Born and brought up in India, Aseem Suri is a Brooklyn-based musician and new media artist.
Classically trained in voice, with degrees in engineering, creative writing, production and design, Aseem has been working at the intersection of disciplines for over a decade. Exploring themes relating to identity, love, loss and the immigrant experience, his medium-agnostic artistic practice has spanned written, visual, aural, and interactive domains of expression, being showcased at galleries, festivals, conferences and concert venues around the world.
Alongside his personal practice, Aseem works as a Creative Technologist, building technologies and systems for innovative immersive audio-visual experiences and artistic collaborations.
Through art, I question. And through art, I find the answers.
What started as an innocent quest to understand the beauty of sound, has taken me far deeper down the rabbit hole, where my past (and current) lives as a science student, an engineer, a business professional, a musician, or a writer amalgamate. And it is through my work that I try to find that confluence point where art meets science, affect meets intention, magic meets devotion.
Though my subject matter varies from piece to piece, as might the medium of my art, but certain commonalities, which would be hard to separate from the paths I have taken and the things I have seen, emerge. Increasingly I find it hard to keep disparate the function of my work when placed in the larger perspective of our social environment from my personal observations about our society and my aims and aspirations from the same. In that way, my art is always aspiring to comment and challenge. Critical thinking and individuality, racial and sexual equality, preservation of human rights and the environment, demilitarization and disarmament, freedom of speech, movement and choice – issues I feel strongly about would find their way in some shape or form into my work, if not being what the works are about. My background, and environment play a mighty role in this, where I feel it would be near impossible for any artist from India, a country where women are treated as second-‐class citizens and trampling their rights is commonplace, to not feel strongly about issues like gender justice. My past experiences make it imperative to write about the corporate culture having seen it from such close quarters. Similarly it is hard to not create works dealing with racial issues and other inequalities while being a brown man living in the USA as what the state defines an ‘Alien Non-‐immigrant’.
While hoping that in some way my work would incite if not an opinion, at least a debate, the social function of my work remains only a fraction of it’s utility to me. From a very young age designers and inventors have fascinated me. The ones who created something new out of nothing and forever changed our world. As I grew up, this wonderment extended to artists (be it musicians, writers or artists from other domains), who would constantly push their mediums. The desire to do something new and unique, something truly stemming from my inner potential, something that exists because of the technologies and the ideologies of the moment, has only grown with time. From audio programming to writing apps, designing visuals to running psychology experiments, circuit bending and building alternate controllers to creating installations, through my art and otherwise I find myself trying to challenge pre-‐existing notions and practices, most of all my own.
My intent to make pieces of art that are interactive, through programming, sensors, and other studied/devised techniques is another big part of my work. I am increasingly exploring a world of art where the viewer is one of the most, if not the most important person to the artwork, literally and figuratively ‘completing the circuit’ to make the work functional.
My works so far remain pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the learning-‐s from which would enable me to create works in the future that can live up to my hopes and aspirations from them and myself.
I truly believe in the power of art to transform. Human history bears plenty of evidence, where numerous pieces of art and media have changed patterns of behavior and thinking, and altered ways of lives. I hope to bridge my fascination and love for the sciences and technology with my desire for artistic expression to continue my explorations into new media, interactive communications and social interactions through art.
