Meet the Artists - Jordan Juras
About: Jordan Juras is a Canadian immersive artist, music producer, audio researcher and consultant based in Berlin. He releases music under the aliases PVAS, Available on Computers, NUG (together with Florian T M Zeisig) and marsh (together with Dylan Kerr). He completed a Bachelors of Science in Physics at McGill University (2014), and a Masters of Music in Music Technology at New York University (2016) where he conducted research in personalised spatial audio and music information retrieval under Drs. Agnieszka Roginska and Juan Bello. With experience gained working as a Research Engineer in the music technology industry, he began to develop immersive experiences in 2019 with a practice that explores subconscious or invisible externalities and challenges the behavioral responses that shape our experience. He has created immersive works for the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival (Oslo, 2021), the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at ZhdK (Zurich, 2021), and the Screen City Biennale (Stavanger, 2019).
How do you describe your practice?
I am a Canadian immersive artist, music producer, and audio researcher, with a practice that explores subconscious or invisible externalities and challenges the behavioral responses that shape our experience.
What are your influences, what inspires you?
Spending time in nature, philosophy of science, experience, listening to cool music, friends!
Where are you based and what is your background in terms of education?
I am based in Berlin. I did a Master of Music in Music Technology from NYU, NYC US, and a Bachelor of Science in Physics, McGill University, Montreal CA.
What does engaging with nature mean to you as an artist?
Engaging with nature is a portal to engaging with our deepest selves. Synthetic demarcations between human and nature, and animate and inanimate matter obfuscates a lineage shared by all of Earth’s substances. Life is a force that courses through animated matter, in a cyclical arc dependant on the inanimate - a state in which a host is ultimately left, ready to nurture the next; repeat ad infinitum.
What does it mean to be selected for the summer school?
Participating in the summer school is an opportunity to develop and refine my current research interest, ‘Sound Gardening’: a conceptual frame to create immersive and interactive AR audio installations, which can re-centre urban dwellers in the natural environments within which our cities have grown.
As an initial focus, I am exploring the realm of “embodied musical instruments”, envisioned to animate and position trees and other Floral entities in a green space as collaborators within an audio-reactive music system. As a collaborator in musical experience, empathy can flourish and space opens for introspection in ways not possible outside of a musical dialog. Connection can be formed across spiritual and physical dimensions, bridging phenomenological and material distance through AR mediation.