Grant Cutler (b. USA 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist working in sound, expanded cinema, and photography, across installation and performance. His current work emphasizes listening as a spiritual-erotic experience through the creation of environments, objects, and films that give dimension to that which is often weightless or invisible. His projects test the threshold of awareness, recenter ecological narratives, and express the palatial silence of the American West.
His work has been featured by the Guggenheim’s CPA commission series, Baryshnikov Art Center, Wave Farm, Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, HoloCenter, NPR, Pitchfork, BBC, WNYC, and many others. His award-winning scores have been exhibited at film festivals world-wide including Tribeca, Ashland Independent, Sound Unseen, and Paris International.
Cutler holds an MFA in interdisciplinary arts and lives/works in Brooklyn, New York.
Sound & Music works are distributed by GruenRekorder, Aether Sound, Innova, and BandCamp. Select video work can be found on Vimeo.
Selected Projects
Untitled #14 - from Nevada Series (2023)Installation view of Silence at Task Gallery (2019)GC working in Big Sur, California
Photo by Al Oxborough (2024)Ocean with Spirit-Patterns (2025) integrates field-recordings from cold-water islands with abstract minimal-animation together in an immersive dual-channel video installation which challenges the viewer to reimagine their relationship to their environments through deep listening and trance-viewing.
The work is meditative, deliberately slow (at tidal pace) impressionistic and colorful - exposing the depth and density of ecological soundscapes while de-centering the dominant human narrative. Reducing the visual sensory plane to color-fields and simple graphic gestures pulls the sonic to the foreground amplifying the often subtler voice in the continued dialog between nature and culture.
Our minds are conditioned to treat soundscapes as insignificant background noise against which we choose meaningful points of focus - usually relevant to human endeavors, like speech, or recognizable symbols - often cultural, spiritual, or biological. When no obvious focal point is present, it is easy for our mind to acquiesce to our own interior narratives, hoping to find a familiar voice. That is why, in this arrangement, a key is given: the slow moving shape, or icon – as a subconscious instruction to listen. When attention is placed on this drifting icon, the urgent push of interpretation, which is often experienced as a swell of anxious expectations, shielding the sensory experience, is interrupted. Listening, the embodiment of the presented sound, is then fully possible.
This project was conceptualized and developed while in residence with two organizations during the winter of 2022: the Artist Association of Nantucket,MA, and BEAST gallery in Bornholm, Denmark. Many hundreds of hours of audio field-recordings were captured in the wild areas around both locations with a focus on the unique coastal landscapes inherent to each island.
Watch an excerpt here.
Album & Video available on GruenRekorder
Untitled #7 from Playa Series (2024)GC listening by Al Oxborough (2024)Silence (2019) is an quadraphonic sound installation created from recordings captured while on a research expedition in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, arguably one of the quietest and darkest locations in the US. For the installation hundreds of hours of ambisonic recordings were edited into a seamless composition of near silent audio in an effort to highlight an integral component of the natural world that is all but lost amidst anthropogenic noise.
Listen to audio excerpts.
Read the accompanying magazine.Newsprint for Divergent Listening Installation at EPIC conference, Amsterdam (2022)
Divergent listening describes any listening practice which seeks to raise consciousness or expand on our understanding of reality through the perception of sound.
How might divergent acts of listening foster resilience in threatened environments? Can we reroute our acoustic energy toward more bio-inclusive living? How might prioritizing intentional listening practices aid in developing a more holistic relationship with earth’s ecosystems? What damage might be undone when we decolonize our sonic landscapes?
Silence: Divergent Listening in the Anthropocene (2021) is a non-durational multi-channel sound installation created from hundreds of hours of field recordings collected in endangered soundscapes throughout the world. The audio has been assembled to create a composition which pulls the background to the foreground: an attempt to de-center human hubris and highlight natural soundscapes on the edge of extinction.
