Aaron James is an artist, acoustic ecologist, curator, and researcher based in South West England.
His work explores how environments are shaped through both the introduction of sound and its sociomaterial conditioning. Drawing on biophilic and xenobiophilic approaches, his practice currently attends to relationships between human and nonhuman systems, including those that are unfamiliar, peripheral, or difficult to perceive. He often works with vernacular materials and site-responsive processes that engage local ecologies and temporal variation. He has been commissioned by and presented work at institutions including Tate, Arnolfini, and ZKM. His work has been featured in publications such as Time Out, The Guardian, and Resident Advisor.
His exhibition Culture Is Not a Luxury! was called ‘one of the most exciting and challenging exhibitions of the last thirty years’ by the Scottish author Irvine Welsh. This exhibition was part of a three-day London-based festival entitled Assembly of Disturbance which he produced and co-curated with Test Dept in partnership with Vice Magazine. The festival featured Timothy Morton, Mike Pearson, and Disinformation, and marked the first major event of the Institute of Sonic Art. This and other events helped facilitate his practice-as-research project Live Curation: A Methodology Towards a New Platform for the Reception of Art which he disseminated at the International Sound Arts Curating Conference. This explored whether the artist as curator and the audience as active agents in the curation of an exhibition, can curate an exhibition live and explicate art and curatorial knowledge relationally.
From 2012-2020 Aaron worked as a DJ and the programmer for the event series Future History which he partnered with Ministry of Sound, Rinse FM, and many other contemporary electronic music brands. Prior to this he worked for Dolby Europe as a sound designer and was one of the first to work with Dolby’s technologies Dolby Atmos, Dolby Mobile, and Dolby Headphone.
Aaron James MMUS MSC BA/HONS AMIOA studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, under the supervision of Professor John Levack Drever. He is an Associate Member of the Institute of Acoustics (AMIOA) and is a member of the UK Acoustics Network (UKAN), World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), UK & Ireland Soundscape Community (UKISC), and Sound Practice Research (SPR).
