{"id":222,"date":"2010-10-20T15:56:26","date_gmt":"2010-10-20T22:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/.html"},"modified":"2026-03-31T20:42:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T03:42:40","slug":"bio","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/about\/bio\/","title":{"rendered":"Bio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist and author working at the intersection of visual art, sound and software design, creating flexible frameworks that are activated in live performance, via network interaction, or in installation settings.\u00a0 Since 2010 he has primarily developed and performed with his software Spectral<\/a>, an interactive listening instrument that generates real-time visual landscapes in response to sound.\u00a0 Building on his work as a composer, sound designer and lifelong technologist, Gilbert\u2019s creative output probes the phenomenological nature of listening itself through a practice centering on improvisation and collaborative dialogue.\u00a0 Gilbert co-founded Dark Matter Media LLC in 2007, through which he consults on a variety of projects in the art and entertainment industries. From 2011-2017 he was the founding Chair of the Media Technology department at Woodbury University<\/a>, and has taught interactive software design at both CalArts<\/a> and UC San Diego<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gilbert\u2019s collaborative and solo work has been shown widely in the US and abroad; venues include Lincoln Center<\/a> (New York), Pierre Boulez Saal<\/a> (Berlin),\u00a0Ars Electronica<\/a> (Austria), Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a> (Los Angeles), BAM Next Wave Festival<\/a> (New York), Hammer Museum<\/a> (Los Angeles), Pioneer Works<\/a> (New York), F\u00e4rgfabriken<\/a> (Stockholm), Laboral Centro de Arte<\/a> (Gij\u00f3n), RedCat<\/a> (Los Angeles), Operadagen Festival<\/a> (Rotterdam), Disney Hall<\/a> (Los Angeles),\u00a0Millenium Park <\/a>(Chicago), Theatre at the Ace Hotel<\/a> (Los Angeles), Mostra SESC de Artes<\/a> (S\u00e3o Paulo), Cemal Resit Rey Concert Hall<\/a> (Istanbul), Festival International de Musique Actuelle<\/a> (Quebec), Molde Jazz Festival<\/a> (Norway), Onassis Cultural Centre<\/a> (Athens),\u00a0Angel City Jazz Festival<\/a> (Los Angeles), Mizmorim Festival<\/a> (Basel), State of the Art Festival<\/a> (Iceland),\u00a0 Roulette<\/a> (New York), Sons d’Hiver<\/a> (Paris), Saalfelden International Jazz Festival<\/a> (Austria), Suoni per il Popolo Festival<\/a> (Montreal), Caf\u00e9 OTO<\/a> (London), Voll-Damm Festival Internacional de Jazz<\/a> (Barcelona), Joshua Treenial<\/a> (California), Jazztopad Festival<\/a> (Poland),\u00a0Guelph Jazz Festival<\/a> (Ontario), Heineken Jazzaldia Festival<\/a> (San Sebasti\u00e1n), Axs Festival<\/a> (Pasadena), Miami Light Project<\/a> (Miami), Engine27<\/a> (New York), New Museum<\/a> (New York), USC Pacific Asia Museum<\/a> (Pasadena), Gulbenkian Foundation<\/a> (Lisbon), Automata<\/a> (Los Angeles), The Blue Whale<\/a> (Los Angeles), Firehouse 12<\/a> (New Haven),\u00a0New School<\/a> (New York), net.congestion<\/a> (Amsterdam), Whitney Museum<\/a> (New York), Grand Performances<\/a> (Los Angeles), The Stone<\/a> (New York),\u00a0Prototype Festival<\/a> (New York), CEAIT Festival (Los Angeles), Kunstradio\u2019s Recycling the Future<\/a> (Austria), and PORT<\/a> (MIT, Boston).<\/p>\n

His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts<\/a>, Eyebeam Atelier<\/a>, the National Performance Network<\/a>, turbulence.org<\/a>, the Studio for Creative Inquiry<\/a> (Carnegie Mellon), the Jerome Foundation<\/a>, Creative Capital<\/a>, the Greenwall Foundation<\/a>, the Markle Foundation<\/a>, the Beall Center for Art & Technology<\/a> (UC Irvine), the Banff Centre for the Arts<\/a>, the Montalvo Arts Center<\/a>, the Watson Foundation<\/a>, ASK Theater Projects, and the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology (CEAIT).<\/p>\n

His book The Secret Life of Data<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>coauthored with Aram Sinnreich, was published in 2024 by MIT Press.\u00a0 In 2025 it won the Nancy Baym Annual Book Award.\u00a0 Gilbert’s writings have appeared in Broadcast<\/a>, Time Magazine<\/a>, Rolling Stone<\/a>, and the International Journal of Communication<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gilbert has collaborated with a wide range of artists and researchers across many disciplines, including: Wadada Leo Smith, Anthony Braxton, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Carole Kim, Ahmed Best, Pablo Molina, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Kathleen Tagg, David Krakauer, Oguri, Roxanne Steinberg, Erica Bernhard, Maija Garcia,\u00a0 Jennifer Johns, Motoko Honda, Azam Ali, Loga Ramin Torkian, Tara Pandeya, Timur Bekbosunov, Matthew Setzer, Daniel Corral, Victor Wilde, Moses Hacmon,\u00a0 Mark Trayle, Leroy Jenkins, Pauline Oliveros, Helen Thorington, Marek Walczak, Scott Rosenberg, Aram Sinnreich, Arul Chib, Marie Sester, Amy Alexander, Grisha Coleman, Michael Bryant, Georgia Archer, Maureen Selwood, JR Hughto, Anne LeBaron, Nels Cline, GE Stinson, Nick Didkovsky, Dafna Naphtali, Tim Boykett, Atau Tanaka, Maile Colbert, Han Earl Park and many others.\u00a0 He studied instrumental and electronic composition with Mark Trayle, Wadada Leo Smith, Mort Subotnick, David Rosenboom, Sara Roberts, Tom Erbe, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Ron Kuivila.<\/p>\n

Gilbert’s collaborative work with video artist Carole Kim was featured in Aspect Magazine Vol. 2: Artists of the West Coast<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 His online work was featured in Peter Traub’s article Sounding the Net: Recent Sonic Works for the Internet and Computer Networks<\/em><\/a> in Contemporary Music Review, December 2005. In December 2010 he was voted a Finalist<\/a> for the World Technology Award in the Arts and inducted as a new Fellow by the World Technology Network<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1994 Gilbert received a Watson Fellowship and spent a year studying music in Ghana, West Africa.\u00a0 His independent research, focused primarily on oral transmission of culture, has been a primary influence on his later work in electronic media.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Gilbert is an interdisciplinary artist and author working at the intersection of visual art, sound and software design, creating flexible frameworks that are activated in live performance, via network interaction, or in installation settings.\u00a0 Since 2010 he has primarily developed and performed with his software Spectral, an interactive listening instrument that generates real-time visual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":218,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-222","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":55,"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2161,"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/222\/revisions\/2161"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jessegilbert.net\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}