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 that 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.
Website: soundingmovingbeing.com