Xuan Ye works in art, music, design and technology.
X is interested in making noise as a generative space to evoke the dissonant, untranslatable and illegible pulses and pauses within more-than-human entanglements. They often involve improvisation, computation and fiction to compose software, images, installations, performances and editions. X's practice in paleocybernetics traces the resonances of technological, biological, and ecological systems through the development of a wave ontology where waves —material and metaphysical— become the language of porous existences, continuous and boundless in their flux.
Their work has appeared at the MOCA Toronto (2022), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2022, Shanghai), UQAM (Montreal) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Peer to Space (2021, Berlin), MUTEK Montreal (2020), Vivid Projects (2019, Birmingham), and Goethe-Institut (2018, Beijing), among others. Their multifaceted practice has been featured and reviewed in Peripheral Review (2020), Canadian Art (Winter 2020), ArtAsiaPacific (Issue. 111), Goethe-Institut (Montreal), KUNSTFORUM International (Bd. 257), and Musicworks (Issue. 136). They were an artist-in-residence awarded by the Swiss Arts Council in 2023, a finalist of EQ Bank digital artist awards in 2018, and a recipient of scholarships and grants from Canada Councils for the Arts and the SSHRC. As a musician, Ye is techne agnostic and genre eclectic.Their LP xi xi 息息 (Halocline Trance, 2019) is an "intriguing debut album of disjointed, abstract computer music and free improv" (Boomkat). Their split-collab tape Breath Fractals released with Chik White (Notice Recordings, 2019) "draws on a vocabulary of shattered sonics, as if the pair had broken a musical window and pieced it back together in as many ways as they could imagine" (Bandcamp Daily - Best Experimental Albums). X is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo.
2024 -
- residencyInstitute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts
- sympoisumEthics of AI Symposium, University of Waterloo
- exhibition4th Kamias Triennial
- writing"Smaller, Slower, Sloppier," DOI: https://doi.org/10.7273/xts3-rp44.
- publicationAngelique Ford, "Eating Language," Puja Journal Issue 1. On Feeding (2024): 28.
- editionEveryLetterCyborg Bites [New York City][Toronto]
- exhibitionI OWNED, A TONGUE [IMAGES]