Jack Callahan (die Reihe) and Jeff Witscher’s (Rene Hell) recent collaboration What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth is a multichannel work examining the banality of the human drama in the 21st century. Witscher and Callahan, both known for their far-ranging work under various monikers, have recently put forward the descriptors “Music Art” and “Sound Music” as formal headings to re-assert the simplicity of their own respective practices. The evening will also feature solo works by Callahan and Witscher. A new work by Witscher, entitled St. Vincent Passion, is in reference to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion with new proclamations of impending apocalypse littered throughout. Callahan’s solo performance draws from his project Housed, a catalog of over 1000 chords from classic House tracks sampled and archived by Callahan, which is currently being turned into an web-based archive.

This event is part of Digital Alchemy, a series of performances and discussions exploring the intertwined intellectual and ideological histories of art and technology. For admission to the full series, become a member and pick up the Digital Alchemy All-Access Pass.

In 1989, as Tim Berners-Lee dreamed up the World Wide Web, a deep faith in the democratizing power of decentralized communication ruled American life. Even Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator of the Hollywood era, could be heard to proclaim that “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the micro-chip.” Today of course, we know better. The question is, how did we go so far wrong? To try to answer that question, this talk returns to the 1940s and shows how our trust in decentralized communication was born in the fight against fascism during World War II. It then tracks that trust through the counterculture of the 1960s to the Silicon Valley of today. Along the way, it shows step-by-step how the twentieth-century American dream of a society of technology-equipped, expressive individuals became the foundation of today’s newly emboldened and highly individualized form of authoritarianism.

This event is part of Digital Alchemy, a series of performances and discussions exploring the intertwined intellectual and ideological histories of art and technology. For admission to the full series, become a member and pick up the Digital Alchemy All-Access Pass.

In their web TV series, “Sistership TV,” multimedia performance art trio and research group The Powers envision a world inhabited by animal kin and monstrous creatures, haunted by other-dimensional entities, and erupting with the repressed archetypes of classical myth. Through the media of video, music, story-telling, dance, and ritualistic performance, The Powers present a performance that is both absurd, irreverent, and terrifying, drawing inspiration from mythological trinities of sisters and reconfigurations of hetero-patriarchal myths. The Powers consists of scholar, psychoanalytic therapist, and musician Katherine Kline, Brooklyn/Montreal painter and mixed-media artist Jessica Mensch, and Canada-based artist and filmmaker Emily Pelstring. Sharing the bill is Oakland-based artist Sharmi Basu, who explores themes of vulnerability, accountability, and experiences of millennial diaspora in their electronic and multimedia performances.

This event is part of Digital Alchemy, a series of performances and discussions exploring the intertwined intellectual and ideological histories of art and technology. For admission to the full series, become a member and pick up the Digital Alchemy All-Access Pass.

Discussions of technology and gender usually focus on how gender shapes the design and use of technology—but less-discussed is the way that technology shapes our idea of what gender even is. In this talk, Os Keyes, a researcher and writer at the University of Washington studying gender, technology and (counter)power, will parallel the development of facial recognition systems for gender with the history of attempts to identify and classify trans people. In doing so, they will demonstrate the profound (and violent) threat that AI systems—even those which claim to merely be “observing” or “measuring”—pose for individuals’, communities’, and societies’ understanding of the range of possible human lives.

This event is part of Digital Alchemy, a series of performances and discussions exploring the intertwined intellectual and ideological histories of art and technology. For admission to the full series, become a member and pick up the Digital Alchemy All-Access Pass.