Nicole L'Huillier

Nicole L’Huillier is a transdisciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile, currently based in Boston, United States. Through sound, vibrations, resonances, and multiple transductions, her work explores more-than-human performativity, from microscopic to cosmic scales; rituals of membranal and resonant architectures; as well as vibration and sound as construction materials for spaces, collectivity, identity, and agency. She works at the intersection of music, art, architecture, science, fiction, and technology to explore the pluriverse and alien imaginaries we are woven into. She is also an experimental musician, drummer, and one-half of the space pop duo Breaking Forms. Nicole is currently a PhD candidate and research assistant at MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future group, she also holds a Master in Media Arts & Sciences (2017) from MIT Media Lab.

Nicole was awarded the First Prize for the MIT 2020 Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize in the Visual Arts, also a DAAD fellowship as part of the Transnational Sound Initiative (TSI), and she was the winner of the 2019 Residencia Simetría, an artistic research residency at CERN, ESO Observatory, and ALMA Observatory. She has exhibited and performed at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Sónar +D, Ars Electronica, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA), SXSW, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Bienal de Artes Mediales Chile, Museo de Bellas Artes Santiago, Chile, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Santiago (MAC), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA), Guggenheim Museum, Bienal de Arquitetura São Paulo, Centro Cultural GAM Santiago, among others. 

Nicole L'Hullier was with Alan Bogana the first artists in residence of Simetría: a programme established by Arts at CERN and Corporación Chilena de Video and supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in the context of its programme COINCIDENCIA – Swiss & South American Cultural Exchanges. Simetría is a shared residency programme that enables two artists in collaboration, to explore the relationship between astronomy and particle physics, at the CERN, and in Chile, the VLT (Very Large Telescope) observatory and ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO).

During her residency, L'Huillier created La PARACANTORA: a ravelling sonic sculpture that she installed at CERN in the LHC ALICE Detector in Switzerland; the ALMA Observatory OSF, Atacama Desert, Chile; and Paranal Observatory ESO, Atacama Desert, Chile in 2019.