EdgeCut: SANITY

New York Live Arts partner and independent performance series, EdgeCut, presents SANITY, the second showcase in an online group performance series, on December 5th. The series explores our complex relationship to the digital and how “liveness” is defined during this current moment. This second virtual iteration of the series on December 5th, 1:00 – 4:00 PM EDT, features an international group of artists selected from an open call, including Malena Dayen, Karen Lancel + Hermen Maat, Caitlin + Misha, Katelyn Halpern + Paul Pinto, and divinebrick + Chris Soohoo. The first showcase dealt with captivity, while the next and last installment, SANITY, will focus on reclaiming our corporeal reality.

Initially convening in January 2020 at NEW INC—the art, tech and design incubator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York—EdgeCut’s online version of the performance series will offer a limited amount of tickets to participate in the various interactive events and artist talks hosted inside the 3D virtual platform NOWHERE. Additionally, many of the performances will be free and open to the public via livestream on EdgeCut and their partners’ websites. The series is curated by Heidi Boisvert and Kat Mustatea.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Karen Lancel + Hermen Maat / Intimacy Agents
Amsterdam / #Intimacy #Biosensors
Artist duo Lancel/Maat showed internationally awarded ‘Artistic Social Labs’ at Venice Biennial, Ars Electronica Linz, European Media Art Platform, Waag Society, Nabi ArtCentre Seoul; with neuro-bio-technological AI Performance Research at TU Delft, Banff Center CA.

Caitlin & Misha / Infinite Worries Bash
Boston / #CollectiveGesture #DigitalObjects
Caitlin & Misha is an artist duo making work about sharing communities, livable ecologies, and the transmutation of waste. Among other things they create installations, games, and happenings where audience participation is a key component of the work and its message.
caitlinandmisha.com & worries.io/bash
Instagram: @oldcateyes #caitlinandmisha

Malena Dayen / While you are with me
New York / #Opera #Responsive
Malena Dayen is an Argentinian opera singer and stage director based in New York. She directed opera productions for Bare Opera and Teatro Grattacielo and co-created “Exercises on The Presence of Odradek”, an experimental operatic work performed live online that combined dance and opera with interactive technology. IG: @malenadayen

divinebrick + Chris Soohoo / Live Improv Performance Prayer
L.A. / #Butoh #Improv
divinebrick (josie j) is a self iconoclast search for the sacred primordial being.  divinebrick name is a placeholder for an idea that the self is a divine phenomenon holding and caretaking the grander whole. Decolonizing the self is the remembering of the soil the self is made of. IG @divinebrickartist

Chris SooHoo is an artist working in paint, film, and virtual reality. He also teaches drawing and painting at the LA Academy of Figurative Art and L.M.U.  Recently he has been combining teaching with the multimedia potential of performance, music, painting, and live streaming. IG @sooohoooo
www.razethewhitebox.com

Katelyn Halpern + Paul Pinto / Living Room
Jersey City / #Video #Dance
Katelyn Halpern is a multidisciplinary artist from Austin, Texas. Her eclectic body of work includes evening length danceworks JUICE and Loose Heart, public installation Labyrinth No. 9, and a series of embroidered styrofoam trays. She lives and runs SMUSH Gallery in Jersey City, NJ. IG @khalpern

Paul Pinto: multi-disciplinary artist who spent the last few months making online shows with his band thingNY, music for theatre productions, and a bunch of videos including Just Love and Dr. Peetee. Jan 2021: Whiteness: Blanc at the Prototype Festival. Twitter @paulfpinto

ABOUT EDGECUT

EdgeCut is a monthly performance series that convenes at NEW INC, the art, tech and design incubator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. We present short works of live performance that explore our complex relationship to the digital—looking at the many ways interactivity, games, robotics, wearables, AI and other digital technologies inform new practices in live performance. Curated by Heidi Boisvert and Kat Mustatea.

Kat Mustatea is an artist whose experiments with language and live arts stretch theater into the digital age. A playwright and technologist, she uses metaphors of hybridity and transformation to craft live performances that investigate absurdity, misunderstanding, and what it means to be American. Her TED talk, about puppets and algorithms, originates a new thesis about the meaning of machines making art. She writes and speaks frequently about the cutting edge of art and technology.

Heidi Boisvert is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is currently mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications. She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination.