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DANCE NEWS: Media Art Xploration Presents MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE, Produced in Collaboration with New York Live Arts, November 5-7
Live Performances,Immersive Installations, and Timely Conversations Around Urgent Questions and World-Expanding Innovations in Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, and the Human-Machine Collaboration
MAX (Media Art Xploration) presents MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE, the organization’s first New York City-based arts festival, produced in association with New York Live Arts. THE NEUROVERSE teams artists with scientists that push the limits of mind and machine through groundbreaking interdisciplinary works. Amid an explosion of new intelligences, technology opens the doors to exhilarating experiences and functions, reorienting our perceptions of consciousness and the wiring that activates it. But smart machines can also pose an existential threat to our species and life as we know it. Will the good or evil uses of these technologies win? THE NEUROVERSE explores both sides, as new artistic forms emerge within innovative reflections on existence—and its curious state on a planet where climate change renders life ever more fragile while technology expands it into new dimensions.
THE NEUROVERSE—featuring work from Boys and Girls Club of Rosebud, Andy Bragen & Daniel Fish, Stephanie Dinkins, Gershon Dublon & Xin Liu (slow immediate), Grayson Earle, Annie Lewandowski & Kyle McDonald, Ethan Lipton & Leigh Silverman, Heidi Boisvert & Kat Mustatea, NUUM Collective with choreography by NiNi Dongnier, and Philipp Schmitt—will take place November 5-7 at New York Live Arts, New Inc’s ONX Studio for Extended Reality, and the Invisible Dog Art Center. On November 7, MAX presents MAXforum: Day of the Future, gathering thought leaders—including acclaimed algorithmic theater visionary Annie Dorsen as keynote speaker and science writer Anne Murphy Paul, as well as many artists featured in THE NEUROVERSE—in discussion of and expansion on the festival’s core themes.
In THE NEUROVERSE, theater, dance, audiovisual installation, and lectures meld with the very technologies they consider in immersive, mind-bending works and experiences—allowing us to hear whales like we have never heard them before; to tour the globe as we fall asleep. On the flip-side, the festival programming grapples with the implications of the dawn of autonomous weaponry; of automation’s replacement of human workers and human identity. Embedded in the very creation of these hybrid works is the alluring potential of breakthrough and the possibility of error. THE NEUROVERSE offers a roller coaster ride through the promise and peril of machine learning.
MAX is a nonprofit organization working with artists and scientists to create live arts that both interrogate and exploit the scientific missions of our time. The organization brings THE NEUROVERSE to New York following its first biennial arts festival, MAXlive 2019: A Space Festival, which, for San Francisco audiences, explored our new space age, the extraordinary scientific advances in this field, and how they change the way we see ourselves and Earth. As performance reemerges as an opportunity for gathering in-person, the MAXlive festival further embraces the potentials of technology to give new meaning and form to what can be done artistically in physical, and virtual, space.
Kay Matschullat, Producing Directorof MAX (Media Art Xploration). Photo © MAX (Media Art Xploration).
MAX Artistic Director Kay Matschullat says of THE NEUROVERSE, “There’s so much possibility in what machines give us, including an extended sense of humanity and greater communication with the more- than-human on this planet who can hopefully help us save it. The question isn’t whether AI is fundamentally good or bad; what will determine the future of human existence is, rather, how we choose to use it. As Jacob wrestles the angel to the ground, will we wrangle smart machines to be our engines, or will they suffocate and subsume us? These questions—along with the pure drama of, ‘will the technology work?’—are folded into the making of works in this festival.”
MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE Consulting Producer Adaora Udoji says, “There’s currently not much in the way of centralized experiences of artistic uses of these technologies: you can go to SXSW, you can go to Sundance, you can go to Cannes, and these are all critically important venues and distribution points, but MAX’s work comes simultaneously out of art and technology from the ground up, solely focused on exploring this nexus in culture. MAX wants the broadest audiences to be asking questions about what media, art, and technology mean and how they impact our lives. People will be seeing a lot of these combinations of new technological tools for expression for the first time. And that’s what MAX is affording you: it truly is a window into what’s available to us today.”
Tickets for MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE go on sale on Thursday, September 30 at mediaartexploration.org.
MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE Schedule and Descriptions
NUUM Collective's Doppelgänger (Work in Process). Photo © https://nuum.co.
