Anya Yermakova is a composer, sound artist and a historian/philosopher of logic.
Anya Yermakova is a multidisciplinary artist and a historian and philosopher of logic. In her intellectual work, she employs case studies of historical experimentalism in logic, focusing on archival materials from the pre-Soviet Russophone world, to destabilize modern logical normativity. She is particularly interested in embodied logicality bringing into salience that dynamic, relational and nonbinary notions can replace the binary, static atomic units of what constitutes common sense. Yermakova expands on the historical suggestion towards logical pluralism with artistic research, by using proto-rhythms and micro-rhythms as foundational units in composition and improvisation. She employs a mix of acousmatic and musical composition, movement improvisation, and score-making, addressing the logicality and sense-making within indeterminacy and not-knowing.
Yermakova has published for Leonardo, Annals of the History of Computing, Forecast and Scientific American and has been an artist-in-residence at Djerassi, UCross and Snape Maltings. She has had a variety of professional recordings of her work, from a recent electro-acoustic album “mytho-logicking” of experimental ethnography and sound sculpting, to a Concerto for Charango and Orchestra “From the Big Bang through the Fundamental Laws,” to a sound-movement work “Ocean Memory in the body.”
Yermakova holds a PhD from the departments of History of Science and Critical Media Practice at Harvard. In 2021-22 she was an artist-in-residence with the Ocean Memory Project and a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College, where she was also a dance artist-in-residence of contact improvisation.