Affiliate Students
Ph.D
Garrett Laroy Johson
Garrett Laroy Johnson draws on his practical and theoretical experiences in music in the Media Arts and Sciences (PhD) and Critical Theory (grad certificate) programs at Arizona State University, where he pursues interests including responsive environments, new materialisms, alternative economies, and process philosophy through a research-creation practice in computational media. His PhD is supervised by Sha Xin Wei (chair), Adam Nocek, and Todd Ingalls. He has shown work and given talks in the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe, at such venues as the National Academy of the Sciences and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In recent years he has presented conference papers at the Society for Literature Science and the Arts (SLSA and the SLSAeu), Movement and Computing (MOCO), Arts in Society, and HCI International. Major awards include a Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst (DAAD) stipendium, a ASU Graduate College Fellowship, DASH cryptocurrency scholarship, the Joan Frazer Memorial Scholarship for Judaism in the Arts, an Arthur Sackler Graduate Student Fellowship, and a commission from Scottsdale Public Art. Johnson is active in a number of research and graduate organizations at ASU. He is a graduate student affiliate of the Synthesis Center since 2014 and an experimental fellow at the Center for Philosophical Technologies for 2018. In 2016 he co-founded Post-Human Network (PHuN), a grad-led critical theory interest group which hosts annual conferences at ASU. He has served on the board of the Arts, Media + Engineering Student Association (AMESA) since 2015, where he has organized graduate student symposiums and other professional events.
Garrett creates immersive responsive media environments + installations, laptop orchestra pieces, sound-based fixed media, interactive dance works, and various performances for live electronics. In recent projects, he improvised regularly on laptop with the dark/ambient group Gulch, and with cello and laptop in the group gbjjck. He’s worked with artists and performers from many different disciplines, including among others Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Chris Ziegler, Sha Xin Wei, Julian Stein, and Britta Joy Peterson. His music has been invited to SEAMUS, the Oh My Ears! Music Marathon, Interference Series and the ACDA at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and his installations have been featured at the 2013 ASU Microtonal Music Festival, ARTEL PHX, and commissioned by Scottsdale Public Art for InFlux Cycle 6.
In 2015, he completed his MA in Musicology at Arizona State University, where he wrote a masters thesis investigating the role of the body in David Rosenboom’s exploratory use of electroencephalography in musical performance. Garrett has presented some of his musicological investigations into the the bioregional music of experimental American composer David Dunn and the psycho-dramaturgy of Wolfgang Rihm’s opera Dionysos (2010) at various conferences in the US and Canada. In May of 2015, he co-founded, co-directed, and co-curated SSOO (something said only once), a four-day arts mini-fest thematizing improvisation, algorithmic creation, indeterminacy, and site-specificity.
Garrett led LORKAS (The Laptop Orchestra of Arizona State) from Fall 2013 to Spring 2015 as the group’s director. During his tenure, LORKAS performed at the A2RU national conference, the 2014 Southwest Electronic Music Festival, the 2015 Southwest Maker Festival, the 2015 Oh My Ears new music marathon, Glendale Community College’s Experimental Music Festival 2015, and hosted an array of guests including Cycling 74 developer Tim Place (Networked Musics), experimental musician John Wiese, and Mark Hosler of Negativland.
He holds a Bachelor of Music in Music History with a minor in German from Ohio University. The 2011 Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst (DAAD) undergraduate scholarship award supported study and research at the University of Leipzig, where he performed and toured with the Leipziger Universitaets Orchester, took courses at the Institut der Musikwissenschaft, was awarded the highest certification in the German language (DSH-3), and wrote a bachelor’s thesis about Swiss composer-pianist Nik Bärtsch and his “minimal groove music”.
research areas: responsive media environments, alternative economies, organization theory + management sciences, rhythm studies, games and play, collaborative technologies, improvisation, critical engineering, critical media studies, the posthumanities.
major outputs:
Artistic and academic presentations at Kennedy Center DC, National Academy of the Sciences, ACM TEI, SEAMUS, Society for Literature Science and the Arts
Publications in ACM MOCO, Journal of Somaesthetics, and forthcoming book chapter w. U. Edinburgh.