Biography

Steve Barsotti is a sound artist and educator who lives in Seattle. He has ventured into various approaches to art making including photography, printmaking, performance, invented instruments, improvisation, object recording, location recording, phonography, electro-acoustic-pull-strange-sounds-from-everyday-objects, and there is sure to be more. The common thread has always been a close examination of easily bypassed details; image from angles that you would not normally see, sounds that can only be heard through contact mics and amplification, sonic qualities of materials that are used in everyday life.

He is a founding member of the Seattle Phonographers Union, a field recording wielding group of improvisers. The Union is described as "moving beyond habitual experience of sound and uncover what is foreign in the familiar and familiar about the foreign; to explore what we hear and relearn what we know" They have been performing together for five years.

Barsotti has been active as an organizer for many years. In Chicago he co-founded In the Eye of the Ear, an organization dedicated to the promotion of artists who use sound as a primary medium of expression. With co-founder Tod Sczwczyk he curated and produced several festivals under that name.

He was an original member of W.A.L.K., a collective of artists that did performance and installation work outside the traditional white wall gallery setting. Their performances were durational in nature, sometimes lasting for weeks. They performed in an abandoned department stores, a park field bath house and in a 13th century observatory in Vilnius, Lithuania.

He worked with Experimental Sound Studio for over six years, a not-for-profit arts organization for the promotion of innovative sound art in Chicago. There he worked as manager of their recording facilities, a freelance recording engineer, an instructor in technical and conceptual workshops and volunteer for various projects associated with the organization such as the Chicago Soundscape Project, the Sounds from Chicago Radio Program and BONES, a CD series of Chicago based sound artists.

Contact: steve at kazbar dot org