JA$$IE lives and works in the District of Columbia. Originally, from Laredo, Texas, a border city to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico—the wave of the Rio Grande, a bank for migratory birds, and the duality of two cultures/economies/languages has been a major wealth of inspiration that informs her music, drawings and research as she continually finds new ways to draw and remix samples and textures inspired from the brown mud of the river.
JA$$IE’s artistic practice in grounded in light & sound and the ways it articulates space. By applying a conceptual and theoretical framework her practice crosses wires, disciplines and borders to extend, fold, and push drawing, sculpture and music—questions of composition, physicality of form, and the ephemeral and immaterial as material to generate work that draws attention to what lies at the edge of perceptibility— placing the work and audience at the bank and in a new relationship.
She problematizes the industry of music with respect to various forms of recording: sampling, notation, code, mixing, performance, genre, improvisation/chance as a system, and she measures this information, takes it out of context in which they are normally seen and/or heard, and reshapes and represents them anew.
Her work oscillates between states of representation and fragmentation, acoustic and electronic, object and process and takes the form of site-specific, interactive installations, drawings, collage, photography, video, music, performance, research, writing and works for internet and paper.
She earned a Master in Audio Technology from American University in 2018 with a concentration in Computer Music, a Master in Studio Art with a focus on Interdisciplinary Drawing and Critical Theory in 2011 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Bachelor
of Fine Arts in Studio Painting from Texas State University. JA$$IE won second place in the 2018 Guthman New Musical Instrument Design Competition, with her instrument gramFX— making her the first woman to compete and win Georgia Tech’s prestigious award. Jassie’s exhibited her work in the 2016 Pure Data Conference at Stevens Institute for Technology in NJ and at the Reinstitute at Guest Spot in Baltimore. She has performed at ShapeShifter Lab in Gowanus, NY and Wave Farm in Acra, NY. JA$$IE was an artist in residence at Signal Culture in Owego, NY and her poems are archived in Ditch, a International magazine for contemporary
poetry.
Jassie will be utilizing GramFX in her performance. GramFX is an augmented gramophone that utilizes an open air gesture control scheme for control over processing of acoustic and electronic sound. I’m interested in old and new recording/playback technologies and making something new.
GramFX consists of a gramophone, a leap motion camera, 78 rpm records, a steel needle and a patch made from scratch in Pd Vanilla. Using one to many mapping strategies, effects parameters are mapped to Palm position and both raw independent coordinates and relative coordinate data. Three fingers map FX parameters, which activate effects and techniques that are borrowed/inspired by “Dj’s” from various time periods, such as: Hindemith, Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, DJ Kool Herec, Grand Master Flash, Daphne Oram, and Suzanne Ciani. Additional synthesis is generated based on real-time audio analysis of the acoustic gramophone output.
In all, GramFX is capable of granular synthesis, pitch shifting, variable playback speeds, and phase-vocoded streams of stretched audio. It can be played by physically locking the needle in a groove and by activating the DRFX chain with hand gesture controls and zones.