The Experimental Sound Program (ESP) is a brand-new artist development program rooted in artistic discourse and our commitment to supporting communities of experimental practice.
The 2026 ESP artists have been invited to contribute to a 1-week lab environment, and undertake a process of exchange and new work development with each other and audiences.
Performance Space is excited to announce the participants in our 2026 Experimental Sound Program;
Archie Barry
Archie Barry is an artist working with video, performance and music composition. They work to rearrange time as a base medium in order to induce heightened states of being. By tuning into histories and experiences that do not easily map onto the ‘seen’ or the rational, they imagine ways of being beyond visibility and representation. The vivid, unsettling personas and situations in Barry’s artworks prioritise sensing above making sense, drawing from personal experiences of loss, near death and a politics of trans liberation.
Their artwork has been presented in solo exhibitions at Western Front (Vancouver, 2025), the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), The Heide Museum of Modern Art (2021) and Blindside Gallery (2019), and in a range of group settings across so-called Australia including at The Samstag Museum of Art (2022), The Monash University Museum of Art (2021 - 2022), The National Gallery of Victoria (2021, 2019), Artspace (2018), The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022, 2020, 2018, 2017) and Contemporary Art Tasmania (2019) amongst other spaces.
Brian Fuata
Brian Fuata is an artist working across performance, moving image, installation, sound and correspondence. Established in Australia’s experimental performance scene in the early 2000s through monologues and structured improvisations, he develops works through close readings of the social, material and temporal conditions of a site. These conditions are conducted through spoken word, conversation, vocals and movement into affective live events.
A key body of work is the ghost performances (2012–2022), in which the act of donning a white sheet became a methodology for treating the gallery as an open studio and the exhibition as a process of composition. This approach informed projects including APPARITIONAL CHARLATAIN Minor Appearances for NIRIN: Biennale of Sydney (2020) and Errantucation (mist opportunities) for the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2020–22), later reanimated at the Seoul Museum of Art (2024). Recent works include Margins, Shadows Rockbund Museum Shanghai; Minor Gestures (Instruction & Entertainment) ART SG and AGSA, Adelaide Biennial 2026
Jane Sheldon
Jane Sheldon is an Australian-American soprano and composer. Jane’s 2022 album I am tree, I am a mouth was listed on the New Yorker's Notable Recordings of that year, alongside the Berlin Radio Symphony and Björk. Flowermuscle is her most recent release.
With an international reputation for highly specialized contemporary opera and art music for voice, Jane's own music shows the influence of the avant garde. Described as “riveting” (New York Times) and “gripping and expressive” (Financial Times), Jane’s work focuses on the experience of altered or transformative states of being and her output includes electronic music, chamber music, opera installations, works for dance companies, and large-scale sound installations for museums. She works extensively with other composers as they create new works for voice, touring the globe with John Zorn from 2012-2017, and frequently premiering new works with Sydney Chamber Opera, where she is an Artistic Associate.
She has sung at the Louvre, the Barbican, the Guggenheim, and the Sydney Opera House and performed at Lincoln Center Festival, Sydney Festival, Jerusalem Sacred Music Festival, Holland Festival, and Tokyo Festival. She holds a PhD in music composition from the University of Sydney. Highlights of 2026 include Liza Lim's The Oresteia (Sydney Chamber Opera), Ambient Church's 10th Anniversary show in NYC, and a new performance installation for the Finnish National Gallery's Kiasma Theatre.
Joel Stern
Dr Joel Stern is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist, researcher and curator working across experimental music, sound art and live media performance. He is Lecturer in Media in RMIT University’s School of Media and Communication, where he was a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow from 2022 to 2025.
His practice explores the politics and poetics of listening, moving through the unstable terrain between the synthetic and the real—where voices are cloned, sounds are repeated and transformed, and meaning fractures under pressure. Working with modular synthesis, generative systems and voice, Stern’s performances unfold as dense, shifting assemblages of noise, text and rhythm. Fragments of speech emerge and dissolve; patterns loop, stutter and mutate; signals drift between legibility and abstraction. Drawing on traditions of improvisation, text-sound composition and electronic music, his work probes how technologies of reproduction—including sampling, synthesis and machine listening—reshape perception, memory and expression.
In 2020, Stern co-founded Machine Listening with Sean Dockray and James Parker. The collaborative platform works across performance, installation, writing, software, pedagogy, radio and curatorial practice, examining the politics of datasets and algorithmic systems. From 2013 to 2022, Stern was Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture, establishing it as a leading platform for sonic art and experimental listening. He has performed extensively in Australia and internationally, and his work has appeared at institutions and festivals including Unsound, Soft Centre, Melbourne Recital Centre, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, RMIT Design Hub and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
Mara Schwerdtfeger
Mara is a composer and curator based in Eora Sydney. Working across live performance, film, dance, and exhibition contexts, Mara cultivates an intuitive approach to sound-making, uncovering emotional depth in the details of everyday sound. Combining viola, field recordings, and digital processes, her compositional practice finds focus in the convergence of environments, memory and sonic artefacts.
As a curator, she has presented live music programs including Fountain Chorus (2022, 2025); group exhibitions — Cycles (2021, Sheffer); Gathering Geographies (2022, Darren Knight Gallery); Building the Palace (2023, Blindside) — and hosts the radio programs Absorbed Terrain on Radio Worm and The Bridge on fbi.radio.
Nicole Smede
Nicole Smede is a warrimay and cross-cultural multidisciplinary artist based on Wadi Wadi Dharawal Country, working across sound, voice, poetry and installation. Her practice explores the interrelationship between land, language and memory, guided by ancestral knowledge. Through immersive installations, soundscapes, compositions and poetic works, she invites deep listening as a form of connection, restoration and return to Country and knowing. Her compositions have been commissioned by leading festivals and ensembles including Canberra International Music Festival, Ensemble Offspring, and River City Voices. Her voice features on award-winning soundtracks such as Goldstone and Black Cockatoo Crisis, and her poetry appears in Guwayu: For All Times and Australian Poetry Journal, amongst others.
Nicole has been the recipient of several residencies, fellowships and awards through APRA AMCOS, Creative Australia, Bundanon, The Lock-Up, The Lake House, ANU, Canberra International Music Festival and Ensemble Offspring and is a member of International First Nations Advisory Sounds of Gathering. Nicole is a founding member of Mudjingaal Yangamba, a Yuin based koori women’s collective dedicated to revitalising language, cultural expression and personal stories through song. Nicole’s work is held in national collections and her compositions are represented by the Australian Music Centre.
Sage Pbbbt
Sage Pbbbt is a vocal improviser based in Boorloo (Perth). She uses a lot of what people often call ‘extended vocal technique’. (But she has some feelings about that phrase.) Her music is influenced by feminist, queer and trans theory. It is also steeped in ritual magick, insight meditation and anarchism.
She is also Sage J Harlow—a composer of text scores and writer of poetry. Her first text score opera called O,D,E was produced by Tone List in 2025. She can be quite silly. She tries to be kind.
Sonya Holowell
Sonya Holowell is a Dharawal vocalist, improviser and writer. For over a decade Sonya’s expansive vocal practice has woven avant-garde world premieres with electro-acoustic experiments with medieval chant and spontaneous long-form composition. She explores the plural self in its network of relations, directed toward truth and emancipation. She enjoys bringing this mantle to collaboration as artist, board member and consultant.
Sonya performs regularly with modular synthesist Ben Carey in their duo Sumn Conduit, and is a PhD candidate in Indigenist Artistic Research.
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