Julia Edith Rigby is an experimental sound artist, composer, and sculptor who thinks about entanglements among humans and more-than-humans, phenomena and sound. Her projects explore collaboration, cohabitation and interdependence with soniferous animals and environments, imagining futurities which complexify our relationships to sensory worlds and sense of place, loss and renewal, kinship and care, climate grief and climate futurities.
Rigby works with performance, sound, video, and multi-channel moving image installation to create multimedia ecosystems that explore the edges of our perception. Her projects ask questions about radical noticing, regenerative worldmaking, listening / sounding as social practice, shifting seascapes, sensory perception of resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology. Her performances hybridize live free improvisational instrumentation, amplified edited sound and field recordings, time-based media and community-activated performance that reconfigure the viewer / listener as performer. She works with field recordings, multichannel video and audio, and projection mapping to open our minds to more-than-human timescales and to introduce new ways of thinking about ecology, environmental relationships, and animal and plant intelligence.
Rigby researches relationships among resonance and vibration, rupture and repair, degeneration and regeneration. What is the connection between the history of a site and its resonance, its acoustical signature? Between ecological, material and sonic decay? Can finding new ways to listen to and think about a site’s resonance catalyze new ways of thinking about more-than-human timescales or even accelerating geological timescales? What can we collectively learn about our rapidly changing world by finding new ways to experience listening?
Her projects range from interactive operas to harmonic and tonal experimentations on viola and pipe organ to immersive multisensorial installations. Collaborating with found objects and found sites—sea caves, trees and waste sites for example—Rigby composes vibrant sound works that explore the sonic signatures of ecological systems and environmental phenomena, render audible the inaudible, and bring us into relation with sounds previously un-hearable and unheard.
Rigby thinks about acoustics and architecture, animal vocalizations, string harmonics, interspecies collaboration, multitudinous means of knowing and worlding, resonant space, metamorphosis, deep time, dissonance, waste streams, ecotones, sustained sound, soniferous bodies, sea caves and fever dreams. Her performances pull questions about collectivity, resonance, interconnection and attention into relation with one another to ask: what happens to our understandings of kinship, care and worlding, and time when we expand our human-centered understandings of perception to consider the sensory worlds of more-than-humans? What does it mean to share physical and acoustical space with a vibrant spectrum of more-than-humans living on this planet? Where do we end, and where does the world begin? What do those liminal spaces sound like?
Julia Edith Rigby has premiered multimedia audiovisual performances and compositions at performed at Heidi Duckler Dance in Los Angeles (2024), LEAF Festival in Lafayette, Colorado (2024), LOW End in Omaha, Nebraska (2023), the Toulouse Theater in New Orleans (2023), SAPPYFEST in New Brunswick (2024) and the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida (2023). She is a recipient of artist grants from the LA County Department of Arts and Culture, Arts New Brunswick, the Center for Cultural Innovation and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. She was recently awarded an artist residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon. Rigby was the Sound Art + Experimental Music Fellow at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in fall 2023. She has been an artist in residence at GlougauAIR Artist Residency in Berlin, PLAYA Summer Lake, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Kala Art Institute, and others. Rigby has exhibited work in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin. Rigby received her MFA in Studio Art at the University of California, Davis (2020), where she was a recipient of the Mary Lou Osborn Award and the Fay Nelson Award. Rigby plays viola, pipe organ, and sound sculptures.
