Garnet Willis is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, composer and
instrument builder. He combines his disparate skills as, wood and metal-worker,
engineer and electronics geek to produce multivariate artworks that tend to revolve
around sound. For several years he was immersed in the psychoacoustics and hardware
implementations of audio spatialization, working as director of R&D at Sound Traffic
Control (now Recombinant Media Labs/CineChamber) in San Francisco. He has garnered
prestigious international awards for his compositions and recordings, including the
Bourges Prize, and has had his work exhibited and performed in the USA, UK, France,
Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Colombia. He has written/built many
commissioned works including his “flux” series of self-playing electromagnetic sound
sculptures and, more recently, has been developing inflatable pipe-organs in a
continuing collaboration with Canadian artist, Max Streicher. Garnet’s current interests
have lead him from his recent SSHRC funded MFA at OCAD University to Doctoral
studies here at Concordia, where his research investigates the crossroads between
temporality, sensation, cognition, intersubjectivity and embodiment.