What if we could compost the multiple lives within our single lifetime to grow a world? Join sound artist Umi Hsu for an evening of artist talk and concept-based activities that explore mushrooms, mycelium, and trans temporality. Umi Hsu will give a performance lecture introducing their practice that combines oral history, biomaterials, and worldmaking, while playing sounds on a living fungi synthesizer that they built.
Workshop participants will have an opportunity to interact with the fungi synth and engage in speculative oral history group activities prompted by fungal life.
This event and exhibition are made possible by generous support from the Kathryn Caine Wanlass Charitable Foundation.
ABOUT THE ARTIST UMI TSU
Umi Hsu is a sound artist and ethnomusicologist. Combining experimental performance, field recording, ethnographic writing, audio narrative, oral history, and songwriting, they make sound art and audio experiments to trace the contours of migration, stories, and memory. Hsu teaches in the MFA in Media Design Practices program at ArtCenter College of Design, serves on the Advisory Board for The Invisible Archive journal and Digital Transgender Archive, and previously directed exhibitions and programs at One Institute.
Umi Hsu’s sound practice has been presented by LACMA, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, SOAS, CTM Festival in Berlin, ONE Archives, Human Resources, Ting Shuo Hear Say, Automata, Radio Alhara; and featured in LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET, Giant Robot, and Dublab. With a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, they have received fellowships and awards from American Council for Learned Society, Mellon Foundation, Shuttleworth Foundation, City of West Hollywood, NEA, and LA Metro.
