Born in 1983 on Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan, Canada, multidisciplinary composer and artist Erin Gee lives and works in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her artistic practice spans various disciplines, including new media, music composition, art-science, and performing arts. She is Professeure Adjointe (Assistant Professor) in the Music Faculty at Université de Montreal. As a DIY expert in emotional biofeedback technology, Gee composes music while exploring soft dimensions of sound, gesture, breath, voice, eye contact, and simulated haptics as manipulative elements for structuring the body and its emotions. Her performance techniques, which she describes as “wetware,” delve into the subconscious influence of sound, drawing inspiration from emotional physiology, hypnotism, feminist theory, ASMR, and the placebo effect. Structuring the social, emotional, and physical facets of music, Gee transforms biofeedback into a space of posthumanist connection, orchestrating listeners’ bodies within her cybernetic systems in place.
Gee has received commissions from Montreal-based entities such as Akousma Festival, Totem Contemporain, Ensemble Supermusique, and soprano Andrea Young. In 2023, her performance at MUTEK Montreal was described as one of the most memorable ambient acts of the festival by Ilia Rogatchevski (THE WIRE), while journalist Simon Tremblay-Pepin described her act as one of the uniquely intellectual and challenging works in the festival lineup. Her international presence extends to exhibitions at art museums, electronic music festivals, and new music venues, with performances/exhibitions at the Karachi Biennale (PK), Centro de Arte Sonoro (AR), Toronto Biennale (CA), Ars Electronica (AT), LEV Festival (ES), MUTEK Festival (AR/ES/CA), NRW Forum (DE), and MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA). In 2021 Gee co-founded Audio Placebo Plaza community sound art collective with Julia E. Dyck and Vivian Li, collaboratively exploring the limits of healing music and placebo-led creation. Her article “The BioSynth: an affective biofeedback device grounded in feminist thought” won the prize of best paper at New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference 2023. Gee’s work has been featured in WIRE, neural.it, Scientific American blog, VICE, MusicWorks, and Canadian Art magazine. She has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, as well as the Conseil des Arts de Montreal, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Saskatchewan Arts Board.
As a researcher she is actively investigating queerness, gender, digital lutherie and new instruments for musical expression, and ASMR in fields of electronic and experimental music.