Myles de Bastion

I am a technical artist and disability rights advocate. I make immersive, sensory-substitution art installations and instruments that let sound be seen and felt, and I build the organizations, companies, and events that put that work in front of people.

I am Deaf, I have progressive vision loss, and I work in both English and American Sign Language. I am from the UK, and I came to Portland by way of Teesside. Before that I taught at the Austine School for the Deaf in Vermont, and at the world's first Deaf Music Camp in Michigan, where I developed the curriculum and ran the music and sound program. That is where the direction of the work got set: build the room so that music arrives as light and vibration, and it arrives for everyone in it at once. Since then the work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum and OMSI, broadcast on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and built at full scale for music festivals and for Esperanza Spalding.

I founded CymaSpace in 2013 and I am its Artistic Director. It is a non-profit that produces arts and cultural events for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing audiences, and it now runs on a budget of roughly $850,000 with about 20 full and part time staff and contractors, puts on more than 50 community events a year, and reaches around 200,000 people in person and more than a million views online. Two of its programs are the Sign Language Café, a cultural and networking hub for Deaf and disabled professionals that started in 2023, and the Northwest Deaf Arts Festival, first held in 2018. In 2015 I founded Audiolux Devices to build the lighting hardware the installations needed, and I was its CEO until 2019. I founded de Bastion, Inc. in 2019, and the product work runs through it now.

I consult for Gallaudet University's Motion Light Lab on sign language technology, work funded by the National Science Foundation, and I have held fellowships and residencies with Epic Games (the Unreal Fellowship, 2020), Open Signal, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), where a 2020 residency funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation produced a 3,000 square foot installation. Awards have come from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Community Foundation / Oregon Humanities Fields Artist Fellowship, the ArtMatters Foundation, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Oregon Cultural Trust. I am currently building Pixelboop, which maps music theory onto color theory so that harmonies read as visible gradients and dissonance as visual contrast; the Portland Jazz Composers' Ensemble uses it as a visual conductor, cueing a 12-piece orchestra to stay in harmonic sync regardless of auditory ability, and it carries a Deaf-led curriculum taught with Portland Public School students. I am also building the Ikigai Machine, an inclusive puzzle room with tactile props and non-verbal storytelling for DeafBlind patrons.

Commissions, talks & collaboration

Let's make sound
visible.