The aftermath of environmental destruction is often quiet, sometimes even silent, as the life-affirming sounds of the living constituents have been removed as a matter of course. Silence offers a space of quiet reflection, a place to ask questions, share, or rest. The softness of the sounds is not meant to represent the complacency that has allowed this turmoil to continue, but rather it is an invitation to meditate on this state of affairs. It is a room to imagine a more inclusive future, a world of resilience, energized by the clamorous singing of countless life-forms.
Resilience is about adaptation, evolution, and creativity. Repairing the relationship with our natural ecosystems demands a paradigm shift - decentering human “progress” in favor of a more holistic approach to living within our environments; focusing on authentic connections rather than illusory divides. Can we re-learn the language of our ecosystems?
Listening is how we place our affections into the world. It helps us develop compassion, empathy, and understanding for our own being, our communities, and our environments. How might divergent listening ease our return to generosity and kindness for ourselves, our neighbors, and our shared world? What voices will we choose to guide us? Can we challenge ourselves to pause, take a breath, and listen before we react?
Listen to an excerpt here.
view the project website here.Disappearing (2020) is a multi-year project which culminates as a full length album and a feature length film merging 17 short films into one audio-visual cinematic experience. The completed film and album are meditative interdisciplinary explorations of temporal realignment and the dissolution of memory; the constant engagement of reworking the past to establish the present.
Watch Disappearing.
Explore the accompanying magazine.
Listen to the album on spotify, apple music, or bandcamp.Untitled #16 from Nevada Series (2023)GC Working in San Juan Islands, Washington.
Photo by Al Oxborough (2023)
Sound-Bodies (2021) is a non-durational sound installation examining the intersection of sonic resonance and metaphysical transcendence, approaching the act of listening as an erotic/spiritual experience. The term sound-body is an anthropomorphic metaphor describing the nuanced interaction of aural energies in acoustic space.
Watch an artist statement film here.Still frame image from Ocean with Spirit Patterns (2025)Triptych #4 from Playa Series (2024)There is harmony to be found in the mind’s struggle to organize thought and memory. A moment of simultaneous creation and dissipation exists; one thought fading into the next without a clear beginning or end. In remembering, each memory is altered, and rewritten in a process where distortion becomes the standard. A mercurial moment when growth becomes decay must exist, yet we cannot witness it directly, as once we’ve taken hold, it has slipped from our grasp, fading into the background, leaving a void which is immediately filled. Despite this moment's enigmatic existence we can witness its resonant presence in every remembrance and every tangential thought by tracing its reverberations as they rumble through our entropic subconscious.
With Palace (2016) the conditions for this moment of simultaneous creation and destruction have been demonstrated both visually and sonically. The colors fuse and separate, the abstract shapes swell and diminish, the continuous movements whirl ethereal and fluid. The sound is unplaceable, with rhythm, harmony, and melody all present but without a recognizable foundation. All the elements seem to breathe slowly and move at the rate of a resting heart beat.
This action of gazing after the unseeable, attempting measurement of the undefinable is an exercise in meditation. Palace is an immersive audio-visual mantra.
Watch an excerpt. Inspired by data that links radiation emissions from cell towers and 5G technology to the spectrum of biological and behavioral side effects experienced by honeybees, Honeybees & EMF Radiation: Intraspecific Transmissions Beyond The Hive (2022) is informed by processes of converting EMF radiation into sound waves. At Wave Farm, Desiree Mwalimu-Banks and Grant Cutler captured radiation waves from local bee hives using a number of electronic measurement devices and transmuted these libraries of sound into broadcast material for collaborative sound installations. The work seeks to create opportunities for education on the impact of EMF radiation within the Upper Hudson Valley landscape, while reflecting on how the bodies and complex communication systems of honeybees mirror our own. Through a series of daily field recordings, Mwalimu-Banks and Cutler explored practices of deep listening, to both the activity of honeybees inside the hive, and the reverberation of sound transmissions within the ecology of their field of resonance. Listening to the fluctuations in vibroacoustics caused by EMF radiation, may offer insight into the consequences of living in an increasingly 5G-centered world. By generating this archive of materials, Mwalimu-Banks and Cutler created psychic maps for interactive dialogue with honeybees and their transmissions on sovereignty, accountability, community, and sustainability.
