Stephan Moore is a composer, sound artist, and laptop audio improvisor. Diana Reed Slattery is a writer, visual artist, and laptop video improvisor. Their joint improvisational project is
called Xenolinguistics, (i.e. the study of non-human languages) , and has been shown at SIGGRAPH, the Immersive Visions Festival, and most recently at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland.
Stephan Moore is a composer, audio artist, and sound designer in New York City. He has graduated from from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Western Michigan University, and Interlochen Arts Academy. In 2006 and 2007, he co-curated the month-long Points in a Circle festival at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. His creative work centers around the collection and use of real-world sound, the creation and perception of sonic environments, and technological manifestations of improvisation and interactivity. Recent performances and installation artworks make use of a large multi-channel array of his Hemisphere speakers. He performs regularly with Scott Smallwood in the electronic duo Evidence, and with a variety of musicians, live-video artists, and dancers. He has created custom music software for a number of composers and artists, and has taught courses in sound art and electronic music at Maryland Institute College of Art, Peabody Conservatory, Massachusetts College of Art, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Simon’s Rock College of Bard. He is currently the Sound Engineer and Music Coordinator of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Diana Reed Slattery is a novelist and videographer based in Albany, NY. For the last 10 years, she has been developing a project centered on the exploration of the visual language, Glide, which appears in her sci-fi novel The Maze Game. This investigation has led to the development of software that animates the glyphs, and allows them to transform into each other, in two and then three dimensions. The three-dimensional Glide software, LiveGlide, allows writing with the Glide forms interactively, in performance. Glide, according to its myth of origin in the story-world, is a psychedelic language. States of extended perception were used in the conception, design, and implementation of LiveGlide, in practice and in performance, and in learning how to read the writing produced. Psychedelics provided the means to emerge from the cocoon of natural language into what could be understood as both a pre-linguistic state of direct apperception of the world around and inside us, and as a post-linguistic (post-natural language) realm of evolutionary forms of language, concomitant with a sense of consciousness extended into a novel, if transient, evolutionary state. Glide has been described, screened and/or performed live at art, technology, and consciousness conferences in Tokyo, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Bilbao, San Jose, Plymouth, Perth, Siggraph (LA) and most recently, at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel. Fulldome screening and performances have been given at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, the Schenectady Museum, The Plymouth Immersive Vision Center, and the Children’s Museum of Science and Technology in Troy. Flat-screen performances have been given at the Children’s Interactive Museum in Middletown, and the Center for Sustainability at Penn State. Slattery has performed at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn with long-time collaborator Stephan Moore. Slattery is pursuing Ph.D. studies at the University of Plymouth, UK on linguistic phenomena in the psychedelic sphere. Xenolinguistics-the study of alien languages-is the term she is currently using to describe the whole of these activities, which are described in more detail at http://mazerunner.wordpress.com.