Boys and Girls Club of Rosebud
OÁYE AI
New York Live Arts Lobby
Installation Open November 5, 6:00pm; November 6 and 7, 10am-10pm
Lakota cosmology provides an alternative framework for developing and integrating AI into society that takes into account the needs of the community. MAX, in partnership with 5 Corners Collective and Boys and Girls Club of Rosebud Reservation, presents a photo series that approaches the concept through young people’s eyes. With the landscape of South Dakota as the backdrop, this photo series is a breathtaking investigation of artificial intelligence and computation through an Indigenous framework that places one eye on scientific and commercial advancements and the other on Indigenous concepts of respect for oneself, one’s community, and the environment.
Stephanie Dinkins
Secret Garden
ONX Studio
Interactive Installation: November 5, 4-8pm; November 6, 2-7pm; November 7, 2-7pm
After a critically acclaimed run at the Sundance Festival, Stephanie Dinkins’ immersive work, Secret Garden, is returning to NYC, this time more intimate than ever before. Step into a time-collapsing garden and encounter stories from Black women across generations: surviving a slave boat, growing up on a 1920s Black-owned farm, surviving 9/11, to name a few. Secret Garden is the timely reminder that sharing and receiving stories is an act of resistance.
Gershon Dublon & Xin Liu (slow immediate)
The Wandering Mind
New York Live Arts Studio
November 5 at 7pm, November 6 at 2pm and 7pm
With The Wandering Mind, artist-engineer duo slow immediate build on their practice of helping us explore what it means to be human on our shared planet. In collaboration with invited musicians, their AI-guided improvisational performance draws from tens of thousands of field recordings from every part of the globe to construct an opus that serenades and guides you on a tour of the world with your eyes closed.
Grayson Earle
Inference Engine
ONX Studio
Interactive Installation: November 5, 4-8pm; November 6, 2-7pm; November 7, 2-7pm
In Inference Engine, you are stepping into more than a video game. You’re in a spacecraft that has been knocked out of orbit and into the GANthropocene; now you're lost in a Generative Adversarial Network—or, GAN for short. With only the controls you have in front of you, you must navigate your way back to your destination before time runs out.
Inference Engine: Exploring the GANc
November 6, 11am-12pm Meet-and-Greet, 12-2pm Workshop
Exploring the GANthropocene is a hands-on workshop from Grayson Earle that introduces the basics of utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks. Students will learn about how GANs work and then utilize a pre-trained Generator to produce new images and videos. Topics include: an introduction to neural networks; creative projects that utilize GANs; how Generative Adversarial Networks function; latent space; training a GAN (this will not happen from scratch due to time constraints, but students will be able to try this later on their own); using “inference” to generate new images; and creating videos that “walk” through the latent space of a GAN model.
Annie Lewandowski & Kyle McDonald
Siren: Listening to Another Species on Earth
Immersive Concert
The Invisible Dog Art Center
November 5, 6:30-10pm; November 6, 2-8pm, November 7, 1-6pm (with timed ticketing)
Sound artist Annie Lewandowski, artist and coder Kyle McDonald, and scenic designer Amy Rubin explore a meeting of intelligences—human, humpback whale, and artificial—in Siren: Listening to Another Species on Earth. Arriving in New York following previews on Martha’s Vineyard and at Cornell University, Siren immerses listeners in Lewandowski’s detailed recordings of humpback whale song, made with pioneering bioacoustician Katy Payne and the Hawaii Marine Mammal Consortium. Lewandowski and McDonald’s analyses of these recordings find their creative expression through McDonald’s captivating and machine learning-driven synesthetic lighting design, which is vividly projected onto Rubin's elaborate sculpture made from marine debris recovered from the ocean around Cape Cod. The Siren installation draws audiences into a thick mix of the interior and exterior worlds of humpback singers, resulting in both a call to beauty and a call to action to protect marine mammals from entanglement.
Ethan Lipton and His Orchestra
We Are Your Robots
A Cabaret
Written by Ethan Lipton
Directed by Leigh Silverman
New York Live Arts Theater
November 5 at 9pm; November 6 at 9pm
In this poignant and wonderfully absurd existential inquiry, Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra, a band of robots, have been invited to perform for this audience. Across their performance, they seek to learn what human beings want from their machines, to understand what it means to be human, and finally to discern what about us still exists (or matters) now that we have them—our smart machines. The hilarious and harrowing new work was commissioned by The Sloan Foundation and MAX, and is directed by Leigh Silverman.
