Matchess

Booking Agent : Ricky Biondetti & Giorgio Salmoiraghi

Whitney Johnson is a sound artist living in Chicago. She composes, performs, and installs multi-channel sound with viola, sine waves, Max/MSP, organ, synthesizers, vocalization, tape looping, and field recording.

As artist-in-residence at Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and Inkonst in Malmö, Sweden, her latest LP, Hav (2024, Drag City), composed sine waves, marimba, viola, ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and Halldorophone into a multi-channel performance-installation. As Matchess, the Stena cassette (2024, Drag City) embodies an alter ego to join the cult of Hermaphroditus in Cypriot and Greek antiquity.

Recent performance-installations FIAT (2025, Roulette Intermedium and 2023, Forecast Platform Berlin), The Tuning of the Elements (2023, Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago), Huizkol (2020, Lampo), and Fundamental 256 Hz (2019, Longform Editions) consider the possibility of brainwave entrainment, an alternative healing technique using binaural beats to induce relaxed or energized mental states.

These works offer audiences the chance to explore their own skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on bodies and minds. In tandem with her sound practice, she received her doctorate in the sociology of sound from the University of Chicago in 2018. In 2022, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship on sound and technology in the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, and she is an artist-in-residence at Q-O2 Brussels in 2025.

She is currently Assistant Professor of Art and Technology/Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Tourdates

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