Virtual Encounters: New Entanglements in Performance and Media
Premiered March 1, 2023, and ran until June 30, 2023
Presented online and across various platforms
Curated by Christine Negus
With an extensive history rooted in a dialogue on “live”-ness and the ephemeral, performance art has weathered a major shift over the past few years. Though the COVID-19 global pandemic has undoubtedly impacted all arts-related programming, live and time-based practices in particular have been forced to renegotiate presentation modes and adapt to a more virtual, screen-based life. Performance art’s merge with the digital realm, with its seemingly opposite characteristics based in permanence and the archival, has raised challenges for both areas of work. Through this convergence, performance artists have been asked to reconsider these aforementioned essential disciplinary attributes in relation to their practice—both in presentation and developing new projects. These uncharted possibilities associated with the virtual have produced exciting outcomes, which continue to redefine and reimagine praxis, and the fields of both performance and media art, in novel ways.
A forthcoming online publication featuring contributions by C.W. Crawford, Blair Fornwald, Che Gossett, and Sandra Ruiz will be available February 2024
Kite
Grave Tending Song
Screening presented on Vimeo
Wednesday March 1 to Friday March 31, 2023
Watch Here
Accessibility: Experimental sound transcription by Lilian Radovac available as closed captioning, presented in partnership with VibraFusionLab
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented on Sunday, March 5, 2023 at 3pm EST
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
This film documents and scores the process of grave cleaning that I do when I visit my family’s graveyard in South Dakota. It’s hot and I’m miserable as I offer tobacco. I remove weeds at the height of summer with their thick stalks, covered in spikes, deeply rooted. It’s a losing battle to keep them out.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition,and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School. Kite’s scholarship and practice investigate contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Kite has also published in several journals and magazines, including in The Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), where the award winning article, Making Kin with Machines, co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista, and Archer Pechawis, was featured. Kite is currently a 2023 Creative Capital Award Winner, 2023 USA Fellow, and a 2022-2023 Creative Time Open Call artist with Alisha B. Wormsley.
David Yu
x-in-waiting
x-in-waiting app
In partnership with the Art Gallery of Peterborough
Wednesday March 1 to Friday March 31, 2023
Click for App Store Download
Click for Google Play Download
Accessibility: App is free to download with no hidden fees. Performances have minimal, diegetic sound with no spoken words and can be enjoyed without audio as a barrier
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented on Sunday, March 5, 2023 at 3pm EST
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
x-in-waiting is an app-as-art archive of an ongoing performance to camera series created during the COVID-19 quarantine from 2020 – present day. x-in-waiting refers to the period of stasis that occurs for something to become something else. Here the “x” is the variable and stands in for whatever occupation the artist is consumed with while in waiting. This also extends to the “x” of uncertainty pertaining to where we will find ourselves/society and daily living at the end of this moment in time. The work asks viewers to wait with the artist for eight minutes while he symbolically engages in an occupation that takes up his time. Download the app and experience waiting with the artist while he is performing waiting. This app will self-destruct when the waiting is over.
David Yu is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist that he subcategorizes under multimedia, installation, and performance. His work stretches from sculptural forms and installation, to audio, video, and live performers. David’s current research is based on performance within a frame of fluxus, where the audience places themselves into the work as participatory elements. He positions himself within the creator-catalyst role that generates situations for viewers to negotiate. David’s practice attempts to modify and pinpoint areas where sculpture/installation, performance, and audience intersect by exposing the notion of the performative gesture that can be embedded in the aforementioned elements. Through this he attempts to coerce viewers into performance, integrating themselves within the experience of the artwork.
Anyse Durcharme
Complex Waves
Presented on Instagram
Saturday April 1 to Sunday April 30, 2023
Complex Waves I - Watch Here
Complex Waves II - Watch Here
Complex Waves III - Watch Here
Complex Waves IV - Watch Here
Accessibility: Image descriptions and experimental sound transcriptions
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented Sunday April 2, 2023 at 3pm EDT
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
Complex Waves is a series of experiments in sound performance. I have been mashing together complex sounds from locations that have had an influence on me over the past 3 years into sine wave glitches with the use of internet based video communication platforms (Zoom, etc). Connecting to the same platform through both a hotspot tethered computer and a cell phone allowed me and the surrounding area to create a sonic loop. These clipped performances will be shared through Instagram.
Anyse Ducharme (elle | she | her) is a franco-ontarian (fr | en) media artist, curator + teacher from northeastern Ontario, Robinson-Huron Treaty Territory. Her artistic production locates itself in an opposition (from within) to digital colonialism through small, sometimes subversive acts: glitching images with internet comments; dismantling assumptions of transparency that are both promoted and compromised by the ways in which knowledge is increasingly organized in the era of the computer; and by exploring the malleability of data through the transformation of information into various representational states.
Jacob Wren
My apartment is just piles of books
Presented on Zoom
Sunday April 2, 2023 to Sunday April 30, 2023
Watch Here
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation closed captioning
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented Sunday April 2, 2023 at 3pm EDT
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
In this online performance, Jacob Wren reflects on the fact that he used to travel constantly for art and yet during the pandemic spent more time in his apartment than ever before. And the travel has not yet resumed. Through a short tour of his bookshelf, questions are raised about what it means to make art when you find yourself no longer in constant motion.
