Co-Lab Projects presents: A Lecture by Victoria Shen With an introduction by Hannah Spector, Assistant Professor of Practice of Time & Technology
Lecture: Thursday, April 16th, 3-4pm UT Art and Art History, Art 1.102, 2301 San Jacinto Blvd This event is FREE and open to the public Parking is available for a fee at the San Jacinto garage north of the Art Building Sponsored by the University of Texas College of Fine Arts Hosted by the University of Texas Art and Art History Department
Be sure to also join us for Victoria’s performance presented in partnership with Fusebox Festival: Saturday, April 18th, doors at 8pm, performance at 9pm Co-Lab Projects, 5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702 Get sliding scale tickets
In this lecture, Victoria Shen (A.K.A. Evicshen) will share her experience as a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker. Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her personal identity, her body, is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes–the body as both subject and instrument.
“My practice treats sound as a material force; something that pushes, scrapes, resists, and accumulates, rather than an abstract signal. Raised by a Cambodian refugee mother whose life was shaped by displacement and improvisation, I approach making through resourcefulness and embodied problem-solving. Scarcity, friction, and adaptation are not only biographical conditions but compositional principles.
Originally trained in visual art and art history, I moved toward electroacoustic music and expanded turntablism while teaching myself circuit design and electronics. I build my own instruments, often attaching them directly to my body or designing them as prosthetic extensions, so that performance becomes a negotiation between flesh, gesture, and machine. My work explores tensions between control and chaos, virtuosity and collapse, intimacy and amplification. By foregrounding physical labor and instability, I challenge conventions of live musical consumption and destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an instrument.
My recent and ongoing development focuses on deepening the integration of body and technology, particularly through analog systems. I am interested in corporeal circuitry: magnetic fields interacting with skin, embedded electronics, ferric materials, and wearable or tattooed audio media that collapse distinctions between organism and device. Moving forward, I aim to expand this research into more immersive, site-responsive works and collaborative formats, creating systems where the body becomes both archive and transmitter; simultaneously vulnerable, conductive, and generative.”
Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia/NZ, the UK, and Europe, as a member of the turntable trio with Mariam Rezaei and Maria Chavez, as a member of hip hop group 1 Above Minus Underground. Shen has also collaborated with Mix Master Mike of the Beastie Boys, Keiji Haino, the Kronos Quartet, Matmos, clipping, Acid Mothers Temple, and Mike Watt. Some notable venues in which she has performed include Boston City Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ISSUE Project Room NY, DOMMUNE Tokyo, Petreon Sculpture Park Cyprus, MUNCH Museum Oslo, Art Gallery of NSW Sydney, and Museo d'Arte Orientale Turin. Shen has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE, WORM Rotterdam NL, EMPAC Troy US, Yaddo Saratoga Springs US, Kurimanzutto New York US, The Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen DK, and AUDIUM San Francisco US, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha US, and Headlands Center for the Arts Sausalito US, and Audio Foundation Auckland NZ.
Shen has taught at Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics Stanford, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Harvard, and the School of Visual Arts NY. Shen is also a serving member of the Board of Directors for The Lab in San Francisco.
Special thank you to Hannah Spector, Jeff Williams, and Mike Smith for making this program possible.
