Somaya Langley has a background in the broad scope of digital culture with a focus on sound/media arts, digital collections/archiving, festivals and events. Both her professional and artistic interests lie somewhere in the realm of ideas, information, technology, socio-politics, communities, networks and empowerment.
Her professional arts practice focuses on embodied and immersive experiences mediated by technology, to initiate socio-political dialogue. This has included, ID-i/o (a live solo audiovisual sensor-performance endeavour), the Suspect Backpack (a wearable mobile intervention), and Mobile Patters (a wearable audio experience). Collaborative installation and performance projects over the past decade include Collars with media artist Alexandra Gillespie, MetaSense with sound technologist Nick Mariette and HyperSense Complex with Dr. Alistair Riddell and Simon Burton. Somaya was also a member of the research project Thinking Through the Body, initiated by George Khut and Lizzie Muller along with Jonathan Duckworth, Lian Loke, Garth Paine, Maggie Slattery and Catherine Truman. She has a love of field recording and in addition to her own field recording around the world, she has participated in sound recording workshops with Chris Watson (UK) and Douglas Quin (USA). In 2012 she assisted with field recordings for the Centenary of Canberra’s artist in residence, Jyll Bradley’s (UK) project City of Trees.
Her work has been presented and performed in conferences and festivals throughout Australia and internationally including Cells Button (Indonesia), DOCAM Symposium (Canada), the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) (Lithuania), das kleine field recordings festival (Germany), SEAM Symposium, the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), Tuned City, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), Liquid Architecture, the NOW now festival, the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), UNAUSTRALIA – the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, Sound Lab Channel III, Electrofringe, the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC), the Australasian Sound Recording Association (ASRA) Conference, the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material (AICCM), the Totally Huge New Music Festival, the Melbourne Fringe Festival and Skylounge.
Somaya has worked in producing for broadcast and online and for cultural collecting institutions in the fields of data management, digital archiving, digital collecting, digital preservation and online delivery. These organisations include the Australian Music Centre, ABC Classic FM, Design & Art Australia Online, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia the National Library of Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, including national projects such as MusicAustralia. In 2010 to 2011 she undertook research to develop a scoping study report on Archives in the Digital Era for the Australia Council for the Arts.
She was Production Manager of the International Society of Contemporary Music 2010 World New Music Days festival and was a Co-Director of the 2008 and 2009 Electrofringe festivals. In 2009 she was Co-Curator of Transit Lounge, a partner project of Berlin’s transmediale festival. For a decade (1997 – 2007) she presented and produced the radio program, SubSequence, broadcast across the Community Radio Network in Australia.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
