Backstitch Residency 2025
TESTU Collective
ARTIST BIO
Testu Collective is an NYC-based intermedia art group founded by Dan Tesene and Serena Stucke. Testu creates intermedia performances, experimental videos, concept soundtracks, audiovisual experiences, sound art, and performance art installations. Tesene and Stucke are interested in creating environments that challenge the traditional audience experience. Testu has produced site-specific installations and curated works for Triskelion Arts (Brooklyn), Wallplay On Canal (NYC), Flux Factory (Governors Island), Sound Pedro (Los Angeles), Chashama (Brooklyn), CTM Festival(online), Ars Electronica(NYC), Ace Hotel(NYC), The Shed(NYC), Pleamar Festival(Buenos Aires), Theaterlab(NYC).
Artist Statement
” Testu Collective’s ‘Ether’ will explore their fascination with inaudible and unseen forces given off from our electrical and magnetic worlds. They create work that engages audiences as active participants in the work, allowing for creativity to be an emergent process not limited to the performer or curated artist. Through installations, video projections, and live performances, the audience will get to observe and interact with these hidden forces. To understand the invisible and inaudible is to understand the full potential of this universe. ‘Ether’ will build upon Testu Collective’s ongoing research into pioneering sound artist Christina Kubisch, who created installations and soundwalks centered around exploring magnetic
and electromagnetic fields. Testu Collective will create tangible experiences of these mysterious fields in Theaterlab’s unique spaces to understand how magnetic fields work via experimental performance art, radical compositions, and unique sound instruments. “
ABOUT THE WORK
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Listening to the Ether is a two part interactive installation and intermedia performance series at Theaterlab. Serena Stucke and Dan Tesene, of Testu Collective, will explore the invisible magnetic and electromagnetic fields that permeate our modern technological environment through novel multimedia approaches in sound art, video projection, and live performance. In the Atelier space, Testu Collective will build a hidden electronic wall where the audience can create unique audio compositions utilizing electromagnetic pick-ups. The collective will also build two motorized instruments that will sense magnetic motion and utilize magnetic pick-up coils for sound. In the Theater space, Testu Collective will create an intermedia performance with sound artist collaborators and a movement artist. The movement artist will be fit with wireless electromagnetic pick-ups. Each gesture and movement will alter the sound of the pick-ups.
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ARTIST’S WORK AT THEATERLAB
ARTIST’S WORK AT THEATERLAB
