Resonant Earth

Hailey Becker is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who incorporates elements of social, environmental, and materials science into her work to analyze the human relationship to the environment, scientific progress, and each other. She is interested in exploring potential futures (some good, some bad) that are direct results of human bias, folly, and innovation. Becker is an MFA student in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Forestry at Michigan State University. She holds a Master’s degree in Materials Science from Michigan State University and a Bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Alabama.

Kakia Gkoudina, from Thessaloniki, Greece, composes multimedia works involving acoustic instruments, electronics, film, experimental theater and sound. Gkoudina earned her Master’s Degree in Composition at Michigan State University under the guidance of A. Bacon, D. Biedenbender and L. Goeringer, and her doctorate degree with a focus on composition and multimedia narrative, under the guidance of Dr. Mark Sullivan (Music Composition) and Dr. Alisson Dobbins (Integrated Performance Media Design). Her doctorate thesis was a multimedia work for chamber ensemble, visuals, film, and dance. She is currently researching multimedia composition based on motion in time and applying this research onto her first multimedia performance play composition. Kakia has worked as a director and sound designer for films as well as, composed music for films, plays, video games and podcasts. Lately, she has been exploring transmedia practices that involve performance, art installation and music composition.

Lately, she has become a member of the Art Club Collective, a multimedia art installation collective with works featured at Michigan State University Museum, Greater Lansing Art Gallery etc.

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Henry Moonrod (he/him/his) is a sculptor who humanizes the sublime, immense, and natural through abstract forms. Local to Lansing he has been working to create ambitious, kinetic public art that can bring his city to life. Each piece contains an interactive element, encouraging viewers to explore and see themselves within the piece. In his practice, Henry continues to innovate with new materials and techniques, working towards an oeuvre that considers the interdependence between the self and the natural world.

Technology often feels like an extra limb, like an extension of the body that we use to see more, know more or experience more than what our bodies can afford us on their own. As an artist working with technology I am constantly reminded and intimately aware of the limitations imposed by my own body and the opportunities that tech proposed to circumvent them. My view on the world ebbs in and out of a technological gaze - a frame of reference algorithmically curated and facilitated by the superorganism of the internet - and this is one possible explanation for my obsession with the digital camera.

I collaborate with technology: I tell it where and what to look at, and it shows me what it sees. Real-time performance and feedback is crucial to this process; by working with video systems and electronics that can run in continuous loops my role as an artist becomes that of what Douglas Hofstadter would call a “Perturbing Agent”. I look and listen to the behavior of the machine, and I find opportunities to inject a notion of change into the operation.

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