Dr Jessica Argo is a 3D sound designer, installation artist and educator both for early years and higher education. She has recently completed her PhD, where she composed immersive Ambisonic soundscapes to temporarily induce anxiety in exposure therapy, to encourage both physical desensitisation and mental catharsis for anxiety sufferers. These ambisonic soundscapes will advance psychiatric exposure therapy beyond the established Virtual Reality visualisation, real-life and talking techniques.
Recently, she has facilitated and analysed bespoke user testing sessions for ISO Design and the V&A Dundee.
Argo creates mesmeric, immersive sound and visuals to be performed live, tailored to the socio-cultural setting. She pans sound across spatial arrays, projects video onto translucent mesh for the audience to play with in nightclubs, installs ambient white cube installations, and stages site-specific performances in unique acoustic environments (such as the Devil’s Mountain Listening Domes in Berlin). All performances are focused on transforming the mental and physical state of the audience, and now she bridges the gap between art and science as she records these induced affects with a physiological monitoring system (evaluating the fluctuations in a participant’s heart rate, sweat secretion and respiration rate).
From childhood Argo has danced and played music, focused mainly in Ballet and Cello. As she expanded her dance repertoire to include Contemporary, Hip Hop, and even Japanese Butoh, equally, she began to go beyond symphonic classical music, improvising with unfamiliar sound textures; she now uses sound and visual art in a symbiotic relationship. Argo plays cello in the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra.
