June in Buffalo 2022 Senior Composer: Olivier Pasquet

We are pleased to welcome Olivier Pasquet as one of the senior composers at the 2022 edition of June in Buffalo!

Olivier Pasquet is a composer, music producer and visual artist. His work is based on the writing of audio visual compositions and synesthesia. His generative pieces are minimalistic and maximalistic at the same time and contextualized within rationalist theory-fictions. The latter can be deciphered through singular pieces or the overall artistic research. The formal and plastic value of his work provides strong links with geometry, architectural and algorithmic designs. His compositions can be sound-based, visual or material. Olivier Pasquet first practices music writing on his own. After composition studies in Cambridge with Richard Hoadley, lectures with Trevor Wishart and Iannis Xenakis, he works in several popular music studios and does a short visit at INA-GRM. 

He got his PhD in musical composition and non-standard architecture at Huddersfield University with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay. He orientates his work toward staged, contemporary music and media art. He collaborates with a wide variety of other artists mostly at IRCAM-Centre Pompidou for several decades. He confronts his sonic compositions with reality thru performance art; dance, opera, music and contemporary theatre. His pieces also materialize themselves under the form of plastic installations and purely electronic music. They are played, sometimes danced, in concert halls, galleries, clubs, or specific sites worldwide. 

Olivier Pasquet taught interactive arts and computational design at Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs, theater-music at Théâtre National de Strasbourg etc. He also has been, or is, guest professor at the National Taiwan University of the Arts, the Hochschule der Künste Bern or NY Buffalo University. He has been a researcher at Tokyo University with Philippe Codognet, Keio and Buffalo with David Felder. He worked at Sony CSL and Ableton as a consultant. He received several prizes and residencies such as Villa Médicis, Tokyo Wonder Site, Arcadi, residencies both in Chili and Taiwan. He received the Creative Art Initiative for Frank Lloyd Wright and Toshiko Mori’s buildings in 2018, the FB price for “Momemtum of AI Creation” in 2021. Besides commissions, he is currently research associate at the Zurich University of the Arts’ Institute for Computer Music and part of the European Flucoma research project.

Olivier Pasquet's work can be found here.