Jonathan Chaim Reus (b. US) is a transmedia artist and musician known for his use of expanded digital instrumentation in live, theatrical and virtual (online) contexts. Thematically, his work often explores nuances and contradictions within single-story narratives around technology and culture. He has done extensive artistic research relating to musical instrument heritages and how concepts of tradition and folk art become transformed through technological change. His most current work is exploring relationships between human voice and its artificial reproduction.
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He is a co-founder of the instrument inventors initiative [iii] in the Hague, and of Netherlands Coding Live [nl_cl], and a recipient of the 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. In 2018, Reus was resident artist at the IEM in Graz for Algorithms that Matter [ALMAT], where he began to investigate the use of artificial voice in composition and performance contexts. This research continued into his work Wordless, a generative dialogue between two AI systems trained on a data set of voice recordings from Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman, who read fragments of reviews of their oeuvres scraped from the internet and recombined into an imagined conversation. In 2022 he won the CTM Radiolab commission for the year-long generative radio project »In Search of Good Ancestors / Ahnen in Arbeit«, airing on Germany’s national broadcasting service, Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
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. Together with Sissel Marie Tonn he is one part of the artist duo Sensory Cartographies, whose wearable sound installation The Intimate Earthquake Archive, won honorable mention at Ars Electronica festival in 2020.
He is currently based in The Hague, and is an affiliate of the Intelligent Instruments Lab (Reykjavik) and the Sussex Humanities Lab (Brighton).