Patchbent Sessions: Spatializing a Composition for a 4-channel Installation

The Patchbent Sessions are a meeting place and learning community for women, trans, and non-binary people. Each session features a workshop in sound technology presented by a teaching artist.
At this time, Patchbent Sessions are open to women, trans, non-binary and gender expansive participants in an effort to encourage equity in sound and audio spaces. All levels welcome, no experience necessary. Space is limited, so please reserve your spot by clicking the Donation button on this page.
In this workshop, Laura Ortman and Kari Watson will discuss a work in progress, their collaboration to create a 4-channel piece for ESS's Florasonic series, with Laura as composer and Kari as technologist. As a composer and violinist, Laura Ortman creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. Kari Watson leads the spatialization work for this project and is a composer, performer, and sound artist working between the mediums of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work.

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, and as part of the trio, In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings. Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Guggenheim, Pioneer Works, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, Baltimore Museum of Art, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast.

Ortman is the recipient of the 2025 Pioneer Works Music Residency,  2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kari Watson (they/them) is a composer, performer, and sound artist working between the mediums of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work. As a performer playing analog synthesizer, they engage a customizable spatialization software built in MaxMSP with spatial speaker arrays to further explore issues of tactility and drama in immersive sonic environments. Recent shows include a duo with Katinka Kleijn at km28, live scoring of an 80 minute dance show, SOAK, a solo set at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and the premier of TETHER, an hour long performance piece for 3 modular synthesizers, dancer and live projections on Frequency Festival at Constellation. With roots in vocal study and performance, their work is informed by the vocal line and often incorporates text. Inspired by their burgeoning research on electronic mediation of the voice and its relationship to identity, gender and sexuality from 1960-present, Watson explores the voice as a raw material to be manipulated and processed towards various dramatic ends.

Host or Publisher Experimental Sound Studio