Paul DeMarinis

Paul DeMarinis (b. 1948, Cleveland) studied film with Paul Sharits at Antioch College before earning an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College in 1973, studying composition with Robert Ashley and Terry Riley. In the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s he joined the League of Automatic Music Composers, among the first musicians to network home microcomputers together for live improvised performance. His subsequent solo work turned toward obsolete recording and communication technologies as compositional material — The Edison Effect scans phonograph records with lasers rather than a stylus, while Gray Matter and Firebirds build sound from live electrical and combustive processes. He won the Golden Nica Award for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 2006 for his installation The Messenger, and has taught at Mills College, Wesleyan University, San Francisco State University, and, since the early 2000s, Stanford University.