STATOCYST ELEGY

speculative design workshops in partnership with Tactical Tech’s RePlaybook, Research Mattress, 2026/27

Underwater data centers are invading Mother Seas. Through acoustic counter-mapping, embodied listening, and speculative environmental designs, workshop participants ask what accountability could look like when the affected publics are more-than-human.

NON BASTA AMORE

video installation, projection mapping for an opera, with live painting by Priscilla Heine, 2026

Rodolfo sings non basta amore (love is not enough) in the third act of Puccini's La Bohème, over his love, Mimì, as she dies: povertà l'ha sfiorita (poverty has withered the flower). No medicine, no food, no warm shelter. La Bohème stages a capitalist order that normalizes disposability. It is mourning, reverence for decay, and the quivering joy that resist. In the words of Bayo Akómoláfé, "Hope includes hopelessness and grieving is showing gratitude for that which has been lost." How to be alive in a world that wants us dead? After the bombs fall, flower’s bloom is a refusal–a small unit of no. We love. It is not enough. Based on imagery of Priscilla Heine's live painting to Puccini's La Bohème, woven with the jazz of Tomas Majcherski, NON BASTA AMORE is a lament for Palestine where Mimì's death becomes a figure of sumud.

Premiered at the Highland Center for the Arts with Opera Vermont.

what are you trampling on today?_____make space, don't trample_____no space? then submerge and merge!________prepare self to co-compost and join ancestral microorganismic parties___________________DECENTERED HUMAN IS A HAPPY HUMAN___________________________we are but a dancing multispecies collage!_____________MOBILE PORTALS MAKE BORDERS OBSOLETE!_____

Dream it

what are you trampling on today?_____make space, don't trample_____no space? then submerge and merge!________prepare self to co-compost and join ancestral microorganismic parties___________________DECENTERED HUMAN IS A HAPPY HUMAN___________________________we are but a dancing multispecies collage!_____________MOBILE PORTALS MAKE BORDERS OBSOLETE!_____ Dream it

Kin Mounds

installation, performative cinema, and manifesto, Research Mattress, 2024/25

Research Mattress engages in sensory unlearnings of anthropocentrism to reawaken dormant senses and arouse relational experiences with more-than-human entities.

As we move towards working with the soil and away from working the soil, we refute the commodified and “alienated labor” of flora, fauna, pets and microbiota. These more-than-humans whose intelligences were denied and exploited to absorb our pollutants, lick our hands, and fatten our bellies are illustrative of capitalist oppression that plagues the human and more than human alike.

Research Mattress has been supported by the Catwalk Art Residency and the Tisch Creative Research Grant, and has exhibited at the Pittsburgh Frame Gallery, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the Shanghai International Design Festival, the Nguyen Wahed Gallery, and the Museum of the Moving Image.

Oh No, Rain Will Not Cleanse Us

street action / film, with Alice Xiaodi Tang, Research Mattress, 2025/26

Times Square Recruiting Station, New York, Flag Day, June 14, 2025

We love each other into one fluid body with no border, lost, grasping, resurging, we peregrinate under the electric flag of the empire that sells it all: genocide, Starbucks, Prada.

Caged Waterfall

public performance/intervention series, video, sound design, 2024

Skyscraping constructions subjugate water flows, disturb soils, and displace microbial communities. What ancient memories and spirits are awakened?

Performed by appointment, across from what was the Brooklyn Home for Consumptives, the soil and water whisper of the gentle tending once offered here, now unsettled by concrete and steel.

Filmed by Judy Lieff and Alice Xiaodi Tang; made possible by NYC DOT.

Kinder Kin Garden

practice-based research and installation series, with Fangling Huang, Judy Lieff, Alice Xiaodi Tang, and Danni Wang, 2022/23

Kinder Kin Garden is a mobile portal, a kinder, kin-garden for multispecies justice, connecting disparate time scales and geopolitical landscapes, a way of existing and world-building.

