Welcome to the Bunker Questionnaire, a series in which we ask Bunker Projects residents and exhibiting artists a few questions based on Marcel Proust’s famous Proust Questionnaire, a survey that purported to reveal a person’s true nature. We hope their answers and the accompanying photos allow you to get to know them and their work a little bit more.
Composer Emerson Voss (b. 1991) dramatizes everyday mundanities through site-specific, multimedia installations and staged music theater works that include music and field recordings, video and lighting, performance and narrative, as well as site-specificity and audience interactivity. Voss has been invited as an artist fellow to Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. His scholarly research concerning public arts funding in Norway has been presented at international academic conferences in Seoul, South Korea, and Lucca, Italy. His intermedia sound installations have premiered internationally in Oslo, Norway, as well as Novi Sad, Serbia, for the international new media arts festival Videomedeja. In May 2026, he will premiere a new immersive media installation at the second international Scent Art Festival in Riga, Latvia. Voss holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from the University of Pittsburgh. Currently, he is part of the music faculties at the University of Pittsburgh and Duquesne University teaching music courses in digital production, theory and sight-singing.
Who are your favorite artists/the ones who’ve influenced you most?
“I’m drawn to narrative art forms and artists that extract the transcendental from the everyday: from literature, Karl Ove Knausgård (Min Kamp [My Struggle] series, 2011); from theater, Trond Reinholdtsen (Neo-Hippie-Interventionistische-Anti-Internet-Peripherie-Welttournee-Roadshow, 2018); from interactive digital media, Masashi Tsuboyama and Team Silent (Silent Hill 2, 2001); from film: Yasujirō Ozu (晩春 [Late Spring], 1949]; from TV, David Chase (“The Sopranos,” 2007), and from graphic narrative, Art Spiegelman (Maus, 1991).”
What is your idea of happiness?
“Being in the midst of the first one-on-one conversation over beer/tea with another person.”
What’s the next goal or milestone you are working toward in your practice?
“An overarching goal for my immersive theatrical practice is the successful integration of mediums that activate our five primary senses, bringing them into conversation with one another and connecting them to each piece’s conceptual framework and temporal map. Recent installations sync participants’ interactions with visual, aural and tactile mediums within theatrical time. In May, for the second international Scent Art Festival in Riga, I’m premiering an immersive music theater work in which participants are prompted to sniff scents that connect to memories from childhood (while also experiencing the work’s visual, aural, and tactile elements). After this project, I will start on an installation that extracts the kitchen-ness of our homes through field recordings of conversations within kitchens around Pittsburgh. Here, gustatory mediums will play a significant role.”
Photography by Anna Brewer
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