Grainger Creative Research Residency 2023 - Monica Lim

Monica Lim – SIMULACRA (July to December 2023)

We live in an age of Simulacra, where versions of ourselves are created, multiplied, stored, transformed and shared, often without our knowledge or consent. We fear losing our humanness, individually and as a species, not knowing whether the thing we encounter is real or merely a symbol of what was once real.

Ideas of simulacra, copying and repetition appear in the Grainger Museum’s collection and Percy Grainger’s musical output with striking frequency. These range from the multiple iterations of his own compositions to myriad typed duplicates of letters and archival documents, endless hectograph and photostat copies of scores, to replications of the physical form in photographs and mannequins.

As part of the Grainger Museum’s Creative Research in Residency program, Simulacra will be an amalgamation between resident researcher Monica Lim, the Grainger Museum and students from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA Dance and the School of Computing and Information Systems in much the same way that Artificial Intelligence is the amalgamation of many peoples’ bodies, knowledge, thoughts and creativity.

Biography:

Monica is a Melbourne-based sound artist, researcher and composer. She is interested in cross-disciplinary forms and the intersection of new technologies with music. Her work spans and combines theatre, contemporary dance, installations, video, ensemble performance, Extended Reality, AI and gaming technology, and has been presented at Arts House, AsiaTOPA, Science Gallery Melbourne, White Night, Melbourne Fringe, Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, Liquid Architecture and Arts Centre Melbourne as well as international symposiums such as ISEA (International Symposium for Electronic Arts) and NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). She has worked extensively in cross-cultural collaborations, particularly with artists from Southeast Asia, with a deep curiosity about cultural traditions and their potential collision with new technologies in order to break down false divisions between traditional/new media art.

Monica is currently undertaking her PhD in Interactive Composition at the University of Melbourne, researching the body as a site for participatory sound-making. She is part of the research team at VCA Dance’s TrakLAB and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics. Within the community, Monica serves on the boards of the Melbourne Recital Centre, the Substation and Liquid Architecture and is co-founder of Project Eleven, a philanthropic initiative which supports the contemporary arts.