DuBois has collaborated with a wide range of artists and musicians, including Elliott Sharp, Paul D. Miller, Todd Reynolds, Toni Dove, Chris Mann, Michael Joaquin Grey, Matthew Ritchie, Eric Singer, Bora Yoon, and Leroy Jenkins. He was a founding member of the Freight Elevator Quartet, and has produced records for Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon on the Nonesuch label. His music integrates real-time performer-computer interaction with algorithmic methodologies repurposed from other fields, most notably formal grammars such as L-systems. His research into issues of musical time revolves around a technique called time-lapse phonography, as used in his piece Billboard. His instrumental writing, like his artwork, is often based on techniques derived from stochastic music and data mining, using metaphors and information from cultural topics as source material in a postmodern style, as in the string quartet Hard Data, a six-movement sonification that, while its musical structure is based on the casualty stream of the Iraq War, borrows heavily from the instrumental writing of Stravinsky, Messiaen, Xenakis, and Crumb.
Conceptual artist
As a conceptual artist, DuBois takes on various topics in American culture and places them under a computational microscope to raise issues relevant to information theory, perception of time, canonicity, and gaze. For example, his trio of pieces on gestalt media, Academy, Billboard, and Play, look at three iconic cultural "canons" in American popular culture. His piece Hindsight is Always 20/20, based on a statistical analysis of presidential State of the Union addresses, uses computational means as a lens into the politics of political rhetoric. Fashionably Late for the Relationship, his feature-length collaboration with performance artist Lián Amaris, uses the radical time-compression of a 72-hour film of a performance to deconstruct romantic obsession. For his large-scale artwork A More Perfect Union, DuBois joined 21 different online dating sites and constructed a census of the United States based on an analysis of the profiles of 19 million single Americans; shown as a series of colored and relabeled maps, the work investigates the lexicon of American self-identity in the 21st century.
Art and exhibitions
His work is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City, and has been exhibited worldwide, including at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In January 2014 R. Luke DuBois—Now opened at the Ringling Museum of Art. This first solo museum exhibition, organized by curator Matthew McLendon, surveyed DuBois's output over the previous decade, and included performance, video, public installation, and generative works. The exhibition went on to the Orange County Museum of Art the following year and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2016. In December 2016Hyperallergic named R. Luke DuBois—Now one of the top 15 exhibitions in the United States. Before becoming a well-known Laptop musician, DuBois did most of his improvisation and performance on Buchla and Serge modular synthesizers.
