On the evening of October 28th, 2026, a room inside the Trahern Building at Austin Peay State University will fill with the sounds of semi-autonomous machines. David Stout, a composer, filmmaker, visual artist and performance director, will give a free public lecture titled At Home in the Uncanny Valley: The Play and Promise of a Latent Space at 6:00pm in the Sara & Mike Gotcher Theatre, Room 220. No tickets, no reservations, no capacity gimmick — just an open door and an hour of talk about what happens when sound, image and emerging technology are put in the same room and asked to cooperate.
The lecture is hosted by the APSU Department of Art + Design with support from the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts. Barry Jones, a professor in the department, said in the announcement that he has followed Stout's work for years and is "thrilled he is coming to APSU" to share it with students and the wider community. Jones framed the visit as a kind of horizon-widening: sound, interactivity, programming and other emergent technologies, as Stout uses them, "can open up the world to us."
That is a fair description of a career that has rarely sat still. Stout's training began in the traditional disciplines — drawing, painting, performance — before he moved into video and sound, and his work now spans live cinema, interactive video, electro-acoustic music and performances that treat immersive projection as an extension of the performer, the audience and the architecture around them. He holds an MFA from CalArts and today teaches at the University of North Texas, where he directs the Hybrid Arts Laboratory, coordinates the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA), and holds a joint professorship in music composition and studio art.
The through-line in his recent work is a fascination with systems that generate more than their authors can fully predict: generative software, artificial-life networks, simulation environments. That interest is where the lecture's title comes from. The "uncanny valley" is the well-known dip in comfort people feel when a simulated human comes close to real without quite arriving. "Latent space" is the term of art for the hidden mathematical territory inside machine-learning models where images and sounds exist before they are resolved into something recognizable. Stout's talk proposes that artists might live in that territory rather than flinch from it — that the strange, half-formed things found there are not failures of realism but raw material.
He has been mining that territory for more than two decades. In 2002, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Stout began collaborating with Cory Metcalf. The partnership was forged, by his own account, under pressure: a European performance tour went badly wrong — "everything that could possibly go wrong did in a very dramatic way" — and the two retreated to Amsterdam, where Stout built a stripped-down interactive performance called SignalFire in which a laptop was made to induce its own audio-visual feedback. Working through that difficult process, they discovered they worked well together even under the worst conditions. In 2005 they founded NoiseFold, and premiered NoiseFold 1.0 at the Festival Internationale d'Art Video in Casablanca, Morocco.
NoiseFold's performances meld real-time animation with generative electronic sound, drawing on cybernetics and mathematical visualization to treat visual music as a form of instrumental play with semi-autonomous systems. The results have been described as painterly abstractions that suggest elemental narratives — "at once familiar, mysterious and strange," as the duo puts it. The pair perform their systems with infrared sensors that read the proximity of their hands and bodies, so that the imagery and sound respond to gesture in real time. Reviewers have reached for strong comparisons. The critic Dene Grigar, writing for Leonardo On-Line, described the way both men gestured at the sensors during a performance as imbuing the experience "with a sense of necromancy," and asked what else one calls the creation of a life form from mere data but a kind of magic. The video pioneer Steina Vasulka praised Stout for celebrating "the elemental power of the digital signal stream" in homage to interactive video's analog past, and computer scientist Ken Perlin summed up a NoiseFold show as "Jimi Hendrix with a power drill." The ensemble's installations and performances have traveled from Casablanca to Marfa, Texas.
One of NoiseFold's ongoing projects, The Ten Thousand Things — its title borrowed from chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching — sends performers on an exploratory journey through simulated fields of spinning particles, searching for "latent images, sounds and musical potentials" at coordinate points where energies intersect. Stout has likened the search to the hunt for extraterrestrial life: a vast noise-field in which aesthetic phenomena may or may not be perceivable, and where the performer decides how to make an ephemeral structure sing, knowing the moment may collapse into unexpected complexity or vanish through a very narrow window of existence.
More recently Stout has pushed the same logic into film. His generative short Contours and Coincidence is an inky, narrative-free exploration of biomorphic forms, drawing on the tradition of hand-drawn experimental animation. Its score abandons his usual image sonification and synthetic sources entirely: every sound is taken from shortwave, FM and AM radio broadcasts, assembled through dial-scanning and carefully drawn envelopes. In his statement about the film, Stout described computational media as "a prosthesis extending the reach of the hand, the tongue, and consciousness itself," and generative image techniques as "a form of contemporary scrying" that lets him "play at the liminal edge of the mind's default pattern recognition states." The film has been shown at the Vašulka Kitchen Brno, an institution devoted to the legacy of Woody and Steina Vasulka — the same pioneers whose tradition critics place Stout and Metcalf within.
His restlessness has also carried him into glass. Stout has completed artist residencies at the Pilchuck Glass School and the Museum of Glass, where his work is now in the permanent collection. Projects such as Swarm Caste use mathematical data — the hacking of differential equations — to drive graphite molds for cast hot glass, producing bio-mimetic forms that, like his performances, sit between the familiar and the alien. Before his Texas years he founded the MOV-iN Gallery for new media art and the Installation, Performance & Interactivity project at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico.
For Clarksville, the visit is a chance to hear the thinking behind that body of work directly. The Department of Art + Design offers studies from animation and ceramics to digital media and sculpture. Its galleries are free and open to the public, and so is this lecture. Stout's talk will draw on examples from his installations, performances and recent award-winning films, tracing a line from drawing and painting through video and sound to the generative systems he works with now.
The Sara & Mike Gotcher Theatre sits inside the Trahern Building on the APSU campus. The lecture runs from 6:00 to 7:00pm on Wednesday, October 28th, 2026. More of Stout's work can be seen at davidstout.net.