#9: Jen Kutler: ”In Loving Memory of Being Touched”

Steve Flato sits down with artist and musician Jen Kutler to discuss her piece “In Loving Memory of Being Touched”. Jen Kutler is a multidisciplinary artist that often works with queerness, femininity, and intimacy. Her performances feature many of her instruments incorporated with immersive field recordings to explore common and discrepant experiences of familiar social tones in immersive sound and media environments.

Using discarded hospital equipment, Jen created this piece at the beginning of quarantine out of a yearning for one of the most basic human needs— touch. The listener hooks electrodes to their body (similar to a TENS pain relief device) and gentle shocks “touch” the listener in time to music played via WebMIDI on a website. The whole thing is housed in a clear cube filled with circuits and LED’s that connects to your computer via USB, and features a beautiful illustration of hands, reaching out to something, printed on one of the circuit boards. 

Steve and Jen discuss the process of creating and the context for "In Loving Memory of Being Touched" as well as an upcoming record (out Feb 12) that uses empathy as a device to generate sound. Previous projects have sonified the female orgasm, used vibrators as instruments, all in an attempt to re-contextualize and transform the common themes found in her work.