Biography

Ximena Alarcón, born in Bogotá – Colombia, in 1972.

I am a new media artist who engages in listening to migratory spaces and connecting this to individual and collective memories. My practice involves ethnography, deep listening practice, and sonic improvisation, and my tools include networking technologies and multimedia interfaces. With all of these I bring to light the sonic spaces that lie in-between departures and destinations, searching for a holistic way of being in the world.

My research involves the use of technologies as creative tools to influence the social contexts of commuting and migration, focusing on listening and remembering processes and using voice and text.

I completed a PhD in Music, Technology and Innovation at De Montfort University in 2007. Following my PhD project “An Interactive Sonic Environment derived from commuters’ memories of the soundscape: a case study of the London Underground”, I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (2007-2009) to develop the practice-led research “Linking Urban Soundscapes via commuters’ memories”, which investigated the listening experiences of commuters from the Mexico and Paris metros in counterpart with the London Underground. The artistic outcome is the sonic virtual environment “Sounding Underground“.

During 2010 I worked as a Programme Leader for the Masters (MA/MSc) in Creative Technologies, at De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT).

I am currently studying the practice and philosophy of Deep Listening with the composer Pauline Oliveros, the writer IONE and the performer Heloise Gold. I am working as a Research Fellow at CRiSAP, developing the project “Networked Migrations – listening to and performing the in-between space”.

One of my objectives is to find a balance between artistic and socially based work within specific soundscapes and with people who are usually outside the artistic scene, doing so by creating narratives in new media.

---