Brian House


Brian House is an American contemporary new media artist. His work deals primarily with the intersection of digital technology and the material world. It frequently incorporates sound and site-specific performance.
House's early projects were some of the first examples of the artistic use of location-based media on mobile phones, using text messaging. He has also contributed to sonification as an art form, and to the critique of big data. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ars Electronica, and Transmediale.
House's recent projects have to do with artificial intelligence and the environment.

Biography

Brian House was born in Denver, Colorado. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2002. While at Columbia, House studied music composition with Jonathan Kramer and Brad Garton and studied philosophy with Manuel DeLanda. House received a Master of Fine Arts from Chalmers University of Technology in 2006, and was active in the underground electronic music scene in Gothenburg, Sweden. He formed the Knifeandfork media art collective in 2004 with classmate Sue Huang, and was a member of Glowlab.
Knifeandfork received a 2007 Rhizome commission and were artists-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. House has also been a resident at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and MassMoca.
House was a resident at the Research and Development lab at The New York Times, where he spearheaded research into the implications of personal data. He created the OpenPaths platform for ethical data capture. His work at the Times was featured in TIME magazine.
House is a PhD candidate at Brown University and his advisor is Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. He teaches digital media at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is represented by Gallery Nosco in London.

Selected works

Animas (2016)

A reaction to the 2015 Gold King Mine waste water spill, where three million gallons of contaminated wastewater was released to the Animas River. The artist made an installation which transforms real-time data from water quality sensors into vibrations that activate metal panels and create an immersive sound environment.

Conversnitch (2013)

Brian House and Kyle McDonald converted light bulbs in public spaces into microphones that automatically tweeted overheard conversations.

Quotidian Record (2012)

Quotidian Record is a vinyl record of one year of the artist's location data translated into music. One rotation of the record is one day. It comments on the physicality of data and the inherent rhythms of everyday life.

Joyride (2011)

In 2011, House used OpenPaths and Google Street View to track the location of a stolen iPhone and create a reenactment of the thief's journey.

Trying the Hand of God (2009)

In 2009, House and collaborator Sue Huang were social practice artists-in-residence at MOCA in Los Angeles where they produced several projects. In Trying the Hand of God, they converted the sculpture plaza into a stadium with astroturf, goalposts, and bleachers, and filmed 64 versions of Diego Maradona's famous "Hand of God" goal from the 1986 World Cup. Members of the audience played the role of Maradona.

Yellow Arrow (2004)

Yellow Arrow was a street art project using stickers and text-messaging that took place simultaneously in 35 countries. It is an important early example of locative media and mobile phone art and draws concepts from psychogeography.
Yellow Arrow was included in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MoMA curated by Paola Antonelli.