Kat Mustatea & Heidi Boisvert
Lizardly
A Mixed-Reality Performance
New York Live Arts Theater
November 7, 1:45 and 6pm
Vincent and Rebecca’s marriage is falling apart as they brace for an oncoming hurricane and they are simultaneously turning into lizards. Set in post-anthropocene Miami, humans have not been wiped out, so much as they have adapted to rapid environmental shifts by mutating into reptiles. Vincent and Rebecca have no choice but to weather the storm inside their smart-home, a technological remnant named June whose functions (and malfunctions) they weaponize in an escalating domestic turf war. The staging employs VR, MoCap and Machine Learning to create a vivid portrayal of hybrid humans in a posthuman world. As a way of bringing the metaphor of transformation outward, the characters influence their surroundings through their gestures, triggering transformations in the environment.
NUUM Collective
Doppelgänger
A Dance
New York Live Arts Theater
Choreographed and Performed by NiNi Dongnier
November 5 at 3pm and 6pm
In Doppelgänger, the NUUM Collective uses machine learning to manufacture a duet between a performer and themselves. In the piece, performer NiNi Dongnier explores isolation and connection as she dances in real-time with her computer-manipulated doppelgänger. NUUM Collective, a group of artists and technologists whose multidisciplinary work asks fundamental questions about what we see and what we think we see, in their latest piece illustrate how it in fact does not take two to tango.
Philipp Schmitt
How Does Thinking Look Like?
ONX Studio
Lecture-Performance
November 5 at 7pm, November 6 at 4pm and 6pm, November 7 at 3pm
In a world where most people's capacity to visualize what artificial intelligence is ranges from the Terminator to face recognition, artist Philipp Schmitt is broadening the spectrum of perception. Featuring choreography by Sarah Danhke, this lecture-performance delves into the imagination of the engineer and the aesthetics of artificial intelligence and gives you access to new ways of picturing AI—that will remain with you long after the curtain bow.
The Knights
On Wings of Song: Listening to Another Species on Earth
New York Live Arts Theater
November 6 at 5:30pm
Brooklyn-based orchestra The Knights share music that takes flight, written for strings and percussion. In a year of a devastating pandemic and of a reckoning with the devastating effects of humanity’s impact on earth, this installment of Listening to Another Species on Earth focuses on birds and other winged creatures in particular. Birds are the original virtuoso musicians, sending out coded signals through their songs intended to affect a change in the listener’s behavior (and perhaps, at times, just for “pleasure”?). Recent neuroscience studies have suggested that hearing “enjoyable music” lights up the same mesolimbic reward pathway for both human beings and birds. MAX presents an evening of pieces by composers who listened deeply to the songs of winged creatures.
MAXforum: Day of the Future
New York Live Arts Studio
November 7
Bodies of Intelligence
Featuring Annie Murphy Paul and Annie Dorsen
11am
Join us for a two-part presentation exploring ideas around embodied learning. Acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul discusses her research into human cognition as a networked and profoundly embodied process; and Annie Dorsen, a theatre director working at the intersection of algorithms and live performance, who most recently has been working with GPT-3, will discuss her experience working with disembodied machine intelligences—the limitations, possibilities, and obstructions.
Costs of Extraction: Using Science and Technology to Sound the Alarm and Light the Way Forward
Featuring Kyle McDonald, Stephanie Dinkins, and Suzanne Kite
Moderated by Adaora Udoji
2:30pm
How can artists liberate technologies from their extractive origin stories to create subversive art works? Artists Stephanie Dinkins, Suzanne Kite, and Kyle McDonald join innovator and storyteller Adaoro Udoji in conversation to explore how artists are using technology to be agents of change.
Road to Recovery: Using Science and Technology to Listen Deeply
Featuring Annie Lewandowski, Gershon Dublon, and NiNi Dongnier
Moderated by Kay Matschullat
3:30pm
How can technology enable different attitudes of attention and care? Composer Annie Lewandowski, researcher and engineer Gershon Dublon, and dancer-choreographer NiNi Dongnier join MAX founder and artistic director Kay Matschullat to discuss how they are utilizing acoustic innovations, AI, and machine learning to provide opportunities for audiences to slow down and absorb information differently.
Have the Robot Armies Arrived?
Including a Reading from Johnsville Road, by Andy Bragen, Developed in Collaboration with Daniel Fish; a Video of Robot Soldiers; and a Conversation
5pm
With a recent assassination in Iran by an autonomous vehicle did we unwittingly witness the entrance of autonomous weapons in the theater of war? And what is a person to do about it?
This event features a reading from the play, a viewing of state of the art autonomous machines, and a conversation moderated by Adaora Udjoni, featuring Ryan Calo, AI ethicist and co-director of Tech Policy Lab at University of Washington.
