Sam Ham Tam (Sam Hamilton), Pāhehā (white person from Aotearoa New Zealand), is an independent interdisciplinary artist and creative researcher from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in so-called Oregon, USA. Their practice functions more like an ecology than a discipline. A modular complex of interweaving creative, critical, material, methodological, magical, experiential, contextual, social, and political lines of inquiry.

a confluence

a nebula

a garden

a long song

Outputs and engagements have included such things as a months-long sound art research project in the Amazon; producing experimental 16mm feature-length artist films about the influence of astronomy on the evolution of human agency; conducting intergenerational rituals of undoing at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, London; recording inside an active volcano crater; teaching youth choirs how to sing like the ocean; filming asteroid showers at a remote high-plain desert astrophysics observatory; collaborating with dancer and chief Ioane Papali’i in Sāmoa; making huge monochromatic gold paintings of gardens; running several DIY experimental sound and film festivals; plus some 15-years of making sound in Greek squats, Arizona punk spaces, underground parking lots, nightclubs, forests, deserts, infinite house shows, museums, 1 swimming pool, 2 weddings, and a palace banquet hall. They have presented their work at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Issue Transmediale in Berlin, Project Room in New York, The Portland Art Museum, Dockfest in Germany, ARTSPACE Aotearoa in New Zealand, Locust Works in Miami and more. Hamilton also spent 10-years touring as composer/sound designer for the acclaimed Lemi Ponifasio MAU Dance Company, performing at the Brooklyn Academy of Museum, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, Ruhrtriannale, and much more.