Karin Weissenbrunner is a curator and independent scholar with an interest in sound art, (eco) media, hacked or DIY instruments, materiality and improvisation. Her research focuses on the links between sculptural and sonic design – traits that evolve concurrently in the processes of making, growing and performing. She completed her doctoral studies in music at City St George’s, University of London (UK), supported by a University Doctoral Studentship. Her revised thesis – an analytical examination of improvised turntable performances – is published as »Turntables in Live Performance: Bricolage, Craft and Plasticity« (forthcoming). During her graduate studies in musicology, audio communication and technical acoustics at Technical University Berlin (Germany), she worked in research teams at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin and at IRCAM – Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique in Paris. As a curator, she has organised concert series, exhibitions, lectures and workshops at festivals, venues and outdoor locations (most of which have received public funding). Since 2018, she has worked as an artistic concert manager, as well as a project manager and editor, for various cultural institutions and ensembles in Berlin.
Her current focus is on the dynamic interface of ecological concern, material research, object-specific sonority and interdisciplinary forms of presentation. Drawn to the intricate entanglement of plasticity and composition in experimental turntable practices, she has also engaged in record disc experiments on her own. Her recent focus is on records made from biomaterials, adopting symbiotic approaches that foreground intimate relationships with ecosystems and forms of multispecies agency.
She is co-founder of the Terrafónica Associação Cultural in Portugal – a collective to connect sound, art, local ecologies, education and the regions’ native forms of environmentalism.