“Sisters With Transistors” is a groundbreaking new documentary about trailblazing women in electronic music. Delegates at the Australian Computer Music Conference will have exclusive access to a streaming link to the film as part of their ticket to the conference, taking place on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th August.
AIM students’ ACMC tickets are free. General Admission tickets which provide access to the film and two days of workshops, performances and more are $30.
About Sisters with Transistors
“Sisters with Transistors” is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. View the trailer above. The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.
ACMC Panel On Diversity: Friday 27 August @ 4:30pm
Emerging technologies have created new levels of accessibility in electronic music. Join electronic musicians Cassy Judy, Brigid Burke, Donna Hewitt, Cissi Tsang, and Sophie Rose to discuss the successes and lingering barriers in music production and the industry, chaired by Alice Bennett.
Meet the panellists:
Cassy Judy: a musician and proud transgender woman. She is currently releasing singles from her forthcoming Seven Ways EP, which will be released in October. She recently gained national media attention with her action around the Coogee Women’s Pool and organised the successful Trans Girlz Calender project and the Trans and Gender Diverse Visibility photo shoot.
Brigid Burke: an Australian composer, performance artist, clarinet soloist, visual artist, video artist and educator whose creative practice explores the use of acoustic sound and technology to enable media performances and installations that are rich in aural and visual nuances. Her work is widely presented in concerts, festivals, and radio broadcasts throughout Australia, Asia, Brazil, Europe and the USA.
Dr. Donna Hewitt: a vocalist, electronic music composer instrument designer and academic. Donna’s research has been primarily exploring mediatised performance environments and new ways of interfacing the human body and voice with electronic media. She is the inventor of the eMic, a sensor enhanced microphone stand for electronic music performance and more recently has been creating wearable electronics for controlling both sound and lighting in performance. Her work has attracted funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, most recently with all female collective Lady Electronica.
Cissi Tsang: a guitarist, composer and trans-disciplinary artist from Perth. They were born in Hong Kong in 1982. Tsang’s work explores the emotional nature of landscape, and the main focus of their practice has been on their response to the natural landscape as a composer and performer, incorporating audio and visual elements of place into compositions, and using the landscape as a narrative device. Cissi has performed and exhibited their works in Australia, Asia, UK and the USA under the names timeofhex and samarobryn.
Alice Bennett: a flutist and sound artist based in Naarm with creative work encompassing composition, installations, and live performance of both written and improvised music. She is interested in acoustic ecology and bioacoustics and has collaborated with visual artists and scientists, exploring issues of climate, endangered species, and our relationship with the environment. Her music bounces around the borders of experimental sound art and electronic dance music with heavy influences from contemporary art music and 1980s synth pop. Alice lectures in composition and production at the Australian Institute of Music.
Sophie Rose: a contemporary vocals lecturer at the Australian Institute of Music and a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a singer, extended vocal technique enthusiast, composer, improviser, performer, and maker. Originally from New Zealand, Rose incorporates Māori mythology into many works and creates new technologies with collaborator, Cloud Unknowing.
About ACMC
ACMC is the annual gathering of the Australasian Computer Music Association, a place to show and discuss research and artistic progress in computer/electronic music. ACMC is a festival of performances, installations, workshops, and tutorials that will inspire, challenge, and showcase our community. This special event is a collaboration with the Australian Institute of Music.
This year’s ACMC theme is connections. We want to connect the diverse range of people who contribute to Australia’s computer/electronic music culture, including and especially artists and scholars who are gender diverse, young/emerging, from regional/remote areas, who have a disability, who are First Nations People, who have low/no income, who are engaged in community music making, or who simply work outside of academia and mainstream institutions.
ACMC will take place on the 26th and 27th of August and will be accessible exclusively online. A full two-day program of sessions will be available to view from anywhere in the world. Attendance for AIM staff and students is free.
