8pm-12am
21+
$15 In Advance
$20 At The Door
OTHER Futures: Featuring 初·ZPTPJ
A night of AV performances inviting you to speculate on distant worlds.
Through live sound and immersive visual narratives, OTHER Futures reimagines alternative visions of the world by reframing history. By radically reorienting perspective through time and place, these four audiovisual performances challenge a myopic world view by expanding on visions of primal-futuristic, sinofuturist, and other futures.
Inspired by creation myths, archeology, simulation theory, the live performance 初·ZPTPJ unveils the rise and fall of a simulated civilization that reflects our own reality on Earth. Titled after the golden era Zep Tepi (“the first occasion”) in Egyptian mythology, 初·ZPTPJ questions whether we are a species with historical amnesia and wonders where humanity is heading at the verge of technological singularity. Chinese artist duo Miao Jing (visual artist, animator) and Jason Hou (composer, sound designer) perform this story as two archivists of records, extracting audiovisual information on the stage.
Opening Acts:
Leyline is an audiovisual performance by the artist duo Tellurics (Harvey Moon + Don Hanson), depicting an abstract exploration of the next 100,000 years of Earth using instrumental electronics and live 3D visuals.
Composer and multi-media performance artist Sharmi Basu and media artist Anum Awan (in collaboration with Rahema Alam on visuals) conjure an abstract future path that hybridizes decolonial sound with Sufi visuals.
Awoke a mythical artificial emotional intelligence comes from the earth. The minerals and metals that make up our digital technologies and takes the form of a moving, breathing, amorphous metallic blob. Awoke values human emotional vulnerability and helps its believers the Awokened build endurance against anxieties like FOMO, and performs emotional labor for them. Communicating with humans through bodily movements instead of words, Awoke’s fluidity causes intensely physical effects in its human counterparts. Embodying her role as the first Awokened Surabhi Saraf will evoke the genesis of Awoke, through atmospheric sound exploration.
The event is produced by ONiON collective.
Artists
Miao Jing
Miao Jing is a visual artist and animation director who lives and works in Shanghai. His art explores spatial experience and cultural identities through immersive moving images. Miao Jing is the co-founder of Hibanana Studio, an art & tech studio focused on creating immersive audiovisual installations. His works have been commissioned frequently by individuals and art organizations.
Jason Hou
Jason Hou is a Beijing-based music producer, composer and sound designer. Jason is known for his iconic style of live performance utilizing the innovative MIDI controller AlphaSphere. Jason's musical style incorporates a wide variety of sonic inspirations while maintaining a strong sense of continuity. Jason is a founding member of 2nd Sense Audio, an audio software company in Beijing that developed the synthesizer plug-in WIGGLE, which received Innovation and Performance Awards from Computer Music magazine. He has most recently performed at Berghain in Berlin during the 19th CTM festival and at BMW Welt in Munich.
Sharmi Basu
Sharmi Basu is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi's primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Her workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. She performs almost 100 times a year and has toured through the US and Canada as well as internationally in Europe. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. She also founded and hosts an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was an organizer the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest. Sharmi is imperfect and is always learning and hopes to help develop a world that embraces and nourishes self-empowerment for all people.
Anum Awan
Anum Awan is an interaction designer and new media artist, based in the Bay Area, who crafts mixed-reality experiences by blending physical and digital media based on queer, immigrant and non-western narratives. They are a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design and CCA. They have exhibited at SOMARTs, Mission Cultural Center, Gray Area, Joe Goode Annex, and more.
Tellurics
TELLURICS is an artist collective exploring a speculative post-human future using real-time performance, simulated virtual worlds and artificial intelligence. Depicting the eventuality of our techno-centric trajectory, their work poses ideas about what remains of technology in the far future of Earth. TELLURICS is led by Don Hanson and Harvey Moon.
Surabhi Saraf
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist and founder of the Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice explores our complex relationship with technology through multimedia works that incorporate video installations, sculptures, performances, and sound compositions. Surabhi has performed solo at Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, Greece, Currents International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, SF and Max Mueller Bhavan Goethe Institut, Mumbai & New Delhi among others. Her collaborative work has been performed at NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival, Bologna, Soundwave Biennial ((8)), ((7)), and ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Surabhi is the recipient of Eureka Fellowship Award 2015 by the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artist award and was nominated for the SECA Award 2018, SFMOMA and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She is a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York.
Partners
ONiON Collective
ONiON Collective is a Cross-Culture Art and Technology platform, where digital art will be presented in our collaborated venues globally. We focus on artwork involves critical/creative thinking about emerging technologies. Based in Shanghai and SF/LA currently, ONiON curates and conducts various art show, pop-up exhibition, and location-based interactive solutions.
