Sophea Lerner is an Australian sonic media artist and broadcaster based in India.
She is currently affiliated with Sarai-CSDS in New Delhi, where she is engaged in practice based research towards a Doctor of Creative Arts at University of Technology, Sydney. Lerner's work brings together experience in group devised physical performance with many years of experimental radio and new media art into a collaborative art practice which explores mediated temporal experience.
From 2002-7 she ran media and sonic arts courses at the Centre for Music & Technology in Helsinki where she directed the experimental open content fm/hybrid broadcast project ääniradio in Helsinki from 2004 and the particle/wave festival of hybrid radio in 2005.
Her radiomaking encompasses intricately composed radiophonic projects as well as engineering and production and collectively devised, rapidly executed semi-improvised live broadcasts. Community and creative networks are integral to collaborative aspects of her practice. The focus of her current research is sound in public space, sustainable sonic arts practices in urban contexts and distributed participatory live radio practices.
As instigator of the foodradio_network she has led participatory broadcast projects such as Recipe for Radio at Electrofringe festival in Australia in which ABC Radio National was opened up for public online remix and Snack City, New Delhi an open call in based project exploring the appreciation and endangerment of street food in the Indian capital, as well as where_are_we_eating? & grilliradio at ISEA2004.
'signal | process' workshop on sound in public space was presented in Helsinki through MUU media arts association & at ISEA 06 San Jose, Pro Arte Institute in St. Petersburg. Recently she has contributed an exploration of contamination of the river Yamuna as part of La Radia festival, multi-city mobile sonic collaboration 'Shift' to project Ctrl-Alt-Del Radio in Istanbul and .00011574 Hz to Radio Action III CD by free103point9 & MACBA.
She has had numerous works commissioned and broadcast by ABC Radio Arts and also has extensive experience with community broadcasting. She was Australia council New Media Arts Fellow at The Listening Room (ABC Acoustic Art Unit) during 1998. Sophea's hybrid installation / performance practice has included a number of complex collaborative projects such as Dream a Little Dream Machine, a soiree for obsolete audio technologies (1996), Interactive story-jar installations for the Australian National Maritime Museum (1993-94) and A Journey by Telephone (1995) - for which she convened and directed 20+ performers of The Wireless Telephone Ensemble across several time zones in a live broadcast with studio audience. She has explored audience interaction through gestural performance in The Glass Bell, a large scale gesturally responsive interactive audio work for large glass water-screen exhibited at Next Wave and d>Art festivals in Australia during 2002 and which toured Australia and New Zealand in 2002/3 as The Lost Bell.
Sophea has held various roles in community media (print & radio) and founded Brighton CROW (community radio open workshop) in 1989. She has participated in international media arts residencies in Finland (Polar Circuit) and Australia (Alchemy: ANAT; Triple Alice 2; Solar Circuit), India (Khoj Workshop & Sarai) and has presented papers on audio and new media internationally and taught at universities and workshops in Australia and the UK and Finland. Sophea is a free103point9 transmission artist and an associate member of the Centre for Media Arts Innovation, University of Technology, Sydney.