bio
Jay Alan Yim studied music composition at the University of California Santa Barbara, the Royal College of Music, and Harvard, and computer music at MIT and Stanford. He currently teaches at Northwestern University. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and three Illinois Arts Council fellowships, and many other awards. His music has been featured at international festivals (a.o. Darmstadt, Ars Musica, Wien-Modern, Gaudeamus, Tanglewood, Aspen, ISCM World Music Days) and has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, Sendai Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, London Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Andiamo String Quartet, Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, dal niente, ICE, Frances-Marie Uitti, Gareth Davis, Laura Chislett, Harrie Starreveld, Dalia Chin and many others.
In 2000, he co-founded the collaborative localStyle with Marlena Novak. Using high and low tech means, their intermedia practice includes video, interactive installations, live performance with electronics, and audience participation. They created localStyle as a collaborative platform whose goal is to use the senses to interrogate existing situations, beginning in 2003 to address issues of climate change and resource extraction, and expanding since 2006 to focus on non-human others via themes as varied as the mating behavior of hermaphroditic marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish from the Amazon, experimental Eurasian blackbird grammar, the presumptive logic underlying human taxonomic systems, singing coral reefs as the Voice of the Anthropocene, and bootstrapping agriculture on Mars.
These works have been presented in festivals, museums, galleries, and alternative venues in more than forty cities worldwide (a.o. Albuquerque, Amsterdam, Amersfoort, Barcelona, Beijing, Belgrade, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Budapest, Camden, Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen, Duluth, Eindhoven, Den Haag, Huddersfield, Jerusalem, Kansas City, Korcula, Linz, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Münich, New York, the Orkney Islands, Richmond, Santa Barbara, Santa Fe, São Paolo, Sarasota, Shanghai, Sittard, Sydney, Szczecin, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Torino, Toronto, Valencia, Warsaw and Wrexham). Festival presentations have included the National Art Museum of China’s (NAMOC) TransLife Triennial, STRP Festival [scale (in collaboration with neuromechanical engineer Malcolm MacIver)], Visioni dal Futuro, Taipei Digital Art Festival, Ear Taxi Festival, estacion ARTE, The Wrong Biennial and others.
Complete resume available in PDF format.
For more about his intermedia collaborative projects, go to the website for localStyle.