Trimpin biography
- Biography.
- Trimpin (born Gerhard Trimpin) (born 1951) is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle and Tieton, Washington.
- Trimpin is an internationally acclaimed composer, musician, visual artist, and inventor.
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Trimpin (b. 1951)
- By Sheila Farr
- Posted 4/26/2016
- HistoryLink.org Essay 11204
Gerhard Trimpin -- known since the 1960s by the single moniker Trimpin -- is an internationally acclaimed composer, musician, visual artist, and inventor. A native of Germany who has lived in Seattle since 1980, Trimpin creates extraordinary interactive installations of sound and kinetic sculpture, as well as commissioned compositions for dance, symphony, and opera. He has collaborated with the composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) and with the Kronos Quartet, the Eliot Feld Dance Company, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, among many others. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, and is the subject of the documentary film Trimpin: The Sound of Invention (Esmonde, 2009) and the book Trimpin: Contraptions for Art and Sound (University of Washington Press, 2011). His 2011 opera, The Gurs Zyklus, was commissioned by Stanford University, where he was artist in residence, and funded by Creative Capital, New York. The Seattle Symphony commissioned his site-specific
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Trimpin
Trimpin (born Gerhard Trimpin)[1] (born 1951) is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle and Tieton, Washington.
Trimpin's work integrates sculpture and sound across a variety of media including fixed installation and live music, theater, and dance performance. His works are known to be electromechanically actuated by embedded microcontrollers that communicate digitally through MIDI.[2]
Early life
Trimpin grew up in Istein, now part of Efringen-Kirchen, near the French and Swiss borders.[3][4] He is a native speaker of Alemannisch[4] and the son of a brass and woodwind player.[5] As a child he had access to old brass instruments to experiment with. He played brass instruments himself, but developed an allergy to metal that affected his lips and made him give up playing.[6][7] Trimpin's father treated him to spatial musical experiences, playing at some distance in the German woods, and young Trimpin experimented with old radio
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Trimpin is a German-born composer and sound artist who has lived and worked in Seattle since 1979. His sound sculptures, installations and set designs have been commissioned by artists as diverse as Merce Cunningham, Samuel Beckett and the Kronos Quartet. These works have been exhibited locally, nationally and inte
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