Anya Yermakova
Harvard University United States
Anya Yermakova is a composer, sound artist, and performer, who plays with intersections of recorded sounds, acoustic music, and critical improvisation. She is also a historian and critical theorist, developing the concept of “historical echo” to address the historiographically silenced nodes of spacetime in human+ history. Yermakova studies the convoluted modernity of non-binary, non-classical, experimental logics in the late Russian Empire, an echo of which persisted “undercover” throughout the USSR and resonates today, she argues, ever so loudly. To address the many omissions from both source materials in the archive and existing narratives in historiography, she treats her creative work as a necessary complement to her textual and mathematical research practice, to make sense of the social and embodied relevance of these logical experiments. Her latest work includes an art-science project that explored the embodied intuition for a practicing astrophysicist and its embedded history, captured in her Concerto for Charango and Orchestra: from the Big Bang through the Fundamental Laws. Anya Yermakova received two bachelor degrees – as a pianist and a biochemist, from Northwestern University in Chicago, and two master degrees – in dynamic epistemic logic and in Russian history and philosophy from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Currently, she is in her final PhD year at Harvard in departments of Critical Media Practice and History of Science. For CV and links to recent projects see her website.