Pia Van Gelder is a Sydney based electronic media artist / facilitator / teacher at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts. She is a director at the Hybrid ARI Serial Space and the Overlord of Dorkbot (Sydney) – a community of “people doing strange things with electricity”. Van Gelder’s practice balances live performance and interactive installations and instrument design – analogue audio/video synthesis and the modification or circuit-bending of pre-existing media-machines to facilitate their creation of unexpected and idiosyncratic outputs. She is interested in the idea of the “performing machine”, exploring the strange partnership or collaboration between artist and machine. Van Gelder work investigates in the form of media archaeology – discussing contemporary approaches to ‘composition inside electronics’ and new possibilities of ‘haunted media’ and ‘machine vision’.
Recent Projects include AV Harp, 2011, an audio/video collaboration with a series of performing machines and AV Bells, 2011, a multi-channel array of open circuits played by manipulating ‘bells’.
