Curation
Marty is the co-founder of the Slingshot Festival, and was curator of electronic arts and technology for for the first three festivals in Athens, Georgia (2012–2015). He is currently an exhibition design consultant for an upcoming edition of Slingshot in 2026. The Festival brings together music across genres and from around the world with electronic arts and arts technologies.
As part of Slingshot, Marty organized and curated the 2015 Sensory Overload conference, featuring leaders in big data, data visualization, data sonification and data art.
Marty is an art director for the upcoming edition of Slingshot in Mumbai, India, February 21–22, 2026
Sensible Environments
A sensible environment is a reactive algorithmic environment that is aware of both itself and interlopers through a real-world sensory feedback mechanism. The sensible environment models an ecosystem as a single large organism with constituent interdependent parts. Like a natural ecosystem, it reacts to disturbances and changes over time. It is sensible, in the sense of “having perception or awareness of something.” A sensible environment senses and reacts to the world at large, including itself. Since it monitors itself through a real-world pathway (not through internal monitoring of the program), it behaves like a natural system: chaotic, non-deterministic, adaptive, seeking its own equilibrium.
Central to the sensible environment is the concept of resonance. Resonance is embodied in the sensory feedback loops. It is also implicated in the hybridization of sounds, and in the blending of electroacoustic sound with that of musicians and viewers (through the use of resonance synthesis). These resonant systems are inherently unstable and tend to reproduce the chaotic behavior characteristic of natural systems.
A sensible environment is an autonomous, continuous installation which can accommodate viewers, participants, and passersby. It can also host performances in its space. In practical terms, this blurs the boundaries between installation and performance, since the continuous nature of the environment naturally erases the notions of beginning and end of any performance, and the spatial context erases the division between performer and viewer/participant. The listener is at minimum a passive participant, at best an active one, but never a pure observer, as is the conceit in traditional Western concert music. And the performer is a participant in the larger sound environment that extends beyond the music. The entire system (sensible environment plus performers and mobile viewers) functions like a single natural system.
For Puerilia, a custom sensible environment was designed using birdsong from the local environment as raw material. Sound from adjacent park grounds was also piped directly in to the hall, rendering the architecture acoustically transparent. Sounds of birds and human activity permeate the space as if doors were left open, softening the distinction between indoors and out.
Echolalia has a custom sensible environment, distilled from recordings of infant sounds, emanating from inside the piano itself. The sensible environment lets us hear the piano as an architectural space, its own spatial context.
Thin is one of a series of compositions which may be played alone or within a sensible environment. Here, This is performed within the sensible environment After With, giving the resulting work After With Thin.
