A short biography

Marko Ciciliani is a composer, audiovisual artist and researcher based in Austria. Most of his work brings instruments and electronics together, and much of it is audiovisual. Light and laser designs are often written into the pieces themselves, and in the later ones the handling of live video becomes part of an extended instrument.

Sound, light and image

The combination of sound and light was also the subject of his doctorate. He completed it at Brunel University London in 2010 with a thesis called Dirty Light: the application of musical principles to the organisation of light as an extension of musical expression into the non-figurative visual realm.

Something that runs through the pieces: sound is not treated only as abstract material. It is heard as a culturally shaped idiom, as something that already carries meaning, and what a sound can communicate interests him as much as its objective sonic quality. The approach is conceptual. Classical composition, sound studies and media studies work closely together in it.

Where the music has been played

By the mid-2010s his music had been performed in more than 30 countries in Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The hosts range from series for experimental music to the large festivals of the new-music world. Among them:

Bakin Zub

In 2005 he founded Bakin Zub, a small group of musicians with a focus on technology. Writing for them, he combines the instrumental parts with live electronics and with light, laser or video designs. Four programme-length works came out of it. My Ultradeep I (2007) and Jeanne of the Dark (2008) were followed by Heterotopolis, co-produced by the ZKM and first heard at the ARD Hörspieltage in 2012, and by Suicidal Self Portraits, given complete at the Forum neuer Musik of Deutschlandfunk in Cologne in April 2014. The Bakin Zub page has the line-ups.

Residencies and conferences

In 2009 he held the Villa Aurora stipend, a three-month artist residency in Los Angeles, and went back for a two-week follow-up in February 2010, with concerts and lectures in Southern California and work with the Los Angeles ensemble SoNu. In 2009 he was also composer in residence at the 14th Composers Forum in Mittersill, Austria. Project residencies took him to STEIM, ESS, ICST and the ZKM.

He often presents at conferences on computer music and media art, among them ICMC, SMC, ICLI and Sonorities. The papers are listed on the press page.

Teaching in Vienna, Graz and Darmstadt

From October 2010 he taught at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, with lectureships at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Pölten and as a guest at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. From March 2011 to February 2012 he was guest professor for electroacoustic composition at the IEM, the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics of the Kunstuniversität Graz.

In April 2014 the same institute appointed him full professor for computer music composition and sound design, starting with the autumn term 2014/15.

He taught at the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt three times. In 2014 he gave individual lessons and had a portrait concert of his audiovisual works. In 2016 he added a course on audiovisuality, Music in the Expanded Field, and a workshop for percussionists with Christian Dierstein, Håkon Stene and Simon Steen-Andersen. In 2018 he ran a workshop on artistic research with the violinist Barbara Lüneburg.

GAPPP

At the end of 2015 the Austrian Science Fund granted him funding, through its PEEK programme, for a three-year artistic research project: GAPPP, short for Gamified Audiovisual Performance and Performance Practice. It looks at what elements of computer games can do in audiovisual computer music. The project website went online in February 2016. Game systems run through much of his work from those years, from Homo Ludens to Kilgore; see the multimedia works.

Dates in brief