R Luke DuBois

Biography

DuBois was born in New Jersey, moving at age 11 to London, England, where he attended the American School in London, before moving to New York in 1993 to attend Columbia University. DuBois holds both a master's (1999) and a doctorate (2003) in music composition from Columbia (studying primarily with Fred Lerdahl and Jonathan Kramer), and worked as a staff researcher at Columbia's Computer Music Center until 2008. He has taught interactive music and video performance at a number of institutions, including Columbia, Princeton University, the School of Visual Arts, and the Music Technology and interactive telecommunications programs at New York University. In Fall 2008 he began teaching as a full-time professor at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where he currently serves as co-director of the Integrated Digital Media program and director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center; his academic position consists of a triple appointment between the Engineering School, Music Technology, and ITP. As a graduate student at Columbia he was a contributor to Real-Time Cmix. Since 2000, he has worked for Cycling '74 on Max/MSP/Jitter.

DuBois has collaborated with a wide range of artists and musicians, including Elliott Sharp, Paul D. Miller, Todd Reynolds, Toni Dove, Chris Mann, Michael Joaquin Grey, Matthew Ritchie, Eric Singer, Bora Yoon, and Leroy Jenkins. He was a founding member of the Freight Elevator Quartet, and has produced records for Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon on the Nonesuch label. His music integrates real-time performer-computer interaction with algorithmic methodologies repurposed from other fields, most notably formal grammars such as L-systems. His research into issues of musical time revolve around a technique called time-lapse phonography, as used in his piece Billboard. His instrumental writing, like his artwork, is often based on techniques derived from stochastic music and data mining, using metaphors and information from cultural topics as source material, but with a postmodern stylistic approach, as in the string quartet Hard Data, a six-movement sonification, which, although basing its musical structure on the casualty stream of the Iraq War, borrows heavily from the instrumental writing of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Xenakis, and Crumb.

As a conceptual artist, DuBois takes on various topics in American culture and places them under a computational microscope attempting to raise issues relevant to information theory, perception of time, canonicity, and gaze. For example, his trio of pieces on gestalt media, Academy, Billboard, and Play, look at three iconic cultural "canons" in American popular culture (the Academy Awards, the Billboard Hot 100, and Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month). His piece Hindsight is Always 20/20, based on a statistical analysis of presidential State of the Union addresses, uses computational means as a lens into the politics of political rhetoric. Fashionably Late For The Relationship, his feature-length collaboration with performance artist Lián Amaris, uses the radical time-compression of a 72-hour film of a performance to deconstruct romantic obsession. For his latest large-scale artwork, A More Perfect Union, DuBois joined 21 different online dating sites and constructed a census of the United States based on an analysis of the profiles of 19 million single Americans; shown as a series of colored and re-labeled maps, the work investigates the lexicon of American self-identity in the 21st Century.

His work is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City, and has been exhibited worldwide, including at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In January, 2014, R. Luke DuBois—Now opened at the Ringling Museum of Art. This first solo museum exhibition, organized by curator Matthew McLendon, surveyed DuBois' output over the prior decade, and included performance, video, public installation, and generative works. The exhibition went on to the Orange County Museum of Art the following year and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2016. In December 2016, Hyperallergic named R. Luke DuBois—Now one of the top 15 exhibitions in the United States.

Prior to becoming a well known laptop musician, DuBois did most of his improvisation and performance on Buchla and Serge modular synthesizers.

In 2013, DuBois was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Goucher College. He was named the inaugural artist for the Times Square Residency at the CrossRoads Program in the Summer of 2015 and a speaker for TED 2016.

DuBois is the younger brother of photographer Doug DuBois.

Notable works

Discography