About

Born in 1978 in Geneva, Switzerland, Lalya Gaye is a Swedish and Senegalese-Malian digital media artist and interaction design researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. At the convergence of art, technology, and design, her work explores the poetic integration of digital technology into everyday environments, behaviours, urban space and everyday artefacts, in order to grasp and revisit our physical and emotional relations to the everyday, to space and to distance. She builds public art installations with various media such as steel, light and sound, takes part in site-specific audio experiments, teaches digital media and interaction design at graduate level, delivers creative electronics workshops, and regularly organizes cross-disciplinary research workshops and small music and sound-art festivals.

Lalya received a B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Geneva, a M.Sc.Eng. in Electroacoustics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, worked several years at the Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, worked on a PhD in Applied Information Technology at the University of Göteborg, and taught at the Interaction Design programme at Chalmers Technical University. In 2009, she was a Visiting Professor and Artist in Residence at the Digital + Media department at Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI, USA), before joining Culture Lab Newcastle in the UK in 2010, where she worked for 3 years on the SiDE Project (Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy), as part of the Creative Media Group. In 2013, she was a Digital City Innovation fellow at Teesside University. Since then, she has been running Attaya Projects, a Newcastle-based platform for interdisciplinary collaborations in digital media arts. She was also a founding member of the Swedish art group Dånk! Collective from Göteborg, Sweden and was a steering committee member of the International Mobile Music Workshops series.