“The Sound Can Touch You Directly”

Christina Kubisch, a pioneer of sound art who composes electronic and acoustic music for intermedia installations and performance works, speaks with Caitlin Woolsey, an art historian and scholar of experimental sound work. Trained as a composer and flautist, since the 1970s Kubisch has worked with techniques like electromagnetic induction to realize immersive, experiential, and often site-responsive installations. This conversation particularly explores Kubisch’s formative training in music and painting growing up in postwar Germany, and how these early experiences as a performer and in the avant-garde music world shaped the artworks and “Electrical Walks” that she has presented in cities around the world, for which she has become best known today.