Jonathan Chaim Reus (US/NL) is a musician who explores embodiment, tradition, and progress in the human-technology relationship. With formal training in electronic music, mathematics, and science, he is known for building self-made hard and soft technologies that support live music performances, eccentric electronic instruments for theater and film, wearable sound art and live coding. His work as an artist often fluidly moves between the disciplinary boundaries of music and art, science, technology and research – treating first principles in each of these fields as conceptual territory for artistic interventions. His recent interests and musical work involve the entanglement of ancient and modern technologies of music making, dataset-making as creative play, and artistic interventions into the 21st century techno-cognitive landscape. 

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Jonathan’s work is deeply imbedded in collaborative practices, and would not be possible without the practices of reciprocal generosity that come from sharing the processes of re-inventing technologies. He is a co-founder of artist-community initiatives such as the instrument inventors initiative [iii]  and Netherlands Coding Live [nl_cl]. He is also active as an arts-based researcher and educator with a focus on bringing arts-based perspectives into scientific and technological research. He received a W. J. Fulbright Fellowship for his work in research and development of new electronic music instruments at the former Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music [STEIM] in Amsterdam, and was resident artist at the IEM in Graz for Algorithms that Matter [ALMAT], where he began an ongoing research interest into ground-up artistic approaches to AI voice technologies. He is recipient of the Leuphana University teaching prize for his teaching work bringing together media studies, cultural critique, and computer science into a cohesive curriculum rooted in arts-based practice.

Reus has received commissions as a composer and artist from Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Slagwerk Den Haag, and Asko-Schönberg Ensemble, including composing original music and building on-stage robotic tape machine instruments for Brave New World 2.0, a nationally-touring ensemble production. He was a Forecast Platform mentee, collaborating with the award winning composer Du Yun on an experimental ethnomusicological artwork under the theme “Future Traditions of Music”. In 2022 he won the Radiolab KONTINUUM commission from CTM Festival for the year-long generative AI radio project In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit, airing on German and Austrian national radio. His work Bla Blavatar vs Jaap Blonk, which was created as part of the EU Comission’s S+T+ARTS residency program, received Award of Distinction in Digital Musics and Sound Art in the 2025 Prix Ars Electronica. Together with Sissel Marie Tonn he is one part of the artist duo Sensory Cartographies, whose wearable sound installation The Intimate Earthquake Archive, also won honorable mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2020.

He is currently based in the artistic community of the Netherlands and The Hague. He is a research affiliate of the Intelligent Instruments Lab (University of Iceland), Experimental Music Technologies [EMUTE] and Sussex Digital Humanities Lab in the UK.

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