David Linton is a Temporal Media Artist traveling the vectors of sound, light,  media ontology, subculture, and signal flow. In recent decades his work  concentrates upon realtime Audio Visual Performance (Live Cinema) and (Site Specific 'Immersive') Installation. He also curates work related to these foci in performance and exhibition settings.
     Having studied 'experimental' film and video in the Ken Jacobs dominated Cinema Department at SUNY Binghamton in the mid 70's Linton - and after several explorative forays to San Francisco - where he infiltrated film and semiotics workshops at the SF Art Institute (without paying tuition) - relocated to downtown NYC in 1979 to play drums at the height of the NY No Wave movement. He found a temporary but productive home working with post minimalist composer Rhys Chatham - both on the road and in the studio for the first recording of Chatham's now historic work 'Guitar Trio'. (link)
    David was also on hand for the generative period of work on Chatham's 'Drastic Classicism' score (to which he contributed his own percussion parts) realized for Karole Armitage's Po Mo Punk Ballet work of the same name. (link) This exposure to dance was to instigate for Linton a long and productive period of producing (in some cases award winning) live and tape sound scores for Dance, Theater and Performance:  favorite among these are numerous shows with performance duo DANCENOISE at the Kitchen, PS 122 and other East Village performance venues of the day... (link) as well as several collaborative media performance works with theater/performance artist Kyle de Camp: LadyLand, Come to Life, & Johnny Spot (all labors of love...) performed at the Kitchen, PS 122, Artists Space, DTW in NYC and at the ICA London and Time Festival in Ghent Belgium. (link)

    Perhaps the most fruitful fringe benefit stemming from David's involvement with dance was the ongoing collaborative friendship that emerged with video-dance inventor Charles Atlas. This association resulted in Linton's contributing to several Atlas works: notably the French INA produced television work 'Parafango' (link) and the collaborative live media operetta 'S & D' seen at the Kitchen in 1988 (link).
    Throughout the 80's Linton continued live drumming both as a sideman and soloist (link) while being increasingly drawn - mostly at the behest of his scoring activities - into the electronic realm and it's rapid expansion via newly affordable tools and the migrating social tendencies they fostered. This would eventually lead to a shift in emphasis in performance modalities concerning the ontology of 'live' sound performance for the stage ultimately pointing toward a redefinition of what that stage might be.
    Meanwhile Linton released his solo LP 'Orchesography' in 1986 on Neutral Records (link) followed by a duet recording 'OWT - Good as Gold' with electric harpist Zeena Parkins in 1988 on Homestead Records (link). Shortly there after he retired from drumming... but not for long:  In 1990 David briefly took up sticks again - invited by Diamonda Galas to attend to percussion duties required for her ’Plague Mass' performed at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, NYC  recorded and subsequently released by Mute records. (link)
    On the theatrical front David's live electronic score for the Wooster Group 's 'The Emperor Jones'  was staged at the Performing Garage in 1992 with Linton seated rear stage visable like a lifesize animatronic while he went about his live electronic tasks. (link)
    By the mid 90's David had contacted a new generation of sound & media performers identified with the nascent Williamsburg Brooklyn centered 'Immersive' movement and a musical sub-genre which came to be identified as 'Illbient'. (link) Still in Manhattan at this point Linton invited favorite associates from this scene to collaborate on a series of unique 'underground' multi-media soirees in a Chinatown loft where he was tenuously maintaining a rehearsal space called the 'haus of ouch'. These events would become the 'SoundLab' series that would prove to be crucial in the emergence of the soon to be ubiquitous DJ Spooky and was no doubt an early domino in the larger paradigmatic zeitgeist tremor that delivered the 'MIX CULTURE' aesthetic he (Paul Miller) advocated onto a still largely unsuspecting downtown NYC music / art milieu in the mid 90's. (link)
       In 1997 David received his first formal invitation to curate a 'gallery' installation reflecting on surfacing trends in the 'Immersive' intermedia 'underground' he'd become conversant with through the SoundLab period. Hosted by the Alliance for Downtown NY's second annual 'Art Exchange' Linton's design for 'The Cascade Lounge' occupied the entire 13th floor of  disused vintage skyscraper on Broad St. with a fluid networked media hive of works by 25 or more contributing artists employing sound, video, film, painting, sculpture, hand built mechanics, filtered natural light, and performance. (link?)
    By the later 90's Linton had produced dozens of original sound scores for a considerable range of mostly NY based 'post modern' choreographers. This apparent ubiquity in the world of sound for dance led to David's inclusion and invitation to join NY expat/Belgium based choreographer Meg Stuart in several of her international 'Crash Landing' multi-media improvisation summits: notably Leuven, Paris, and Vienna - where the very same interests in live intermedia exploration & improvisation he had embraced were being played out by an amazing international array of gifted performers on a large scale theatrical platform. (link?)
    At the end of the 90's Linton - by now an exclusively electronic musician - had gradually come to realize that the recently prevailing compressed modes of machine based sound performance required other expressive elements in the mix if they were at all to compete with the attentive thrall offered by more traditional live instrumental performance.  Thus Linton's long abiding penchant for the visual was ascending the horizon at the 1998 launch of the 'Unitygain' dedicated floating intermedia platform for live electronic performance.

    By 1999 this platform had expanded to include video mixmaster Benton C Bainbridge as a fulltime collaborator for an entire year of monthly events at Williamsburg's Galapagos Art Space. (link) From it's inception Unitygain would continue for a full decade into the new millenium morphing from space to space ranging from: The Cooler, CBGB's gallery, Context Studios, Tonic, Chashama's 42nd Theater, The Kitchen, DCTV - where it made a quantum leap from intermedia 'club hang' to live weekly late nite cable televsion program on Manhattan Neighborhood Network - to it's final run and ultimate resting place at Monkeytown in a very different Williamsburg than the one in which it had started.  Over the course of this 10 year lifespan the UnityGain project presented possibly hundreds of collaborative audio visual performances by some relative proportion of that many artists. When taken as a whole this arc would track the rapid evolution in technological media tools, trends, and culture from primitive beginnings through increasingly sophisticated digital capabilities and back full circle to a retro primitive, neo analog aesthetic over the course of one decade. While the unitygain.org website died off some years ago a fair semblence of UG's productive lifespan can be gleaned from a wayback machine archival link available here: (link)

​

​

   

 
 

​

​

   

​

 

  

  

​

     In 2004 David embarked upon the course he has maintaned since with the launch of his first solo audio-visual project: The bicamRL research sound and projection system or "bicamRL AV"  for brevity's sake. With his “Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System” (2004) Linton has aimed to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest via the deployment of interconnected proportional measures of electric sound & pulsing light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space. Employing an integrated recursive audio & video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention he delivers a vigorous eye, ear, and - sometimes - body shaking realtime audio visual performance from which a kind of retro-tech animist ritual “medicine show” emerges where subject and object blur. Thematically David likes to consider that within the 20th Century 60 Hz alternating electrical current gradually came to function as a primary subliminal Prana in the mass bio-energetic body/culture of human life in North America…