Statement
China Blue’s work explores connectivity. Through her investigation of sound at the intersection of science and technology she is inspired by how our world is built from our sensations and perceptions. This emerging world provides not only a basis for exploring the inner world of the mind but also our senses forecasting a way to transcend their limits and connect to each other.
Biography
Author Biography – China Blue
China Blue is an internationally exhibiting and award-winning artist. She is known for her discoveries of the sounds in Saturn’s rings for NASA and the voice of the Eiffel Tower. Over the past two plus decades she has researched NASA’s Vertical Gun’s acoustics whose projectiles shoot at Mach-15, the sonics of an asteroid impact on Mars and the songs produced by our brains. With this research she explores connectivity through her installations, environments, soundwalks and her Podcast “Listening with China Blue.“
With a background in painting and media art, China Blue has exhibited in major international venues including the Venice Biennale (2019, 2024), Tokyo Experimental Media Festival (2013), and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2008). Her solo and group exhibitions span museums such as the Newport Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Aine Art Museum in Finland. Her sound-based installations and research have been supported by NASA Rhode Island Space Grant, the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute and the Canada Council for the Arts.
China Blue is the widow of Dr. Seth S. Horowitz, a Brown University neuroscientist turned planetary geologist and author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind. Through their collaborative life together, they not only created science-based artworks but also contributed to scientific advancement. Among their firsts was the recording of meteorite impacts at NASA’s Ames Vertical Gun Range, a groundbreaking sonic capture of planetary-scale simulations. Their recording of the voice of the Eiffel Tower was documented in an article in Acoustics Today. The first-ever physical 3D imaging of Beta-Amyloid plaques—the contributors to Alzheimer’s—was published in the Journal of Biomedical Graphics and Computing. Seth’s AVGR research on impacts on Mars was published in ICARUS.
As a cultural researcher and sonic investigator, China Blue is the only artist to have recorded from the NASA Ames Vertical Gun’s hypersonic impact chamber and one of very few to have turned planetary data into sound. Her collaborations with neuroscientists, physicists, and acoustic engineers position her uniquely to write a book that bridges scientific exploration and sensory experience.
China Blue has been featured in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Art in America, and Sculpture Magazine and contributed to the publications Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words, Environmental Sound Artists: In their Own Words, and A Year of Deep Listening. She has been interviewed by France 3 (TV), for the film “Com-mu-nity” produced by the Architecture Institute of America and was the featured artist for the 2006 annual meeting of the Acoustic Society of America.
She has been an invited speaker at Adobe, Creative Tech Week, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkelee School of Music, Reed College and Brown University and was an adjunct professor and Fellow at Brown University in the United States. She has been an Adviser to Rhode Island Congressman Langevin’s Committee for Art & Culture and Rhode Island State’s Art and Health Committee. She was the Founder and Director of The Engine Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing art/science dialogue.
In all her work, China Blue explores the connective tissue between perception, material, and meaning. She brings a deeply informed, poetic, and radically interdisciplinary perspective to the art of listening.
“Cassini’s Dreams…is a remarkable visual arts and sound project that is partly scientific and partly poetic,”
says NY Art Critic Lilly Wei
“as China Blue demonstrates…nothing is still nor silent, the void is filled with the sounds of in-commensurable invisible forces that can be heard by those who listen to them.”
states NY Art Historian, Stephanie Jeanjean
“China Blue’s work… has returned to the subject matter of nature in an effort to find either
new meaning or create new metaphors…”
Jill Conner, New York Editor, Whitehot Magazine and contributor to Art in America and Sculpture
“China Blue (is) a forerunner in the … contemporary sound art movement.” Edward Rubin, Sculpture magazine
About China Blue’s Sound Objects “Holding sound gives form to breath”
states: Andrea Nann, Dreamwalker Dance Co.
RISCA Panel: The panel was unanimously enthusiastic about awarding this applicant the Fellowship Award.
The works employ technology in new and interesting ways and … the only one to explore robotics.