Listen here and here.
Learn more about the project.Untitled #37 from California Series (2025)Thoughts Becoming Loud (2019) explores the complexity of a moment through impressionistic multimedia works: an interactive portrait, a small-edition large-scale magazine, and oversized prints.
The show’s title comes from a German diagnostic term, Gedankenlautwerden, for a patient who hears their thoughts spoken aloud as they think. The works present out-loud, and in physical space, a profusion of notions, co-existing in us within a single instant: fantasy, projection, nostalgia, memory, long-held beliefs.
What kind of machine is our mind, that can turn sensory surplus into a seemingly uninterrupted fluid stream of consciousness? Often confusing, mismatched or contradictory, it is incredible that we can make sense of what bounces around inside. Thoughts Becoming Loud is an orchestration of these abundant impressions.
The exhibition centers on a generative audio visual composition, which pulls from hundreds of audio recordings and over 30 videos to synthesize a kaleidoscopic portrait of one woman’s inner dialogue. By selecting video elements, the user determines what occupies the woman’s mind, attempting to slow, silence, focus, blend, or amplify consciousness. The piece invites users to examine the modern condition of constant distraction, by focusing on what happens in a single moment in time.
The accompanying print works make meaning of a half-decade of disparate moments. The magazine’s pages mimic the untidy process of remembering, pairing and juxtaposing impressions from a short period of life. Framed prints pull some of these impressions into focus, concentrating a sense of a life based in Middle America.
Together, the works evoke an emotional story of a moment in time: the collision of memory, cognition, and the unconscious.
The interactive website portion of the project was programmed by Colin McArdell
Watch the demo video here. Portrait of Kanchan (2015) is a reflective light-sculpture installed in the Delaware River in Upstate New York. The rectangular mirror reflects the mid-day sun to create a mirage-like glowing portal bending with the ebb and flow of the river; a collaboration of light and water. The artwork was inspired by a dream in which a voice revealed that “Kanchan is golden.”
Watch a clip here
GC working in Bornholm, Denmark.
Photo by Al Oxborough (2022)
Untitled #6 from Desert Series (2019)Lemniscate (2014) is a generative sound composition housed within an interactive website. Eight audio tracks may be played simultaneously or individually with no beginning or end. The website and media player were created specifically for this artwork in collaboration with programmer and designer Colin McArdell.
Watch the demo video here.Triptych #12 from New York Series (2024)All Filler (2016) is a generative quadraphonic audio installation. To create the source audio four vocal artists were recorded performing to a graphical score. The score instructs the performer to focus on, and emphasize, a variety of ‘in-between’ moments of speech that are often erased, edited out, or hidden in the production of mainstream voiced-audio content (podcast, audio-books, auto-tuned singing). This (typically neglected) audio is then given its moment ‘on stage’ using four audio-monitors in a square configuration, creating an immersive sound-field. Six different sonic environments (or worlds) were created to accompany the voiced audio, each with their own environmental nuances and interactions. Participants experiencing the installation are invited to immerse themselves in these sonic environments which joyfully uplift what is typically left on the cutting room floor.
Listen here.The Palace Speaker Array (2019) is a 4.4 sculptural audio-reproduction system created as a platform for showcasing immersive multi-channel sound-works. Four large speaker cabinets make up the array, each roughly 7 ft. tall and weighing 200 lbs. The speaker cabinets contain internal subwoofers and are designed to reproduce sound at the full spectrum of human hearing. No additional amplification is needed as each speaker is individually powered. The cabinets can be set up in a four point quadraphonic array, as individual mono-playback devices, or in any other configuration.Untitled #37 from Playa Series (2024)Barrier Forms (2019) is a series of three bound volumes containing abstract graphics and text which confront the psychic barriers that stifle creativity. The first volume contains simple hand-drawn graphics and a list-poem describing barriers. The second contains a similar poem in relief against a variety of monolithic barrier-forms. The third volume, in color, presents a series of graphical barrier objects in various pink hues with a deep blue section placed in the center of the volume in counterpoint.