me.

About Me
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Digital Performance
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Interactive Media
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The Music
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BIO

PHOTOS

Miggy Torres (b. 1992; he/him/his) is a composer and interdisciplinary artist.

A musical omnivore, Miggy constantly strives to express himself in new and challenging ways. The result has been an experimental artistic style that often transcends various media—including music, theatre, film, interactive media, and performance art—with the ultimate goal of immersing the audience in parallel realities, florescent mythologies, and transformative æsthetic experiences.

Miggy's artistic approach is underpinned by anthropological, psychosocial, and semiotic conceptions of how we experience the world around us. Influenced in part by the the work of Durkheim, Geertz, Eliade, Saussure, Deleuze, and Derrida, among others, Miggy's work is predicated on the idea that:

  1. Perceptions of reality are generated in the mind by a densely interwoven system of symbols.
  2. These symbols give meaning to everything we experience. That is, for something to have meaning to someone it must be coded in their mind as a symbol. Moreover,
  3. these symbols can be generated by myth—windows into new realities that describe how things ought to be, how things ought not to be, what things have value, and what things even exist.
  4. All of art is myth abstracted. A work of art is a window into a new reality with its own system of symbols.
  5. When the reality of the work of art collides with the reality of one’s everyday life, the two symbolic webs intersect and interact (interpretation), giving way to new truths and new perceptions of reality.

Recent interests include machine improvisation; sociological explorations of Millennial culture and identity; works generated by specific physical interactions between performer and instrument; rendering electroacoustic processes with non-electronic means; degradation of memory; and contrapuntal relationships between sound, video, theatre, and dance.

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Miggy’s works have been performed internationally with collaborators as diverse as the Mivos Quartet (Travels in Hyperreality), Eastman Broadband (Difrasismos), and oboist Jake Gunnar Walsh (Mise En Abyme). 

Miggy has collaborated with a variety of organizations across a wide array of disciplines: from 2021 to 2023 he was a guest artist at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University led by Dr. Katy Börner—in collaboration with the Ontario-based Living Architecture Systems Group led by architect Philip Beesley—for the work Autopoietic Bloom. In 2019, Miggy was a guest artist with the Indiana University Department of Theatre, Drama, and Dance, composing new music for their Spring theatrical production Vinegar Tom. Miggy’s A True Noun Does Not Exist for live electronics was premiered by the composer in collaboration with IRCAM at Studio 5 at IRCAM, Paris, in 2018.

Miggy’s music has also received various awards and honors such as the Louis Smadbeck Composition Award and a residency at the Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat in Laceyville, PA in 2017 where he collaborated with virtuoso flutist Justine Stephens on a new work, 19 images of breath and space. Miggy's On The Fractured Identity of the Millennial was selected for inclusion in the Soaring Gardens: the Second Decade gallery exhibition in Scranton, PA in early 2021. Difrasismos was a finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards in 2016.

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Originally from South Windsor, CT, Miggy holds degrees in Music Composition from Indiana University (Travers, Gibson, Hass, Freund) and Ithaca College (Grossmann, Wilson). Additional summer studies at IRCAM (Tarakajian, Malt), Paris.

During his tenure at Ithaca College, Miggy studied voice with mezzo-soprano Ivy Walz, conducting with Janet Galván, and music theory pedagogy with Craig Cummings. Miggy is a passionate improviser, having studied both solo and ensemble improvisational techniques under Louise Mygatt and Nick Weiser. At IU, Miggy founded and led a student-run improvisation ensemble that met weekly in the Spring semesters.

Miggy is a fierce advocate for bringing new music into communities, having served for two years on the Board of Directors and as Media Administrator and Grant Writer at Connecticut Summerfest, a composition festival that takes place annually in the heart of Connecticut.

Miggy is of Greco-Puerto Rican descent. In addition to music, he also loves writing and keeps an active digital collection of writings on æsthetics, the creative process, and other delightful topics.