My practice begins with sound, approaching it not as accompaniment to the visual but as a central element in my thinking, sensing, and relating. Working across sound, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, I build systems that test how bodies, objects, and environments register one another through processes of sonic translation and relation.

Much of my work focuses on the distinction between hearing and listening. I am interested in forms of sonic communication that do not rely entirely on language, yet still register social, cultural, and interpersonal relations. Many of my works examine how sound marks presence, structures encounters, and mediates relation across bodies, spaces, and distances. By translating light, motion, text, ambient noise, and speech into sonic or kinetic form, I create works in which listening becomes embodied, relational, and materially situated.

Through interactive and electronically responsive works, I use custom circuitry, sensing technologies, and networked systems to make sound perceptible beyond the auditory alone. In these works, vibration can distort an image, ambient sound can inscribe a record, silence can be registered through interruption, and bodily presence, proximity, or gesture can activate, modulate, or transmit sound.

Repetition, translation, accumulation, and feedback recur throughout my practice, alongside an ongoing attention to time, duration, and delay. I am interested in how sonic events move between media, materials, and bodies, and in how technological systems shape the social and cultural conditions of that movement. I approach technology as a site of mediation through which relations among presence and absence, proximity and distance, labour, memory, and exchange can be felt. Across sound, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, my work uses sonic material to probe how perception is organised and how relations among bodies, objects, and environments may be sensed, measured, and reimagined.

BIOGRAPHY

Christopher Dela Cruz is a Philippine-born, Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist working across sound, sculpture, installation, performance, code, and video. His practice investigates sonic signatures and how sound registers presence, identity, and relation across bodies, objects, environments, and sonic cultures. Working through electronics, kinetic forms, custom circuitry, and algorithmic systems, he explores listening, translation, and intercultural communication through interactive and electronically responsive forms. Dela Cruz is currently the Arts, Culture and Media Technician at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Audio Director of Festival Italiano di Johnny Lombardi at CHIN Radio/TV International.

CURRICULUM VITAE (CONDENSED)