Liz Phillips

Liz Phillips is a New York-based artist who specializes in sound art and interactive art. A pioneer in the development of interactive sound sculpture, Phillips' installations explore the possibilities of electronic sound in relation to living forms. She attended Bennington College and received an interdisciplinary B.A. in the fields of music and art in 1973.

Her childhood experiences in nature, particularly along the Hudson River near where she grew up, have been accredited to her interest in sound, water, and space. By 1969, Phillips was already developing an approach to “create a new kind of environmental space where the structure of the space was defined by human interaction.” By this time she was known for sound environments that were structured around the communal act of eating. Phillips would “wire” dinner tables and process the resulting signals, resulting in an electronic soundscape that responded to the sound patterns generated by the participants’ dinner. Of this process, Phillips once explained that “to build sound structures I use electromagnetic fields, where people actually become electronic components in the circuit. Therefore, the collective presence and movement of the people in the field feeds back audio responses. The tones are in response to the total actions and relationships of the participants. The people themselves, are also potential sound structures realized only through contact with other people. With the new feedback, audio and kinesthetic patterns evolve.” Phillips continued similar audio recording and sound art throughout the 1970’s as her work swept across the state of New York and, eventually, alongside the East Coast.

In 1981 she co-founded Parabola Arts Foundation, a not-for-profit organization created by five media artists from varied disciplines (music, sculpture, film, video). Some months later, she had an installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, entitled Sun Spots. According to a review by composer David Ahlstrom, the capacitance fields generated by Phillips’ work allowed audience members to modulate the sound field by moving around the space, activating “tinkly sounds like Chinese wind chimes, percussive little points of sound, cascades of sound that spill like water, and bundles of pointed sound like a million tiny Christmas tree lights flickering on and off.” A second iteration of Sun Spots was installed at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase in 1982.

Phillips received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and numerous Individual and collaborative commissions from New York State Council on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts as a composer, video artist, audio artist, and multi-media artist in the years following.

In 1999 Phillips exhibited Echo Evolution at The Kitchen in New York. As in her other work, audience participation is critical to the success of the piece, which used multiple electronic sensors to track participants’ movements in the space, placing them into an interactive relationship with an audio soundtrack, as well as neon visual elements. Echo Evolution was shown again, in 2002, at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York

In 2010, Phillips “re-presented” Beyond/In, a piece first installed in 1974 along the theater walkway at Artpark in Lewiston, New York. The original installation relied on prerecorded sounds of wind and water from the Niagara Gorge. This time Phillips used updated technology to create an interactive sonic environment, in which participants’ movements through the installation trigger modulations in sounds from the Niagara River at various points.

Phillips has exhibited interactive multimedia installations at art museums, alternative spaces, festivals, and public spaces. These include: The Academy of Natural Sciences, The Milwaukee Art Museum, Queens Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Spoleto Festival USA, the Walker Art Museum, Ars Electronica, Jacob’s Pillow, The Kitchen, Rene Block gallery and Frederieke Taylor gallery.

Phillips' collaborations include pieces with Nam June Paik and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and her work has been presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM, and the World Financial Center. She is often associated with and exhibited alongside other early American sound artists Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and Max Neuhaus.

She teaches workshops and lectures on Sound and Interactive Media (sculpture department) at Purchase College and at Columbia University in the MFA Sound Program. She has also curated several exhibitions of emerging artists and women making installations with sound.

You can find more information on Phillips and her work by visiting her website.