Biography
Stelios Manousakis (Crete, Greece) is a composer, live-electronics performer, researcher and sound designer. In these capacities he strives to develop a new musical language that is both visceral and cerebral; that communicates in a purely cognitive and experiential level while at the same time being complex and multilayered.
Stelios operates in the convergence zone between art and science, composition and performance, Western art music and ‘digital folk’ idioms. He mostly composes electronic, electroacoustic and electro-instrumental music using software that he designs, and is interested in applying complexity science, cybernetic and biology-inspired Artificial Life models to generate novel musical systems and non-standard sound synthesis methods, often merging algorithmic finesse with the expressivity of improvisation and the immediacy of real-time interaction. This approach extends from fixed medium pieces to Open compositions to interactive multimedia installations and sound art pieces - an area that Stelios has begun exploring during his time in DXARTS.
Besides his solo work, Stelios is a founding member of several electro-instrumental ensembles and multimedia groups.
Stelios studied accordion, piano, music theory and linguistics in Greece and received a Master's Degree from the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands. He is currently teaching and pursuing a PhD at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) in the University of Washington, Seattle.