José Alejandro Rivera (aka proxemia) is an artist, composer, land worker, organizer, and designer. They often work across sound+space, maps, plants, and audiovisual media.
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Interested in the ecologies of listening and place, their practice is often expressed through electroacoustic music and experimental soundworks. These pieces are foundational for electromagmetic explorations across multichannel installation and performance, transmission art, sound design for radio and film, location recording, geo-notational mapping and visual and spatial design projects. José moves from an awareness that considers sound a portal into presence and as an invitation to listen beyond it; to the wisdom of the more-than-human, to places and times, and to our bodyminds via ancestral resonances, dreams, meditation, plant medicine and land practice (herbalism, regenerative agriculture) and movement practices like Qigong and yoga.
Much of their ongoing research includes their diasporic identity as it relates to the political and cultural history of Borikén (Puerto Rico). They are currently working on a transmedia project regarding neurodivergence, UFO lore, radio, ethnobotany, agriculture as resistance, decoloniality, and the shifting environmental crises on the island. Part of this project, Co-regulating the spectrum; Meanwhile the wave ︎︎︎, was explored as a Radio Art Fellow at Wave Farm in Fall of 2022, and as part of a Creation Grant funded by the Vermont Art Council (2022). In collaboration with Amanda Dawn Christie’s, Ghosts in the Airglow project (2019-2023)︎︎︎, a 7-minute excerpt of Co-regulating the spectrum was transmitted via the HAARP Ionospheric Research Instrument towards Arecibio, Puerto Rico.
Playfully probing related sci-fi themes and interspecies exchange, another experimental radio-based audiowork, Blue Ecology for Future Memory ︎︎︎ was commissioned by Radio Amnion and later presented as part of Radiophrenia Festival in 2023, and the BECOMING FUTURES Festival in 2024.
Recent projects and collaborations have been presented at Tribeca Film Festival, 24hr Drone at Basilica Hudson, PBS.org, Center for Performance Research (CPR), Invisible Dog Art Center, Philadelphia Fringe + Cannonball Festival, Radiophrenia 2023, Radio Amnion, Arts Birthday, Wave Farm, the Library of Congress, Rutgers University, Bennington College, the Blackstar Film Festival, National Arts Centre (NAC) Green Rooms, Studios @ MASS MoCA, Venice Architecture Biannual, BIM (Bienal de Imagen en Movimiento), the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (MA), Goethe-Institut Boston, ICA Boston (Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957), MIT’s MediaLab, Green Building and List Visual Art Center, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab & The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, The Center for Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, The Aviary Gallery (MA), Washington Street Arts Center (MA), and Le Laboratoire (MA).
José’s sound work has been featured on Radiophrenia, WGXC 90.7fm, radia.fm, disquiet.com, textsound.org, and frameworkradio.net, among others. As proxemia, they’ve opened for the likes of Alessandro Cortini, Jan St. Werner, evichshen, Jake Meginksy, among others. They have received honors and gracious support from organizations like Wave Farm, Vermont Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, MIT and the School of Architecture + Planning, Cambridge Arts Council, Harvard University, The Createwell Fund, Assets for Artists at MASS MoCA, Kent State University’s College of Architecture + Environmental Design and NASA.
José is living and working in Mohican Territory (in Upstate NY). José served as a lecturer on sound and media at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Fall, 2019).
From 2015-2020, they worked closely with Non-Event ︎︎︎, a Boston-based experimental music series, as a live sound engineer and graphic designer. Along with numerous collaborations, his fluid body of work also includes the design and construction of an open-air performance space for a youth dance and drumming group in rural Ghana.
They studied art and sound in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology Program (MSc 2017), and received a BS in Architecture & Environmental Design from Kent State University (2011).
José, born in 1988, continues.
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Read less ︎︎︎
Interested in the ecologies of listening and place, their practice is often expressed through electroacoustic music and experimental soundworks. These pieces are foundational for electromagmetic explorations across multichannel installation and performance, transmission art, sound design for radio and film, location recording, geo-notational mapping and visual and spatial design projects. José moves from an awareness that considers sound a portal into presence and as an invitation to listen beyond it; to the wisdom of the more-than-human, to places and times, and to our bodyminds via ancestral resonances, dreams, meditation, plant medicine and land practice (herbalism, regenerative agriculture) and movement practices like Qigong and yoga.
Much of their ongoing research includes their diasporic identity as it relates to the political and cultural history of Borikén (Puerto Rico). They are currently working on a transmedia project regarding neurodivergence, UFO lore, radio, ethnobotany, agriculture as resistance, decoloniality, and the shifting environmental crises on the island. Part of this project, Co-regulating the spectrum; Meanwhile the wave ︎︎︎, was explored as a Radio Art Fellow at Wave Farm in Fall of 2022, and as part of a Creation Grant funded by the Vermont Art Council (2022). In collaboration with Amanda Dawn Christie’s, Ghosts in the Airglow project (2019-2023)︎︎︎, a 7-minute excerpt of Co-regulating the spectrum was transmitted via the HAARP Ionospheric Research Instrument towards Arecibio, Puerto Rico.
Playfully probing related sci-fi themes and interspecies exchange, another experimental radio-based audiowork, Blue Ecology for Future Memory ︎︎︎ was commissioned by Radio Amnion and later presented as part of Radiophrenia Festival in 2023, and the BECOMING FUTURES Festival in 2024.
Recent projects and collaborations have been presented at Tribeca Film Festival, 24hr Drone at Basilica Hudson, PBS.org, Center for Performance Research (CPR), Invisible Dog Art Center, Philadelphia Fringe + Cannonball Festival, Radiophrenia 2023, Radio Amnion, Arts Birthday, Wave Farm, the Library of Congress, Rutgers University, Bennington College, the Blackstar Film Festival, National Arts Centre (NAC) Green Rooms, Studios @ MASS MoCA, Venice Architecture Biannual, BIM (Bienal de Imagen en Movimiento), the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (MA), Goethe-Institut Boston, ICA Boston (Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957), MIT’s MediaLab, Green Building and List Visual Art Center, Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab & The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, The Center for Visual and Performing Arts at UMass Dartmouth, The Aviary Gallery (MA), Washington Street Arts Center (MA), and Le Laboratoire (MA).
José’s sound work has been featured on Radiophrenia, WGXC 90.7fm, radia.fm, disquiet.com, textsound.org, and frameworkradio.net, among others. As proxemia, they’ve opened for the likes of Alessandro Cortini, Jan St. Werner, evichshen, Jake Meginksy, among others. They have received honors and gracious support from organizations like Wave Farm, Vermont Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, MIT and the School of Architecture + Planning, Cambridge Arts Council, Harvard University, The Createwell Fund, Assets for Artists at MASS MoCA, Kent State University’s College of Architecture + Environmental Design and NASA.
José is living and working in Mohican Territory (in Upstate NY). José served as a lecturer on sound and media at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Fall, 2019).
From 2015-2020, they worked closely with Non-Event ︎︎︎, a Boston-based experimental music series, as a live sound engineer and graphic designer. Along with numerous collaborations, his fluid body of work also includes the design and construction of an open-air performance space for a youth dance and drumming group in rural Ghana.
They studied art and sound in MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology Program (MSc 2017), and received a BS in Architecture & Environmental Design from Kent State University (2011).
José, born in 1988, continues.
︎︎︎ Back