current & former residents

Eric Raynaud, known as Fraction, is a Paris-based composer and sound artist working across performance, installation, and immersive audiovisual environments. His practice focuses on sound as a spatial and physical medium, combining generative systems, custom software, and spatial audio techniques to create site-sensitive works. Bringing together sound design, visual systems, and scenographic structures, his work explores perception, spatial transformation, and the material conditions of sound at the intersection of art, architecture, and technology. Alongside composition, he develops software, publishes music, and engages with experimental and noise-based aesthetics as part of an ongoing research-driven practice. Among his key works are DROMOS, an audiovisual performance premiered at MUTEK Montréal in 2011 and later featured by Apple, and Entropia (2016–2018), developed during a research residency at the Society for Arts and Technology in Montréal and presented internationally. In 2018, he took part in the 4DSOUND residency in Budapest and the artistic research program at IRCAM. Raynaud has received several international recognitions, including the Digital Arts Prize from the Institut Français, and was selected for the SHAPE European platform. In 2024, he was appointed associate composer at L’Hexagone Scène Nationale by the French Ministry of Culture, reflecting his ongoing contribution to immersive sound practices and contemporary audiovisual art.
https://www.instagram.com/fraction_is_noise/?hl=it

Robin Koek is an enterprising sound artist who aspires to nurture a new cognitive understanding of the world surrounding us mediated through art and education. His work reflects on the environment integrating field recordings and site-specificity in composition and installation practice, researching the spatial nature of sound in both the physical and virtual realm. He constructs immersive experiences at the intersections of these worlds merging analog, digital and acoustic phenomena. These augmented realities are sculpted out of code, sensing devices and media projections developed in interdisciplinary teams. These realities can be experienced as dynamic environments in which sensory feedback to the interactor is an essential component. His recent works explore a transhumanist approach in which technology plays an important role to explore new forms of interspecies communication and mutual understanding fostering new art ecologies.
https://www.instagram.com/visionsofvisions/

Joe Stratton (aka Bothelbows) is a musician, engineer, and sound designer based in the US. While usually producing music to accompany video, his current focus is spatial audio: composing for immersive environments where people can experience sound in new and unexpected ways. Using ambisonics, Dolby Atmos, and recently 4D, his work is meant to be heard on all sides, above and below the listener. Best known for his work with the theatrical rock group Not Blood Paint, he intends to continue challenging audiences to look beyond the surface of their experience, outside their comfort zones, utilizing spatial audio technology now in place of guitars and costumes (often still including costumes).
https://www.instagram.com/bothelbows/

Dugal McKinnon works at the intersection of sound, music, language, and acoustic, visual, and digital media, developing projects that combine artistic research with technological experimentation. His works include This Storm Is Called Progress (2016), created with Grayson Cooke, an audiovisual installation shortlisted for the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize (South Australian Museum); Lost Oscillations (2015), with Jim Murphy and Mo H. Zareei, a touch-based augmented reality sound installation commissioned by the Audacious Festival of Sonic Arts; and let x = (2014) for icosahedral loudspeaker and 24-channel loudspeaker array, commissioned by the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics. He has been artist-in-residence at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (Graz), ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), and STEIM (Amsterdam). He holds a doctorate in composition from the University of Birmingham, completed while he was a guest artist in the electronic music studios of the Technical University of Berlin. His recent writings focus on ecological and material practices in sound-based art. He is Deputy Director of the New Zealand School of Music and Co-Director of the Lilburn Studios for Electronic Music.
https://sounz.org.nz/

Alexander Brix Tillegreen is a visual artist and composer working between Copenhagen and Berlin. His practice spans printmaking, painting, sculpture, sound installation, and composition, exploring how perception, abstraction, and embodied listening generate meaning. His visual works function as resonant spaces shaped by rhythm, spatiality, and chromatic tension, while his sound works investigate language, voice, and psychoacoustic phenomena, particularly the phantom word illusion, foregrounding how meaning emerges through listening. In 2023, he presented newly commissioned works at the Darmstädter Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik and released his debut album in words on the German label rastermedia. His work has been shown internationally, including at Nikolaj Kunsthal, CCA Glasgow, Museum Tinguely, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Roskilde Festival, and CTM Festival.
https://www.alexandertillegreen.com/

