I like that 80 years ago some French intellectuals’ books started filling with mirrors & windows and bemused dissociation. Simultaneously, the telephone—the perfect device of existential estrangement—was becoming commonplace.
I’ve never read Nausea, not linearly. However, I make a lot of decisions by flicking to random points on random pages and doing whatever it suggests. It’s tea leaves as both method and antidote to existentialism.
Elliot Vaughan is a composer, performer, and artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. His output includes exploratory concert music, composed theatre, pop songs, performance art, and contributions to collaborative projects. He was the 2024 CNZ/NZSM Composer-in-Residence.
For fifteen years he lived in Vancouver, where he completed a Bachelor's at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts and made his living freelancing. His career there extended from arrangements for theatre and pop records to music for dance and contemporary classical composition.
Returning to Aotearoa in 2018 to earn his Master's at Te Koki—NZ School of Music, Elliot has established himself as a key voice in exploratory composition and performance there. His blurring of performance art and music has been recognised with awards and commissions, including for his shows First Buzzard at the Body (2021) and Fish in Pink Gelatine (2019). Elliot is violist with the Moth Quartet, and has a pop band called Eigenface.