Benjamin Portzen is a composer and improviser working at the intersection of sounding and moving, principally concerned with matters of being: the transformation of consciousness through art, the unfathomable intimacy of sound and light entering body/mind as form and image, aesthetic experience as divine. He investigates these through the media of concert and recorded music, dance, field recording, instrument building using found/natural materials, and software design, treating each as a lens through which to look deeply into apparent binaries between living and nonliving, creation and destruction, remembering and forgetting, emergence and senescence. Central to his practice is a fascination with and constant observation of the seemingly-inner experience of relating with our seemingly-outer world. In the era of scientific materialism, Ben sees value in artistic processes which prioritize embodied knowledge accumulation and transmission for creators, participants, and witnesses. The products of his time emerge from a dance between stillness, silence, solitude, and community, and aim to move us towards a deeply-inclusive way of being which embraces the inseparability of our inner and outer ecologies.
At present, Ben’s research interests include designing intelligent computer collaborators for composition and improvisation, illuminating the body as the locus of creative potential in the creation of soundworks, the facilitation of “real” experiences for performers and audiences, and the ways in which artistic practice offers the opportunity for radical self-transformation and -dissolution in service of living with greater depth, beauty, and grace.
Ben has collaborated with artists across the United States, Canada, and Europe including Extended Music Collective, Andrea Lodge, and David Potvin, and has been awarded residencies with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (2022-24), the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), Ensemble Modern, Kunstakademie Deinze, and Studio H among others. His work has been supported by organizations including EXCELerator Lab at the University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, Arts Nouveau Brunswick, L’Association Acadienne des Artistes Professionel.le.s, Canada Arts Council, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and the George and Marjorie Chandler Fund. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Henry Merritt Wriston Scholarship, the Marjory Irvin Prize, the Pi Kappa Lambda Award, and in 2021 was awarded IBM’s prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to explore how, across a variety of traditions, locales, and media, art makes space for the unknown to be embraced, and transformed from feared into fascinating. Ben is a founding member of Inland Ocean, an international cooperative of artists co-creating and commissioning multidisciplinary work, and holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Composition from Lawrence University where his principal instructors were Asha Srinivasan and Joanne Metcalf.
Gratitude [inspired by Jasmine Hearn]: I am here today in this body/mind/heart not by miracle, but by the support, guidance, love, and nourishment of innumerable people, places, beings, sounds, and bodies. What follows is an ever-evolving and ever-incomplete list of those to which I want to express my profound gratitude.
Ora Itkin
each breath
The Saint Paul Conservatory of Music
David Fritze
Thomas
the sound of frogs
Asha Srinivasan
Brent Peterson
Field Avenue
Molly Reese
Nancy Stark Smith
Deer Park Monastery
Megumi Masaki
my blood and non-blood ancestors
this body
Nolan Ehlers
David Zambrano
Lisa Morley
Brian Portzen
Margaret Paek
the land
Rena Kraut
Thích Nhất Hạnh
Meli
Karen Evanoff
John Supko
Joanne Metcalf
the smell of lilac bushes
Kate Bittner
Brian Pertl
Jasmine Hearn
Pema Chödrön
Julyen Hamilton
Zoe Markle
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