Aaron Taylor Kuffner American , b. 1975

Aaron Taylor Kuffner is an American born conceptual artist, based in New York. Kuffner’s dynamic work reaches far outside conventional forms of representation: it actively engages its audience and pushes art to serve society. His pieces often take the form of multi-year projects that require in depth research, collaboration with field experts and the development of new specialized skill sets. Each project provides unique conceptual tools that further the evolution of consciousness through the experience of beauty and the sublime.

Kuffner’s work demands a multi-faceted approach to art. Through his work Kuffner has become a noted musician and composer, a skilled metal sculptor, machinist and engineer, an ethnomusicologist, a prolific street artist and social activist, a painter and inventor, a theater director and producer of hyperbolic events.

For over a decade Kuffner has immersed himself in the study of Indonesian Gamelan music. While living for several years in Java and Bali and attending the Institut Seni Indonesia in Yogyakarta, he learned to play the Gamelan, researched the process of making the instruments, cataloged various tuning modalities, and developed his own electronic notation system, all the while gleaning gamelan's cultural and spiritual significance. In 2008, shortly after returning to New York he was awarded an Artist in Residency with renowned technologist Eric Singer at the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. The fruit of their collaboration would be the construction of the world's first fully robotic gamelan orchestra.