Marcel Zaes SAGESSER

Marcel Zaes (or Marcel Zaes Sagesser) is an artist and researcher investigating how humans are increasingly intertwined with their technologies. By putting a strong emphasis on sound and its underlying media and materiality, Marcel creates opportunities for listening to constructed or found environments through technology, so as to understand how sound, once technologized, shapes our human experience as much as it renders social, cultural, and political phenomena audible. Examples include drum machine use in popular music, participatory rhythm collections in browser-based interfaces, or interactive musical scores for electronic music performances. This work leads to a rich hybrid practice in academic scholarship and creative work, including interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches as well as technological development. After a PhD in Music + Multimedia Composition (Brown University ’21), Marcel relocated to Shenzhen and since then investigates, with his interdisciplinary focus, the sonic materiality of the Greater Bay Area, reflecting on how “high tech” and “low tech” aspects of one of the largest areas of human settlement play out in sound and sonic media – and again, how these sonic materialities render the humans’ relationship to local technologies audible and visible. Marcel’s work has appeared internationally in academic venues such as Computer Science (DIS, TEI, HCII, VINCI, CHCHI), media studies (SCMS), computer music (NIME, ICMC, ISMIR, SEAMUS), popular music studies (IASPM), at spatial audio, musicology, artistic research, and cultural studies conferences (CSA), and in journals such as the Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, or Norient Sampling Politics. His creative work has been exhibited or performed at venues such as the Center for New Music San Francisco, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, The Stone at The New School New York, the Biennial of Contemporary Arts Lisbon, at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, at Shanghai Cadillac Concert Hall, Montreux Jazz Festival China, Hong Kong Center for the Arts, or Wuhan Biennale. As an acknowledgment of his work, Marcel received a number of international grants, prizes and fellowships, among others the Fulbright Fellowship by the United States of America. 

Website: https://marcelzaes.com

Research Lab: https://soundstudiesgroup.net