Eadem Mutata Resurgo
Lisa R. Coons is a composer and sound artist with a special affinity to noise composition and experimentation. She is attracted to the sound palettes inherent in simple materials and creates welded sculptural instruments from found and salvaged objects. Lisa studied composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City during her undergraduate degree and received her Master’s from SUNY Stony Brook. Presently a PhD candidate at Princeton University, her portfolio includes music for acoustic and electronic instruments, turntables, traditional ensembles and welded percussion sculptures. She received an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award in 2005 for the string quartet Awkward Music and an Honorable Mention in 2009 for Cross-Sections, her electric guitar quartet. Recent commissions include works for The Machine Project for the Hammer Museum of Los Angeles, The New Music Collective of Charleston, Iktus Percussion Quartet, the Violin Futura Project, and Dither Electric Guitar Quartet. Lisa lives in New York and is a member of the composers collective called, simply, The Collected. www.lisarcoons.com
Steven Pierce is a scientist, artist, and inventor from Oregon. He is currently studying some of the ways that biological systems resist change and coalesce from chaotic components. This research explores how organisms react to, and recover from, genetic damage as seen in aging, mutation, and cancer. He is a member of the Brooklyn art collective, 3rd Ward, and has attended Burning Man regularly since 2002. He bikes everywhere and spends most free time playing capoeira and practicing other movement arts. His creative efforts and projects are largely related to those pursuits, more generally--accessibility, visceral engagement, and complex dynamism (e.g. www.flameshoe.com). He is now finishing his PhD for Genetics at Columbia University in New York City.
Aaron Good is an engineer, musician, and amateur surgeon from Portland, Oregon. During the day he engineers creative solutions to information disasters. The rest of his time is spent tinkering, welding, and playing music. He is the recipient of an Aaron Good Grant for Making Shit and collaborates with his gentlewoman caller, Sarah, on interactive electronic projects incorporating light and sound. Aaron works on generative music and finds ways to help people without musical "skills" to express themselves through sound. He wants to foster music and sound as a medium for accessible self-expression. Somewhere in between overbearing and formulaic top-down restrictive systems and total tonal and rhythmic freedom, there is a place where both beginners and experts can feel comfortable and rewarded, ideally without a considerable investment of time and interface exploration. So in addition to assistive systems, intuitive interface design is key in allowing people to feel at home with an instrument. http://soundcloud.com/forkmanteau
Sarah Tappon lives in Portland, Oregon, Where she scans brains with magnetic fields strong enough to pull the glitter off a raver at 15 feet. She conducts cognitive science experiments to further our understanding of human auditory perception, attention, and self control. She's also an amateur diesel mechanic, volcano climber, beer brewer, and mycologist. For Burning Man 2009, Sarah performed all of the programming and much of the soldering for the massive LED board seen here.
