of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence programme, Paul DeMarinis plans to complete and present new sound art projects (including Hypnica, Squakly Wheels and Weekends). In addition, he will do new research in archives and museums into old techniques of visualizing sound and compile a catalogue raisonné.

Homepage: Paul DeMarinis

Homepage (with list of works, bibliography and discography):
www.stanford.edu/~demarini