Myles de Bastion, CymaSpace founder, is a User Interaction Designer, Artistic Director, Musician, Activist and Creative-Altruist. Deaf from birth, Myles develops cymatic technology and art installations that enable sound to be experienced as light, motion and vibration. His work has appeared in the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland Art Museum and on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show. Myles has designed and built large scale installations for music festivals and Grammy-award winning jazz artist Esperanza Spalding. His journey as a musician making sound visible for the Deaf community was covered by CNN’s Great Big Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdwXPZ4vu-c

In 2018 Myles began branching out to explore experiential storytelling, he produced a short-film that conceptualized a science fiction world without air and sound where the characters communicated through telepathic hand gestures. This became the predecessor to a large-format theatrical escape-room experience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns3F2jn3VbM) led by Myles and Portland’s Deaf community. The Ikigai Machine Live Experience was installed for a 2-week run within the 2,000 sq ft open space facilities of Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts. All characters communicated silently through hand gestures, leading small groups through the puzzles and experiments.

In 2019 and 2020 Myles received fiscal support and training via the Open Signal New Media Fellowship and the Epic Games Unreal Engine Virtual Production Fellowship.

His most recent project “Virtual Worlds Beyond Sound” promoted communication access for Deaf people and provided guidelines and tools for virtual reality app developers to incorporate sign language and open captioning into 360-degree virtual environments (https://www.freethink.com/articles/vr-accessibility).

As the Artistic Director for the Media program at CymaSpace Myles has a proven track record of project collaborations with an extensive list of arts and cultural organizations in the Northwest. Myles stands for inclusion and representation for Deaf and intersectional disabled. BIPOC. LGBTQ+ and Deaf+ community members and he is a mentor to many who come to CymaSpace seeking support, advocacy and consultation.