Erin Gee
Erin Gee is a Canadian artist and composer whose work centers on voice, affect, and technology. She builds custom biofeedback instruments that link sound to physiology, treating emotional manipulation as a technical layer alongside hardware and software in biofeedback systems. Using roleplay, ASMR, and hypnosis, she explores intimacy and resonance while reimagining human–machine relations across AI, VR, and robotics, with works presented at Ars Electronica, MUTEK, and the Toronto and Karachi Biennales.
Bodies Beyond Nature: Hacking Emotion in Performance with Wetware and Biofeedback
As technology advances, the boundary between observing and shaping emotion becomes increasingly subtle, moving empathy into a grey zone between sincerity and influence. Emotion is both personal—unique in each body—and shared, spreading through a room like a virus, making the body a fascinating but unreliable narrator. For nearly a century, biofeedback technologies have promised a transparent window into consciousness, yet humans have long explored emotion through mindfulness, meditation, movement, and music. Multidisciplinary composer Erin Gee extends this lineage into the digital age, using custom biofeedback circuits and wetware technologies to transform physiological signals—heartbeat, respiration, and sweat—into sonic material. By integrating techniques such as ASMR and hypnosis, she invites audiences to question their sensations, creating a space where technology, embodiment, and sound probe emotional experience. This approach offers Gee a way to study and experience how physiological and perceptual systems interact, creating lushly layered electro-vocal music that probes into the affective force of sound.
