Info

Always immaterial, sometimes I’m material; for one human lifetime I am Somfay (or Jes, if you like).

Until the gales of time reshape my dune; in this life I am an artist, musician, DJ and toolmaker based in Elora, Ontario, Canada. My practice centres around what I have come to call Electronic Kintsugi, which first began as a descriptor for what I do within the scope of Fermata Positronics—my analog video circuit bending outfit—but now encompasses my entire practice, whether I am working on video art, producing music, or any other manner of creative exploration.

At the very heart of Electronic Kintsugi is the idea of taking something that is from another time (or even outside of time), and highlighting or releasing the hidden spirit within it. This something could be any number of things—vintage analog video equipment, melodies and moods tucked away on long forgotten albums, or ideas from another era that existed for a singular or limited form in their time, but for whatever reason remained endlings; never being explored further beyond where their paths concluded. I find that there is a certain bittersweetness in these objects and ideas, as the blossoms that would perhaps have unfurled—had they been encouraged to germinate to their fullest—would certainly have been wonderful to behold.

Electronic Kintsugi, in this sense, is a bending of parallel timelines in order for them to intersect with the present once again—yet in a mutated form like a fasciated flower: a reflection in a cracked mirror, or a scene through a window of many facets. It is similar to the idea of a sculptor being the one who is themselves sculpted by the stone they work, being coaxed to reveal the form and light from within its metamorphic core; although in Electronic Kintsugi, it is more the lifting of the shy spirit sitting behind the fore-spirit, that hadn’t originally been given the chance to express itself completely in its first life.

What it feels like to me, as I seek out these orphan ideas—or in many cases, they serendipitously find me—is a kind of saudade; a sensation of needing to delve into something which had never been before—or was only hinted at—but at the same time feels as if it had existed for manifold infinities. If you’ve ever been hiking or driving on a trail or a road that came to an end, but you could see an incredibly beautiful scene unfold before you, bathed in sunset just beyond the limits, you might understand this feeling of wanting or needing to go beyond that conclusion—to hack a new way forward in order to know what else could be around the next corner, from where that sublime sunset light is emanating.

Even with the acceptance that we cannot know this mystery in its entirety; like Love, the desire is there to be entirely overcome by it, wanting for it to pour through our every nerve. And so what is one to do, but venture into the thickets and hollows, and find out what lies beyond and within—to at least partially uncover that which has been obscured.

This desire to go beyond where the road ends also comes into contact with the idea of Electronic Kintsugi—and more broadly, glitch art in general—as a cracking of the firmament; of sending a cascade of versicolor filaments outside of it so that others too may find their way, or at least know that there is something beyond the ceiling that is well worth pursuing; a winking reminder that the limitations of the prosaic world are illusional and can be dissolved, whether for a brief moment or an eternity. I often look to Nature as a prime reminder of this; her limitless creativity and willingness to experiment ever more, show us that there is far more to life and the Universe than we have yet dared to imagine as possible.

Further still, and of quite some importance in my practice, is the immense gravitational lift that originates in the realm of dreams and in states of transcendence. Of our lives, we spend almost three decades with our bodies in a state of sleep—if you dream, that is a full life in parallel to your waking life. In that sense I have endeavoured to live those three decades as vividly as I am able to, and to integrate them completely within my practice. The realm of dreams is the very amalgam that binds together the fragments in Electronic Kintsugi—alongside Nature, its unending sky is where I derive the utmost inspiration and guidance.