PETER CHAMBERLAIN
Professor

Peter Chamberlain received an MFA in metals from SUNY New Paltz, an MA in sound-sculpture from Suny Albany, and a Post Graduate Certificate in installation and performance from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC, Canada.  He has been teaching some form of electronic arts full time since 1977.  He taught sculpture, electronic arts, and contemporary art history/criticism at Elmira College in NY for 15 years.  In 1991 he moved to Oahu to help restructure, update, and direct the Art Department's core program and design and implement Electronic Arts courses at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Chamberlain's solid backgrounds in the areas of sculpture, music, and electronic media allow him to intermix elements of both hard and soft media with reasonable facility and finesse.  He has logged extensive experience in applying these skills toward the production of intermedia works that metaphorically reflect and question unlikely juxtaposition of cultural, natural, and technological elements.

His first interactive installation was produced at Electronic Body Arts in Albany, NY in 1976.  Since, he has exhibited interactive electro-kinetic and intermedia work throughout the continental US, in Vancouver, Canada, in Mexico City, in Essen and Munich, W.Germany, in Melbourne, AUS, and in Hawai'i.  He has lectured on this work in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, continental US, and Hawai'i.  In November 2000 he exhibited three interactive sound sculptures in Sonic Residues 2, an international invitational exhibition and performance series featuring 25 artists from 7 countries at the Melbourne Museum of Art in Australia.

Since 2001, while continuing his sculptural experiments, he has rekindled his interest in music production and shifted focus to working with Mokaki, a group of “rapidly aging activist poets, artists, and musicians” who record weekly at the Mokaki Lounge and perform at special interest activist venues on Oahu.   He maintains multiple roles as keyboardist, technical director for performances, recording engineer and keeper of the studio, and also designs and constructs sculptural instruments and amplification devices that serve as functional stage props for performances.

More images of his work can be found at:
www.peterchamberlain.net