Liz Phillips

Liz Phillips (born 1951) is an American artist specializing in sound art and interactive art.

A pioneer in the development of interactive sound sculpture, Phillips' installations explore the possibilities of electronic sound in relation to living forms.

Her work has been exhibited at a wide range of major museums, alternative spaces, festivals, and other venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Spoleto Festival USA, the Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica, Jacob's Pillow, The Kitchen, and Creative Time.

Phillips' collaborations include pieces with Nam June Paik and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and her work has been presented by the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM, and the World Financial Center.

She is often associated with, and exhibited alongside other early American sound artists Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and Max Neuhaus.

Liz Phillips was born in New Jersey in 1951.

Phillips has said that childhood experiences in nature, particularly along the Hudson River near where she grew up, were formative of her interest in sound, water, and space.

At one point, she was “torn between making art and studying nature.” Early exposure to art in the museums of New York convinced her to pursue the former, although her intense interest in the latter has remained a consistent thread in Phillips’ work throughout her career.

She began attending Bennington College in 1969, where she studied with Cora Cohen, Pat Adams, Philips Wofford, instrument-maker Gunnar Schoenbeck, Joel Chadabe, and Thomas Standish.

As early as 1969, Phillips was already developing an approach that she has continued to expand over decades of work and dozens of major pieces.

“To build sound structures I use electromagnetic fields where people actually become electronic components in the circuit,” she wrote at the time in the pages of Radical Software, an early video art journal that was a critical platform for the discussion of emergent media and cybernetic art in the early 1970s.

“Therefore, the collective presence and movement of the people in the field feeds back audio responses….

The tones are in response to the total actions and relationships of the participants.

The people themselves, are also potential sound structures realized only through contact with other people.

With the new feedback, audio and kinestethic patterns evolve." Phillips' inclusion in the pages of Radical Software signals her affinity with and closeness to the early video art scene.

In 1970, Phillips created a work called Sound Structures, which was an installation that made use of a radio frequency capacitance field generated from a piece of metal placed under a rug.

Resulting sounds were picked up on AM radios set around the room, initiated and changed by the entrance and movements of participants through the field, their bodies acting as conductors, grounding the field and generating sound.

As the participants moved toward the center of the field, the frequency of the sound heard coming from the radios went higher and resulted in heterodynes.

Crucial to the artist's design of this complex environment were the important sonic possibilities unlocked by spontaneous group formation and play among the participants.

Her idea, she wrote in 1971, was “to create a new kind of environmental space where the structure of the space was defined by human interaction.” At the time, Phillips was known for sound environments that were structured around the communal act of eating.

Phillips would “wire” the dinner table, and process the resulting signals using a combination of tuned oscillators, resulting in an electronic soundscape that responded to the sound patterns generated by the participants’ dinner.

In 1971, Phillips presented Electronic Banquet at the Eighth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, held at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory on November 19.

The festival also featured work by Woody and Steina Vasulka, Yoko Ono, the Videofreex, Douglas Davis and the public debuts of early video synthesizers developed by Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik, as well as one designed by video artist Eric Siegel.

Phillips later went on to collaborate with Nam June Paik and dancer Robert Kovich from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on a commissioned piece.

In 1972, Phillips participated in the Ninth Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York, held aboard the Alexander Hamilton, a riverboat at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan.

She received an interdisciplinary B.A in the fields of music and art in 1973.

In 1974, in collaboration with artist Yoshi Wada, Phillips created a responsive sound installation using RF fields entitled Sum Time at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.

Finely tuned speakers created standing waves between themselves that were only activated when people moved through the space.

The complex feedback system set up for this piece also involved the use of storage and delay.

According to sound artist Charlie Morrow, writing in the pages of the SoHo Weekly News in 1974, “the quality of her selection of storage times is fascinating, and reflects an intuitive grasp of processes as basic as the long waves of energy within the earth’s crust.”

In 1977, Phillips produced City Flow in the pedestrian mall at the City University Graduate Center in New York.

The piece incorporated the sounds of passersby as well as the traffic on nearby Forty-second Street.

The piece attracted attention and was featured in The New Yorker’s regular “Talk of the Town” column.

At the New Music America festival, held in Minneapolis in 1980, Phillips created Windspun, the first of several ambitious wind-activated sound pieces.

Windspun made use of an array of multiple anemometers, each one causing sounds to strengthen and fade.

Their multiple locations and complex electronics interacted with the movements of participants in the installation space, resulting in tones that ranged from dense drones to sounds like breathing, depending on the direction and speed of the wind.

Slow winds resulted in single tone sounds; stronger winds generated large envelopes of sounds, shaping, combining and fading dense clusters of notes in a process that the artist conceived of as akin to the formation and movement of sand dunes.

The second installation of Windspun, in collaboration with Creative Time in New York, was at an alternative energy site operated by the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation on the East River in 1981.

This installation made use of a wind turbine on the site.

Later wind-activated pieces include Zephyr (1984) and Whitney Windspun, a sound piece included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial.