Seth Cluett is an artist, composer, and scholar whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. His "subtle…seductive, immersive" (Artforum) work has been characterized as "rigorously focused and full of detail" (e/i) and "dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature" (The Wire). Exploring the territory between the senses, Cluett's works are marked by a detailed attention to perception and to the role of sound in the creation of a sense of place and the workings of memory. His research interests and critical writings investigate embodied cognition, sound in virtual and augmented reality, computational creativity, the media history of the loudspeaker, and architectural acoustics.
His work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Kill Your Timid Notion at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland; the Ars Electronica Festival and Alte Schmiede in Austria; the 10th Rencontres Internationales and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; Hebbel am Ufer Theater and Staalplaat in Berlin; the Osage Art Foundation/October Contemporary in Hong Kong; The Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1 in New York; the Institute for Contemporary Art and Non-Event in Boston; the Betty Rymer and Deadtech Galleries in Chicago; as well as Swarm Gallery in Oakland, CA and the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY. An active improviser, Cluett has performed with Composers Inside Electronics, Daniel Carter, Okkung Lee, Zeena Parkins, Pauline Oliveros, Marina Rosenfeld, Keith Rowe, Laurie Spiegel, Stephen Vitiello, and Christian Wolff amongst others.
Cluett has published book chapters for MIT Press and Rowman & Littlefield, articles for the Leonardo Music Journal and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, and his work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Line, Sedimental, and Winds Measure Recordings. The recipient of grants and awards from The Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Fund, NYSCA, and Meet the Composer, he holds an MFA in electronic art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a doctorate in music composition with a graduate certificate in Media & Modernity Studies from Princeton University where he was a fellow at the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Study.
Prior to Columbia, Cluett was Assistant Professor of Music Production and Co-Director of the Krame Center for Contemplative Practices and Mindful Living at Ramapo College of New Jersey and held a joint-appointment as Assistant Professor of Visual Arts & Technology and Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology where he was Director of the Sensory Computation/Experimental Narrative Environments (SCENE) Lab researching immersive digital media. At Columbia, Cluett is on the composition faculty in the Department of Music and affiliate faculty with the Center for Comparative Media and is Director of the Computer Music Center and Assistant Director of the Sound Art MFA Program. Since 2017 he has served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs where he is active in research on acoustics and computational intelligence.