Philip Samartzis

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Philip Samartzis is a Melbourne based sound artist, scholar, and curator with a specific interest in the social and environmental conditions informing remote wilderness regions and their communities. His art practice is based on deep fieldwork where he deploys complex sound recording technology to capture natural, anthropogenic, and geophysical forces. The recordings are used within various exhibition and performance outcomes to demonstrate the transformative effects of sound within a contemporary art context. He is particularly interested in concepts of perception, immersion, and embodiment to provide audiences with sophisticated encounters of space and place.

Philip is the recipient of three Australian Antarctic Territory Fellowships which he is using to construct a sound map of Eastern Antarctica. His project Polar Force produced in collaboration with Speak Percussion received a Honorary Mention for the Digital Musics and Sound Art Category at the 2019 Prix Ars Electronica. In 2021 Philip was selected by Australia Post to appear on the $2.20 stamp to commemorate the Australian Antarctic Arts program.

In 2019, Philip was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowship to undertake research at the High Altitude Research Centre at Jungfraujoch. His high alpine research has been featured in the New York Times, Deutsche Welle Radio, Swiss Info and Les Temps news services and exhibited in China and Japan (2019) and Switzerland and Australia (2021). Philip was recently awarded a Creative Australia International Engagement grant to register the subterranean sonics of Valais in collaboration with the Verbier 3-D Foundation, and the Valais School of Art.