Thessia Machado

Thessia Machado is a visual/sound artist, instrument builder and performer whose work investigates the physicality of sound and its effect on our perception of space. In sculptures and interactive installations that have a real-time, live component, the expressive potential is still active and changeable.

As a extension of this practice, and under the moniker link, she also performs electronic and electro-acoustic experimental music with hand-made and modified instruments.

Thessia’s installations and video pieces have been exhibited in New York, London, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin and Athens. She has been awarded residencies at Homesession, Barcelona, the NARS Foundation, NY, I-Park, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Vermont Studio Center and is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Experimental Television Center and The Bronx Museum.

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I’ve always been interested in the mechanical aspects of things: how things work and are affected by other things – interactivity of a tangible sort.
Working with sound allows me to think of the air in which we all swim as yet another malleable and responsive, physical material. It gets pushed around by sound waves and it, in turn, pushes in on our bodies and the spaces we are in, both defining and permeating these boundaries. As it bounces and is deflected by the different materials and objects, sound changes and acquires a new character that is particular to the place and time of the event – both time- and site-specific.
A non-hierarchical approach to sound (isn’t it all noise?) and its organizational principles (this doesn’t sound like music!) allows for the uncovering and exposing of latent patterns and systems that hide in the unremarkable. A way to welcome the incidental rhythms and juxtapositions from the myriad devices and noises we are all surrounded by. The aim is to play with and explore simple and ingenious ways to extract the most poetic content with the least imposition onto the materials.
The sound of physics.
Mechanical and electronic.
Rubber bands and sine waves.

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