Biography

Derek Hoffend is a visual and audio artist who creates sound-sculpture installations and electro-acoustic music. Installations examine intersections between sound, objects, body, and environment, combining electronic, acoustic, recorded, and self-generative audio processes with found and constructed objects and spaces. Live performances traverse immersive, evolving, textural soundscapes, combining composed and improvised digital and analog processes for computer, hand-made circuits, and modified electronic and acoustic instruments. Recent work has explored immersive audio, multi-channel arrangements and sculptural forms (4 to 12 speakers), tactile interfaces, viewer participation, resonant objects and spaces, and architecture and site as instrument.

Pieces have been performed or installed at IBM (Cambridge, MA), Microsoft Start-up Labs (Cambridge, MA), Mobius Artist Space (Boston, MA), Studio Soto (Boston, MA), Union Square (Somerville, MA), The Enormous Room (Cambridge, MA), sQuareone Studio (Boston, MA), 90.3 WZBC (Boston, MA), Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), Sonotheque (Chicago, IL), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Athenaeum Theater, (Chicago, IL), and Consolidated Works (Seattle, WA).

Hoffend has a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art and Technology, a MA from New York University in Studio Art, and a BFA from the State University of New York at Fredonia in Sculpture and Photography. He is currently Full-Time Visiting Artist Faculty in Sound at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Part-Time Faculty in Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. He is a recently-invited member of Mobius, a non-profit intermedia artist collective based in Boston, MA.