The Art of Sound and Image: a conversation with Maile Costa Colbert

Inside the episode with Mitch Hampton:

I have known Maile Colbert personally for more than a decade, originally going back to the days when I frequented Mass Art Film Society where she presented some of her very first work, including a film about artist Sophie Calle, and my interest in some of the faculty at CalArts with whom she studied, including James Benning. Maile Colbert, like so many of the guests at Journey Of An Aesthete, is an artist whose work involves the aesthetic itself, but for what it reveals about us.

She is unique in that her art focuses on what I would call the textures of sensory life. She works in what is sometimes called experimental sound and does sound design for her own projects as well as those of others. She also makes film and video and has created an opera, Come Kingdom Come. She is interested in what the world sounds and looks like and what, as elements of "found" nature and created culture, the experience of our senses tells us about what it is to be human at this point in our collective history. Equally serious about and sensitive to the visuals and sounds of life, her work defies all traditional categories or genres and urges us to pay greater attention to the environment around us.

Maile’s Bio:

Maile Costa Colbert  is  an  intermedia  artist, researcher, and educator with a focus on audio-visual time-based media. She is currently a PhD Research Fellow in Artistic Studies with a concentration on sound studies, cinematic sound design, and its relationship with soundscape ecology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, through the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, and a visiting lecturer at the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto. Her current practice and research project is titled, Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place (http://www.mailecolbert.com/proj-wayback.html), and asks what we might gather from listening to and sounding a past. She is a collaborator with the Portuguese art and culture organization Binaural (www.binauralmedia.org), a member of CineLab, IFILNOVA's research lab for cinema and philosophy (www.fcsh.unl.pt), and is an editor and author at Sonic Field - sonic arts, sound studies, and listening culture (http://sonicfield.org/author/mailecolbert/). She has exhibited, screened, and performed globally.

For an extended look at this episode, links to artists mentioned, more about Maile, visit our show Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/journeyofanaesthetepodcast/

You can view, read, and listen to more of her work here:  www.mailecolbert.com