Pianist, composer, and technologist Zubin Kanga is at the forefront of curating and creating interdisciplinary musical programmes which seek to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies. In 2020, following his appointment as Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway University, Kanga was awarded a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, funding a 4-year research project, Cyborg Soloists. As Director and Principal Investigator, Kanga, together with a host of collaborators, is unlocking new possibilities in music making through interactions with AI and machine learning; interactive visuals and VR; motion and biosensors; and new digital and hybrid instruments.
Commissioning and co-creating new works is at the centre of his practice: recent highlights include Alexander Schubert’s internet-based score WIKI-PIANO.NET, which has been performed 27 times across nine-countries, Nicole Lizée’s Scorsese Etudes which remixes scenes from the director’s films, Luke Nickel’s hhiddeenn vvoorrttiicceess, combining AI electronics/visuals, haptic metronomes and rollercoasters, and Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using an experimental KeyScanner to allow the piano to type text onto a screen like a typewriter. He has performed over 130 world premières, and performed across the UK, Europe and Australia including at hcmf//, London Contemporary Music Festival, BBC Proms, Festival Présences (France), Klang Festival (Denmark), Darmstadt (Germany), Time of Music Festival (Finland), Borealis Festival (Norway), and Melbourne Festival (Australia).
