Tom Boram

About the Artist

Tom Boram is a multimedia artist and musician from Baltimore, MD. His work contains but is not limited to improvised electronic sound, audio-visual performance art, narrative and experimental film/video, technical systems and sound design. His creative work is the dark center of a Venn diagram of his personal concerns: religious experience, lucid dreaming, synesthesia, human history, technology, synesthesia, mental illness, death and magic. He has performed and screened his works in venues, festivals and galleries throughout the USA, Canada, Mexico and Europe. He is a founder of the High Zero Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music and works as an educator in and around Baltimore.

Artist's Statement

I am a lifelong musician and my visual work almost always references sound as formal component. I have been using intense formal abstraction and synesthetic ideas related to the beauty of music improvisation in other media such as video, food and light installations. I am interested in technology and how we are developing and changing our brains and bodies because of regular interactions with technology. For example, my interest in electronic music led me away from traditional instrumentation and forms of improvisation. After building and designing my own technologies to perform with I now think completely differently about music and what it means to me. My aesthetics and meaning of personal expression was altered through my relationship with electronic tools and media. I think our identities are altered in a similar way. My recent works have dealt with the "projection" of the self into electronic media and tension created by the persistence of our other "crappier" selves.