Arts Division
PhD student
Graduate
Art Department
San Francisco
Film and Digital Media
Kevin Corcoran works with sound in contexts of music, art, communication, and place. His practice emphasizes walking, listening, and amplifying details of places where relationships and slippages emerge between infrastructure and open space, land use and access, presence and memory. He combines creative work for fixed media, installation, and performance with research in sound studies, media ecologies, and environmental humanities.
Ongoing fieldwork is focused on present conditions of post-industrial and post-military land use in California. Noticing where human and elemental forces interact informs his place-based inquiries in landfills, landslides, decommissioned military spaces, ports, urban sprawl, vacant lots, abandoned architecture, remediation zones, field research stations, and open space preserves.
Kevin is active in improvised music as a percussionist focused on extended and electroacoustic techniques. Originally from Sacramento, based in San Francisco since 2013, he has performed and recorded in the United States, Europe, Mexico, and East Asia, often collaborating with musicians, dancers, and visual artists. In 2015 he co-founded the Re:Sound performance series bringing experimental music and expanded cinema into disused naval base buildings on Mare Island in Vallejo.
Currently working on a PhD in Film & Digital Media, he completed an MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice in 2024, also at UCSC, and a BA in Technocultural Studies at UC Davis is 2012.
Environmental soundscapes, field recording methods in the arts and sciences, media ecologies and infrastructures, landscape and architecture, environmental art, environmental justice, social geography, science and technology studies
Honorable mention for sound installation collaboration with Jorge Bachmann, Taoyuan International Art Award, Taiwan, 2025.
Graduate Research Fellowship, UC Climate Action Arts Network, 2025.
Ambulation, cassette, solo. Buried in Slag and Debris (CA), 2025.
-1 outside/24 inside, cassette, with Zhao Cong. Aloe Records (CN), 2025.
Peripheral Residue, CD, with Andrew Weathers. Editions Glomar (US), 2024.
Rooms and Shadows 1 and 3, CD, with Sun Yizhou. Ftarri (JP), 2023.
Severity, cassette, solo. Karma Detonantion (TW), 2022.
Illusive Layers, cassette, with Hung Tzu Ni. Editions Tympanum (US), 2022.
Unfinished Objects in the Field, digital, solo. Lateral Addition (US), 2022.
Vague Language, digital, solo. AMPLIFY2020 by Erstwhile (US), 2020.
