Performances
Utopics: Cybernetic Time
by Isaac Sullivan
Utopics is a series of site-responsive spatial interventions that recursively apply sound recordings, video projections, mirrors, text, and photogrammetry to amplify the presence of the elsewhere within the here-and-now, exploring technical imagination though the tensions between linear and cybernetic perceptions of time.
A ten-minute slide presentation introducing the project will be followed by a twenty-minute lecture performance entitled Utopics: Cybernetic Time, which reconfigures field recordings from its past editions and layers them into live vocals and video.
With previous iterations in a church in Berlin, a warehouse in Dubai, a television repair facility in Athens, a palazzo in Venice, and a former ice factory in Mumbai, each edition contemporaneously indexes and mediates its placement. Employing mise en abyme to reckon with persisting conceptions of futurity and catastrophe, Utopics takes up a non-nostalgic relationship to the future; and invites an open contemplation of presence in which histories and memory are necessary, yet not entirely sufficient.
About the Author
Isaac Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Zayed University, Dubai; and co-founder of the artist collective, Cybernetic Listening. Exploring ecological thought and emerging technologies, Isaac Sullivan’s artworks and performances revisit cybernetics and engage with AI’s impact on images, data, territory, and observation through video, sound, and installation.
I woke up a sweaty human
by Dalia Khalife
In this audio-visual performance, Dalia sets her physical movements to the backdrop of her life size (sweaty) avatar, raising questions on the boundaries and the liminal space between human form and simulation, including the play on sweat and liquidity.
The performance ties itself to Dalia’s research exploring sweat as a socio-political and paradoxical condition, set against the backdrop of Lebanon’s recent economic collapse. It also looks at hydrofeminism, porosity, inner-outer leakages, micro-climates. She weaves a choreographic language from a bodily archive, while contemplating where the body goes at the level of extremes: ecstasy, abjection, micro-aggressions, stillness.
The project originated from a cross collaboration with Mark Hamilton, who crafted the technology behind the artistic experience.
About the Author
Dalia Khalife is an artist, a scenographer, a multidisciplinary designer, and a dancer. She is currently a professor at the Lebanese American University.
She works intuitively, in an interdisciplinary manner, across installation, site-specific interventions, video, objects, painting and performative gestures to produce situations where viewers occupying the same space produce its meaning. Her practice examines psychophysiological happenings as well as elements of spectacle and play within power structures, social events, and rituals, that manifest as primitive moments of ambiguity and shared vulnerability.
https://www.nika-projects.com/artists/dalia-khalife
