Ari Smith

Ari Smith is a bassist, improviser, and composer spanning genres of jazz, experimental, and contemporary classical music, currently based in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering at UW Madison. In the Wisconsin area, Ari has been a particularly active member of the free jazz and free improvisation scenes, both with his trio Laminal Animil, and sharing the stage with artists such as Hanah Jon Taylor, Vincent Davis, Jim Baker, and Isaiah Collier. In his improvisation and through-composed work, Ari strives to explore the material technologies of performance, such as instruments and scores, as boundary objects/“power tools” that mediate and redistribute agencies across humans and nonhumans, as well as the promiscuous use of academic citation styles as a demonstration of dedication to others and as a creative-expressive practice situating works within interdisciplinary conceptual webs and traditions.