rdwr:oeuvre

rachel devorah wood rome



wicked|hallowed (2025) site-specific installation for autoklavierspieler and immersive audio at IEM, Graz

wicked|hallowed for the autoklavierspieler (MIDI-controlled mechanical piano) and 5.1 audio entangles acoustic and digital algorithmic rituals between Boston—the home of the artist and of actor Mark Wahlberg—and Graz—the home of the autoklavierspieler in the Institute of Electronic Music (IEM) and 18th-century theorist Johann Joseph Fux.

Wahlberg’s Hollywood ascent has paralleled the mainstreaming of white Christian nationalism in the United States. As sociologist Andrew L. Whitehead defines it, white Christian nationalism is “a cultural framework that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life” in order to preserve hierarchies of race and gender (Whitehead, 2022).

Between 1986 and 1992, Wahlberg was charged with three racially motivated hate crimes in Boston (where the word wicked serves as emphatic slang). Since then, he has rebranded himself through public performances of penitence—capitalized by lending his voice to Hallow, a popular Catholic prayer phone application (downloaded 23 million times between 2018 and 2025) in which he holds an equity stake.

The installation stages a confrontation between agentic devotions by juxtaposing SuperCollider-transfigured samples of Wahlberg’s voice from Hallow with SuperCollider-generated realizations of William Schottstaedt’s Automatic Species Counterpoint (1984), a C encoding of Fuxian counterpoint rules. These rituals—ancient and modern, acoustic and digital, sacred and profane—operate together within a shared space of uneasy reverence.



jaden piblik (2025) electroacoustic soundwalk for the Boston Public Garden

A diverse collection of plants from around the world live together in the Boston Public Garden, embodying the ideals and contradictions of the United States. Heralded as the "first public botanical garden in the United States," this historic site reflects a uniquely American paradox: the aspiration for multicultural democratic inclusivity juxtaposed with the tenants of colonialism. Nature is not left to thrive on its own terms but meticulously curated, shaped to conform to Victorian notions of beauty and order. jaden piblik is an electroacoustic soundwalk setting of the Haitian-Cantabrigian poet Jacques Fleury's Haitian-Creole translation of the English-language poem "Treeness" by Jason Allen-Paisant. The work bridges languages and traditions, resonating with the complex, layered histories embodied in the Public Garden itself.



Devorah/Schmidt (2024-present) improvising duo



Devorah/Koen (2024-present) improvising duo



Devorah/Graham (2022-present) improvising duo



glacial til|green hill (2024) solo ep

tape release by impractical labor in service of the speculative arts/cele sound, listen to an excerpt here

traces cycles of fallowness and fertility, peaks and plateaus, in the Massachusetts spaces that the artist attempts to grow with/in



rilf (2023) solo electronics improvisation structure



psalter ex machina (2023) solo album

digital release on cele sound, listen here

art makes us human. when a machine makes art, it challenges that axiom.
these works for midi-controlled acoustic organs, acoustic instruments, and electronics explore the spaces between human and machine art-making practices.



believe (2023) text score

for 'Post-Score' at co-opt research & projects



⤊⥁ta (2020-2023) a/v livecoding trio

rachel devorah - sound;
carl testa - sound;
melanie wilson - image.



bonvenon (2022) audio-visual improvisation structure for French horn and electronics



zatzal (of the golden west) (2021) audio-visual fixed media



radiant drift (2020) 'solo' album

digital release pan y rosas discos, listen here

Pregnant with the fetus who would become my daughter, I made hydrophone recordings from my cervix periodically between viability and birth.
radiant drift accounts for the relative motion of my daughter and me in spacialized audio as we individuated in gestation. The literal hydrophone recordings are set in counterpoint against a poetic rendering in analog electronics.



"Resonant Sonic Specificity." PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2018. https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/public_view/tb09j6186



cybird drone (2018) audio-visual fixed media



palladian (2018) audio-visual fixed media



objectify (2017) sounding sculpture



"overmorrow" in Feminist Media Histories 3, no.3 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.3.173



"Ocularcentrism, Androcentrism" in parallax 23, no.3 (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339969



offal (2015-2020) improvising ensemble

orchestra for femmes & laptops



blood moon (2014-2016) improvising quartet

matthew burtner - soprano saxophone;
kevin davis - cello;
ryan maguire - pedal steel guitar;
rachel devorah- horn.



aorist (2014-2022) improvising trio

kimberley a. sutton - cello & electronics;
kristina warren - voice & electronics;
rachel devorah - horn & electronics;



"Absence (2013) by Rachel Devorah" in Emergency Index 3 (2014).



"Listening beyond language: Annea Lockwood's The Glass Concert (1967--70)." Master's thesis, Mills College, 2013. Proquest (1537722).



andrew weathers ensemble (2013-2015) improvising ensemble

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other/older works on archive.org