Jacob Wren makes literature, collaborative performances and exhibitions. His books include Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor and Authenticity is a Feeling. As artistic codirector of the interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created performances such as: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information, Every Song I’ve Ever Written and Adventures can be found anywhere, même dans la répétition. PME-ART has also presented the online conference Vulnerable Paradoxes and the related free PDF publication In response to Vulnerable Paradoxes. His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.
Endlings (Raven Chacon & John Dieterich)
Parallel 03
Presented on Zoom
In collaboration with Shawn and Derek Durant, Doreen Girard, Marie-France Hollier, B.P. (Bret Parenteau), and Alex Raja Ven
In partnership with send + receive: A Festival of Sound
Thursday May 18, 2023 at 7:30pm EDT viewing until Wednesday May 31, 2023
Watch Here
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented Thursday May 18, 2023 at 8pm EDT
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
The web instrument, Parallel 03, designed by Endlings (John Dieterich and Raven Chacon) and six Vancouver musicians and sound artists utilizes a variety of cross-platform and anonymous methods for composition and improvisation. Composed, recorded, and arranged over four months of isolation in 2020, the eight collaborators became generators, translators, mistranslators and filters for inputted contributions in an incalculable feedback loop of expansive processes. The instrument is designed to receive new content from other contributors, allowing for a constant stream of unique, ephemeral music.
Parallel 03 collaborators so far are: Raven Chacon and John Dieterich (Endlings), with Parmela Attariwala, Adrian Avendaño, John Brennan, Elisa Ferrari, Marina Hasselberg and Alanna Ho Website design by Joel Schuman Parallel 03 was originally commissioned by Vancouver New Music
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass
John Dieterich is a guitarist, composer and producer based in Minneapolis, MN. He plays in the band Deerhoof and collaborates on a variety of musical and artistic projects.
Ellen Moffat
seeds strings and sounding things
Screening presented on Vimeo
Monday May 1 to Wednesday May 31, 2023
Accessibility: Experimental sound transcription by Jeff Morton
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented Thursday May 18, 2023 at 8pm EDT
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
seeds strings and sounding things is a stop-frame animation that uses organic materials and cultural objects, analogue and digital processes, and improvisational methods for production. An ad-hoc light table is a stage for performative acts by objects and materials, documented as still images by a cell phone placed beneath the table’s surface. Arranged into sequences, the objects fluctuate in their orientations, tempo, intensities and densities, and relations. The sound is created through actions and interactions with the same materials using extended techniques to play their tonality. The image and sound elements intersect by chance. The fluctuating relations of visual and sonic elements explore materials and materiality using methods that dodge control.
Ellen Moffat is a sound artist whose installation and performative works have been presented in artist-run centres, public galleries, festivals, conferences, and residencies as solo, collaborative, and interdisciplinary projects. Her exhibitions include the Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Sonorities Festival (Belfast), Gallery 12-14 (Vienna), ICMC (Copenhagen), NAISA (Toronto), Kentler International Drawing Centre (Brooklyn), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax), and Surrey Art Gallery. Her collaborations range from projects with media, performance, and visual artists to computer scientists and engineers and to community groups. From Toronto, she has lived throughout Canada and is currently based in London, Ontario.
Jerron Herman
Lax.vid
Screening presented on Vimeo
In Partnership with Images Festival and Tangled Art + Disability
Thursday June 1, 2023 to Friday June 30, 2023
Accessibility: Experimental sound transcription by Adán De La Garza and Audio Description by Superior Description Services and described by James McKenzie
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented on Sunday June 4, 2023 at 3pm EDT
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
Lax.vid is a digital musing on the athletic and dissembling conditions of rest. Cast in a dream-like schism between reality and hyperreality, a figure navigates an embodied and digital memory of comfort, using his screen as a portal, asking us what it takes to catch some zzzz’s.
Jerron Herman is a disabled dancer and writer who creates works to facilitate welcoming. He has premiered pieces at Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, The REACH (excerpt), and The Whitney Museum. His writings have been published nationally and abroad and his play, 3 Bodies, was published in Theater Magazine June 2022 issue. From 2019-2020 he curated the series Access Check 2.0: Mapping Accessibility for the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and Discourse: Disabled Artists at The Joyce for The Joyce Theater in 2021. As a model, Jerron has worked with HIMS, Rothy’s, Tommy Hilfiger, Samsung x i-D, and Nike. Other accolades: 2021 Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship in Dance from the Jerome Foundation. The 2021 PETRONIO Award and residency as well as a 2020 Disability Futures Fellowship by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Autumn Knight
Complain/Disappoint
Screening presented on Vimeo
In Partnership with Images Festival
Thursday June 1, 2023 to Friday June 30, 2023
Accessibility: Experimental sound transcription
Artist Talk
Presented over Zoom
Originally presented on Sunday June 4, 2023 at 3pm EDT
Accessibility: ASL Interpretation
Notes From The Artists
In Complain/Disappoint: Part 1/6 Autumn performs with Purchase College faculty and students.This video features a solo improvisational performance by the artist. The loose score presents Autumn Knight engaging with a world of sculptures and objects The piece explores affective labor, vulnerability, and taboo of complaining and/or expressing disappointment. Audio narratives provided by the Purchase College community.
Credits:
Ross Karre, Video Director, Merve Kayan, Camera Improvisor, Monica Duncan, Camera Improvisor, Senem Pirler, Sound Design and Live Sound Performance, Valerie Caesar, Animation, Sculptures created by Powerhouse Arts
Autumn Knight is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Knight’s video and performance work has been presented by various institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen (NY), and Performance Space New York. Knight is the recipient of the 2021-2022 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Arts and a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.