Steve Bates is an artist and musician living on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis / Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Through his work he listens to thresholds, boundaries and borders, points of contact and conflict. Information and signal feed back onto themselves creating new situations and events. Sometimes unpredictable and chaotic, at other times this same feedback is used as a way to provide stability. The history of ideas, experiences, and materials are an influence on his work and often lead to a research-heavy path resulting in multiple works around a theme. Recent topics have included the history of barbed wire, the night as a space of freedom and libidinal desire, feedback as it occurs in sound and video art, politics, economics, and biology, most recently, pathological and non-pathological auditory hallucination and currently, the sound of Hell. Or hells. The sonic is the starting point for his projects which are evocations of communication networks and systems, or expressions of spatial and temporal experience. He frequently works with material in situ and in relation to their sites while at the same time recognizing the many complexities involved in working this way. He releases music both solo and collaboratively, often through his own small scale publishing and curatorial project, The Dim Coast. His work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States of America, Europe, Chile and Senegal. He works in the field, on the air, in museological/gallery and performance contexts. These shifting territories reflect the content of his practice.