Last semester, the TIMARA department welcomed Oberlin alum Eli Stine as a Visiting Assistant Professor. After graduating from Oberlin in 2014 with degrees in Computer Science and TIMARA, Stine received his PhD and Masters degrees in Composition and Computer Technologies as a Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia. His work explores electroacoustic sound, multimedia technologies (often custom-built software, video projection, and multi-channel speaker systems), and collaboration between disciplines (artistic and otherwise). Festivals and conferences that have programmed Stine’s work include ICMC, SEAMUS, NIME, CMMR, NYCEMF, the Third Practice, Studio 300, and Threshold festivals, CubeFest, the Muestra Internacional de Musica Electroacoustica, the International Sound Art Festival Berlin, the Workshop on Intelligent Music Interfaces for Listening and Creation, and the International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design. An adept film sound designer, Stine’s work has also been heard by over a million people in The Amerikans web series, and in his sound design for the virtual reality installation VRWandlung, a VR adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis which is touring around the world.
In a research-artist statement addressing the experience of teaching in TIMARA, Stine noted that he was struck by the department’s similarities to his time as a student alongside the changes in the decade since he matriculated, explaining that “The department is still full of a bright, diverse array of media-makers, ranging from experimental singer-songwriters to instrument builders to fixed media composers to film-makers to acoustic music-plus composers. The department still has the sense of community and shared interest in newness, experimentalism, and musical excellence that it had when I was a student. However, the involvement of TIMARA with the college through the new TIMARA cafe layout and makerspace, larger 100-level non-major courses, and TIMARA-faculty co-taught StudiOC courses has decidedly been enhanced, and is positioning TIMARA as the nucleus for some really fascinating multi-department, Con-College endeavours, and I’m very curious to see how this turns out in the next half-decade.”