Francesco Palmieri is an Italian classical and electric guitarist based in Berlin. His artistic practice focuses on contemporary music performance, combining instrumental research with an interest in sound spatialization and performative contexts. During his internship at spaes, Francesco explored how spatial audio technologies can be integrated into contemporary music performance, investigating the relationship between guitar sound, space, and listening experience. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Artistic Research in Music at the Malmö Academy of Music.
https://www.francescopalmieri.eu/

Matthew D. Gantt is an artist, composer, and educator based in Troy, NY. His practice focuses on sound in virtual spaces, generative systems facilitated by idiosyncratic technology, and digital production presets as sonic readymades. He worked as a studio assistant to electronics pioneer Morton Subotnick from 2016- 2018 and has been an active participant in the international creative community, presenting or performing at spaces such as Pioneer Works, Issue Project Room, Roulette, Babycastles, SVA Visible Futures Lab, Feral File, IRCAM, ICST Zurich, and countless DIY venues and grassroots organizations. During his residency at spæs in the summer of 2024, Mathew worked on the auto-reactive installation Jon Hassell Boids, blending his distinctive audio-visual aesthetics with spatial elements and interpretations of the materials he employed. He made extensive use of our loudspeaker half-sphere while also creating an extraordinary audio-visual triptych featuring small screens and 3-channel mono spatialization.
https://www.instagram.com/gan.tttt/

Mári Mákó is a sound artist and composer based in Rotterdam and Berlin. Her work has been described as avant-garde electronic and post-club, characterized by a controlled yet abstract complexity in her music. She builds her own instruments to produce unique and unconventional sounds in her compositions. These practices are informed by her research interests, which include the ecology of listening, experimental notation, interactive design, and conducting processes. She is pursuing her Doctor of Liberal Arts program at MOME in Budapest and participating in residencies between Rotterdam and Berlin. Mári has been working on adapting a tactile stone interface for spatialization and sound composition. Additionally, she has been preparing a live set for multichannel performances in Ambisonics while incorporating a powerful software tool developed by spæs lab fellow Daniele Fabris into her musical repertoire.
https://marimako.com/

Zhao Jiajing, hailing from China, is a composer, sound artist, and new media artist currently based in London. He completed his studies at the Royal College of Art in 2022, majoring in Information Experience Design with a focus on Sound Design. Jiajing's work encompasses a variety of disciplines, such as spatial sound, new media, performance, and installation. His work is inspired by time, consciousness, chaos, and surveillance themes. He explores sound as a pathway to multiple worlds. Using field recordings, sound collages, and granular synthesis techniques, he creates immersive sonic experiences that stimulate multi-sensory imagination. His work has been showcased at prominent venues, including Old Street Gallery, EiS Immersive Audio Conference, and IRCAM. Since 2019, he has actively collaborated with trailblazing theatre groups, performers, and installation artists to provide music and sound for their projects. Jiajing has been developing an alternative interface solution for spatializing analog live sounds by experimenting with different methods of integrating a Theremin with Ambisonics spatialization software at @spaeslab. He has also been working on a new composition customized for a half-sphere setup, which has earned him an invitation to the 2024 New York Electronic Music Festival.
https://zhaojiajing.com/

Verena Lercher is an award-winning media artist based in London and Berlin with a 15-year background in professional stage play, theatre ensemble work, and off-production performance. She had ongoing collaborations with Christoph Schlingensief, Anja Behrens, Søs Gunver, Anna-Sophie Mahler, Krystian Lupa, Alexander Giesche, and Bram Jansen. From 2018 to 2020, she was a postgraduate student in exmedia at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM, DE). Since 2021 she is engaged in practice-based artistic research on Sounding out Identities of the Artificial Voice with Adrian Heathfield, P.A. Skantze, and Angus Carlyle (GB).
www.verenalercher.com

_{photo: Trond Lossius}

Andrea Parkins is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer, and electroacoustic musician who engages with interactive electronics as compositional/performative process. She is known for her pioneering gestural/textural approach on her electronically processed accordion and investigation of embodiment and chance with her custom-designed software instruments.
www.digitalinberlin.de/andrea-parkins