DEMO2024 Closing Performance Night
DEMO2024 Closing Performance Night
Thursday, June 20th
5pm-9pm
WSA, 161 Water Street
Complimentary Refreshments provided
The DEMO2024 showcases are open Wednesday to Sunday from 11 am to 7 pm, through June 5 - 20.
Below read about the special performances that will close out DEMO2024:
5:30pm - Antariksha Studio with MURTHOVIC X THIRUDA
"Elsewhere in India" is a groundbreaking transmedia project that explores the intersection of Indian cultural heritage, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies. Through a series of immersive and thought-provoking installations, performances, and experiences, the project invites audiences to embark on a journey through time, space, and consciousness, as they navigate the fragments of a future India on the brink of cultural amnesia.
At the heart of the project is the story of Meenakshi, a "Cultural Cyborg" tasked with preserving and reviving the remnants of India's rich cultural tapestry. Meenakshi's quest serves as a narrative thread, weaving together the various components of the project.
"Elsewhere in India" serves as a platform for artistic experimentation, cultural preservation, and social commentary. By harnessing the power of storytelling, technology, and speculative imagination, the project aims to provoke critical reflections on the nature of identity, memory, and belonging in a rapidly changing world.
As the project continues to evolve and travel to different venues around the globe, it invites audiences to join in the creation of a new, inclusive cultural narrative – one that celebrates the diversity and resilience of the Indian diaspora, while also offering a hopeful vision for the future of cultural heritage in the digital age.
6:30pm - MYStudio with Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company
"Embodied Ink " is a multimedia dance performance, which transcends the presentation form of Chinese Calligraphy, immerses its viewer in a multisensory environment with a poetic experience. The performance translates stroke motion into body movements, further into real-time calligraphic visuals and sounds with motion capture technology. Drawing inspiration from art history research on the three schools of Chinese calligraphy, Seal Script (zhuanshu), Standard Script (kaishu), and Cursive Script (caoshu), it reconceives the physical media in terms of virtual potentialities, fixed forms in terms of forces and moving particles. The virtual field of the body reveals the imperceptible movement and philosophical ideas underlying cultural heritage.
Artists: Anna Borou Yu, Jiajian Min, Ying Shi, Greta Campo, Siyu Wang, Zezheng Li
Special thanks to NEW INC, New Museum of Contemporary Art, EY Metaverse Lab, ONX Studio, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, Andy Chiang, Harald Haraldsson, Tiange Zhou, Zeyu Wang
7:00pm - Ash Rucker with Christine Alfred
We are all constantly moving through conflicting emotions, feelings, and grief as we contend with the state of the world today. Join Ash Rucker for Messages Received: Utopian Realities, an interactive moving meditation and prayer for the world intended to uplift and spread love and joy amidst overwhelming loss and tragedy. Open to everyone, the performance is a nondenominational transcendental vibration. Regardless of your beliefs, the objective of this collective performance piece is to raise the vibrations around the world.
"Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion."
bell hooks, All About Love, p. 215.
"Reflections of Divinity" is an interactive altar that draws inspiration from the inherent beauty of all sentient beings and our interconnectedness, reaching back in time to honor the primordial sound of creation. The elements are represented through objects that emphasize resonance, harmony, and unity, serving as a reminder that all transcendent experiences reflect our own Divinity.
7:30pm - elekhlekha
Jitr จิตร: extended gong ensemble is an audio and visual networked live coding, collaborative sound making, and an extended body of work from an ever-evolving project, Jitr จิตร. This project borrowed an alternative mode of collaboration rooted in Southeast Asia communal gathering gong ensembles. Democratizing interaction between each live coding performer via MIDI networks of imaginary gongs, where each has limited gongs with melodies and rhythms spread among live coders. Audiences are invited to join the ritual musical gathering and make sounds with objects found in one's pocket or body, eliminating the dominant force and underlining each participant's agency.
8:00 - Dan Gorelick with Andy Rolfes
"Many Dawns," a collaboration between Dan Gorelick and Andy Rolfes, is an immersive audio-visual piece that explores the present moment – how we exist at the crossroads of many different time-scales, depicting a world with dilated time: extended dawns, dusks, and accelerated days. The soundscape, created with cascading cello loops and live-coded sequences, incorporates field recordings and real-time air traffic control radio chatter from around the world. The visuals are generated in real-time with Unreal Engine with a joystick and Rokoko motion capture glove. Our human experience is just a fleeting moment in the greater geological time-scale, and the piece creates a space to collectively reflect on the impact to and our responsibility to the planet. "Many Dawns" has been performed at Gray Area in San Francisco and Zerospace in Brooklyn, NY.