The Kinder Kin Garden integrates living materials: mycelium, lichen, and moss, our mentors and ecological elders, with fragments of our technological waste. The Portal-Garden’s adaptability and mobility are metaphors for current migrations of all species, a response to ecological collapse and geopolitical shifts.

Research and prototyping for Kinder Kin Garden has been supported by the Tisch Creative Research Grant, Eric Forman Studio, Tony Patrick’s Share Lab, and exhibited at the Shanghai International Design Festival.

ROBOTA (44°34'39.5"N 72°14'45.2"W)

performance/single-channel video/sound design, 2022

In a post-human world, a cyborgian entity materializes and experiences an enchanted pond for the first time.

The performance stems from an ecofeminist perspective and references the origin of the word “robota” (derived from “drudgery” and “forced labor”) as well as “robot” (from Karel Čapek’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, Rossum's Universal Robots).

Robota’s cyborgian entity continues its habitual tasks but senses possible liberation in the multisensory, multispecies world in and around the pond.

Future Vision Festival, Tokyo and Amsterdam, 2022; Bideodromo Experimental Film Festival, Bilbao, Spain, 2023; Stockholm Film Festival, 2023; Europa Film Festival, Barcelona, Spain, 2024

ROBOTA

MAMA, SOIL, AND SPIRIT

installation, 2021

MAMA, SOIL, AND SPIRIT expresses the poetry of relationality as I collaborate on an interactive artwork with the soil. Sensors read the soil’s humidity and temperature, and the value inputs shape the dynamics of three reactive animations: Bathing Mamas, Tunnel Mamas, and Deep Time. Within the animations is documentation captured with borescope cameras and a Butoh performance. I evoke animistic mentalities, the dynamism of the microbiome, and technology's relationship to its maternal materials. The screens rest in holes, ontological parasites defined by soil. They are spirit portals revealing the continuum and unity of the above ground and the underground.

MORE MAMAS

CYBORGIAN ROCK: A PROTO-BOT

custom chatbot/web-based interactive experience, 2020/21

The Cyborgian Rock (CR) is a fictional entity experienced via a chatbot and designed to stimulate animistic imagination in users. It is a cyborgian relative of the Makapansgat pebble".. This project explores the untapped potentialities of social presence, which can be defined as the sense of being with another. The CR experience is the opposite of our encounters with consumer techno-products. It does not serve a utilitarian purpose or provide consumerist pleasures. Instead it steers one towards reflections on the more-than-human worlds. The code and algorithms are “handwritten” thus the CR is a proto-bot, not an AI-bot.

Featured on the Coding Train live stream.

HOLE SOCIETY

art intervention/video series, 2022/2023

HOLE SOCIETY is accompanied by instructions inspired by Fluxus scores. The series forms an abstract narrative of birth-death-regeneration and reveals a web of bureaucratic structures, cultural complexities, and economies that surround soil exploitation. HOLE SOCIETY examines infrastructure where it intersects with soil and relies on holes. It reveals terra firma as a dynamic and living thing and part of a continuum with the life above-ground.

HERE

The Institute for Feminist Laughagenic Studies

The Intersectional Feminist Laughalution Society (IFLS)

speculative proposal and web environment, 2022

Stages the IFLS as an institution devoted to the study and activation of feminist laughter. This research project explores how gendered subjects are conditioned by the social timing and bodily codes of laughter, proposing new “laughagenic” practices for resistance and reconditioning.

IDENTIFY via IFLS index system

REGULATE with awareness of oppressive laughter norms

DEPLOY feminist and resistance-oriented laughagenic practices

PASS BY/PASS THROUGH

live online performance/reactive sound design, 2021

An entity dances with a rock as audience members react. The position of the rock, detected with a gyroscope sensor, is used in Max MSP to create an instrument that responds to rock’s orientation and velocity. This project was made in a NIME workshop with the support from Rudolfo Cosovich and Eric Parren. It is inspired by a Jinen Butoh workshop with Atsushi Takenouchi.