Experimental Sound Studio and Asian Improv Arts Midwest are proud to present Japanese performer, composer, and sound poet Tomomi Adachi with Chicago artist Lou Mallozzi.

About Tomomi Adachi

Tomomi Adachi is a performer/composer, sound poet, instrument builder and visual artist. Known for his versatile style, he has performed his own voice and electronics pieces, sound poetry, improvised music and contemporary music, also presented site-specific compositions, compositions for classical ensembles, choir pieces for untrained musicians in all over the world including Tate Modern, Maerzmusik, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Centre Pompidou, Poesiefestival Berlin and Walker Art Center. He has been working with a wide range of materials; self-made physical interfaces and instruments, artificial intelligence, brainwave, artificial satellite, twitter texts, fracture, and even paranormal phenomena. He was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD for 2012. He received the Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica 2019. He composed the world’s first opera which adopted a libretto written by artificial intelligence, for which he won the Keizo Saji Prize in 2022.

Photo credit for Adachi: © Guillaume Kerhervé/ Maison de la Poésie de Nantes

About Lou Mallozzi

Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Chicago. He dismantles and reconstitutes gesture, sound, image, and language to poetically destabilize our relationships with the familiar through performances, installations, interventions, fixed media works, improvised music, drawings, and collaborations. His work has been exhibited and performed in many venues in the US and Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, The Italian Cultural Institute of Chicago and the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Radiorevolten Festival in Halle, Constellation in Chicago, and many others. Mallozzi co-founded Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago in 1986 and for the next 30 years he facilitated the presentation of exploratory sonic art works by more than 500 artists in festivals, exhibitions, performances, and transmissions throughout Chicago. Concurrently he began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Associate Professor in the Department of Art + Technology / Sound Practices. Mallozzi has been awarded grants, fellowships, and residencies in support of his work, including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center, The Ishibashi Foundation/Japan Foundation, The Emily Harvey Foundation (Venice), and the Illinois Arts Council. In 2020, NewCity named him as one of thirty artists “foundational to the art world of Chicago.”

Photo credit for Mallozzi: © Sandra Binion

About Asian Improv Arts Midwest

Asian Improv aRts Midwest’s (AIRMW) mission is to build a vital, self-empowered Asian American Community in the Chicago area by advancing the understanding and profile of Asian American cultures through the traditional and contemporary cultural arts.

Our work at AIRMW is grounded in an understanding of tradition as an aesthetic lineage. We believe that we represent and offer something more than a simple image of tradition and culture. Our resident artists are part of a legacy that one is born into or dedicates truly a lifetime to and as such is an immensely valuable and irreproducible experience. In an effort to continue preserving these experiences that only express themselves through the non-canonized pedagogical model, we offer training sessions in lieu of “classes” that are more applicable to folk art and craft histories. We recognize however, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to preserve this form of rigidity of pedagogy, even in the classical arts, and especially in the US. But we believe there is a way to retain the aesthetic and philosophical principles that still can flourish within the contemporary world.

Our artistry is founded in the preservation of a philosophy that is rooted in traditional performing, musical and visual arts: the aesthetic lineage. AIRMW artists are more than just craftsmen or artisans, but artists who can recontextualize the practical applications of our technical expertise to create new and contemporary works relevant to the current cultural landscape. To do this, one must understand the underlying aesthetics of what makes a work “traditionally Japanese” or “traditional,” and it is this philosophy that AIRMW continues to share through taiko, nihon-buyou and shamisen.

Through our in-house programs and collaborative projects, AIRMW is dedicated to creating productive relationships with artists, communities and institutions. We continually strive to maintain the responsibility of professionalism as part of cultural preservation by producing high quality arts programs that accurately reflect the multicultural, multi-ethnic reality of Chicago and the nation.

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