Thessia Machado performs electronic and electro-acoustic experimental music with hand-made and modified instruments under the artistic name link. She completed her BFA at Hunter College, after beginning her studies in art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro.
Machado finds the active, expressive potential in sculptures and interactive installations with a real-time, live component. “Working with sound reveals the air in which we all swim as yet another malleable and responsive material,” she writes. “It bounces and is deflected by space and objects, changing and acquiring a new character.”
During 2016 and 2017, Machado will participate in the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions Program, where she is developing an installation/instrument that uses light-triggered sound modules and electro-acoustic instruments responding to a video score. In 2016, she was commissioned to create a new work at the Harvestworks TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art, and Music) Lab. Her project “Measures” (working title) is a song object, an immersive installation, a playable sculptural instrument. Featuring an installation mode for playing composed pieces and a live performance mode, “Measures” is site-adaptable, expandable, and programmable. In 2014, at BRIC House in Brooklyn, she exhibited an interactive piece which translated a signal simultaneously into sound and image. Constructed from discarded electronics, such as old PalmPilots, audiences were able to activate its light sensors by using a flashlight or by touch, manipulating the sound and screen.
Machado’s work has been exhibited in New York and Philadelphia, as well as in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, and Athens. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Experimental Television Center, and The Bronx Museum. She has been awarded numerous residencies, including at MacDowell Colony, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
