Nolan Lem is an artist and researcher whose work reflects a broad range of influences and mediums particularly those related to sound and motion. His work often centers around the collective behaviors of large-scale interactive systems. Incorporating a diverse range of materials, devices, and cultural objects, unusual audio-visual habitats emerge from distributed networks of sonic machinery.

He has premiered his work and research at a number of diverse spaces including the Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires (MAMBA), Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), L'HOSTE Art Contemporain (Arles, FR), and the Danish National Museum of Music (Copenhagen, DK). He has held residencies at IRCAM, MassMoCA, Cité Internationale des Arts, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. He holds degrees in saxophone performance, Electrical Engineering, and received his MFA at Columbia University where he studied at the Computer Music Center. Nolan received his PhD at Stanford University where he studied at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

He is currently a post-doc at Chalmers University in Gothenburg (SE) where he works at the division of Applied Acoustics.

I am interested in the ways in which sound shapes our experience of the physical world, probing alternative ways of thinking about the acoustic world as a sort of process. Incorporating a wide range of materials, mediums, and devices, I create sonic habitats that explore the interplay of sound and movement through mechanical intervention and algorithmic systems of control. Deeply informed by my experimental research in auditory perception, I often work with ‘swarms’ of distributed, oftentimes cultural, sound objects that are guided by expressive forms of self-organization and collective behavior. As such, my work touches on themes related to automata and AI, sound fetish, and the dynamics of synchronization.