Bio

Jesse Stiles (b. 1978, Boston, MA) is a new media artist, musician, and designer of electronic systems. Through the adaptive misuse of emerging digital technologies, Stiles creates works that are simultaneously entertaining, disorienting, immersive, and transcendental. Stiles’ performances and generative installation work engage with and deconstruct a number of populist formats including electronic dance music, narrative cinema, and the “light show” – pushing these mediums into realms both sublime and subliminal.

Stiles’ work has been exhibited and performed at nationally and internationally recognized institutions including Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), Lincoln Center (NYC, USA), Eyebeam (NYC, USA), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/Berlin/Madrid), and the American Land Museum (various sites, USA).  His first solo gallery show, "Automatic Speleology," was at The Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, NY in 2010.  Stiles has produced a number of site-specific performances in unconventional sites such as “Topics in Advanced Facemelting,” a light and sound performance in one of the United States’ few remaining gasholder buildings (Troy, NY), and “Deja Rendez Vous” a performance on a floating video stage adrift in the Buffalo Bayou (Houston, TX). In 2000, Stiles was awarded the Watson Fellowship, a one year grant, which enabled him to travel around the world creating electronic music, a project which culminated in the album, “Watson Songs.” His recent release “The Target Museum” is a record of experimental pop songs, employing dream logic and imaginary instruments.

Stiles has worked as a sound designer and composer on a wide variety of IMAX films, feature films, touring exhibitions, and experimental video works. He has led courses, lectures and workshops on sound design, digital audio composition, studio production, and field recording at universities and colleges including NYU, Carnegie Mellon University, The New School, Princeton, and the Massachusetts College of Art.  Stiles holds a BA in Cognitive Science from Vassar College and a MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In 2010 Stiles was hired as the Sound Engineer & Music Coordinator for the the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.  Working with the company during their precedent-setting "Legacy Tour," he produces and performs in concerts featuring the works of many leading figures of the 20th and 21st century (including John Cage, David Tudor, Brian Eno, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, and John Paul Jones).  He currently resides, for the most part, in hotel rooms all over the world and, whenever possible, in Baltimore, MD and, occasionally, in a handful of studios he maintains in New York City, upstate New York, and central New York.

Jesse Stiles' CV is available here.