Haptic Drift | March 9, 2024

Theaterlab Presents

Haptic Drift: An Evening of Adventurous Sound & Performance Art

By Testu Collective

March 9, 2023 – 8pm

For the third iteration of the Haptic Drift series at Theaterlab, Testu Collective has created a physical, action-based score. Eternal Oyster’s movement will activate the graphic sculpture as musicians Matt Evans, MA, Testu, and Santos interpret it through experimental sound techniques, voice, and amplified sound objects.

Testu Collective will be drawing on concepts from Fluxus graphic and performance scores which were created to leave interpretations open to the performers.

“Fluxus is an attitude, a “way of doing things” with the desire to eliminate traditional boundaries between artistic disciplines, between artist and audience, and between art and life itself, in order to dissolve art in the flow of existence.” – Anna Cestelli Guidi

Tickets
$20 (plus fees of $2)
Click HERE to purchase!

Meet the Artists

Testu Collective is an NYC-based intermedia art group founded by Dan Tesene and Serena Stucke. Testu creates 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). Most recently, Testu Collective performed ‘Breathing Landscapes’, a live audiovisual experience, at Tunnel space in Tokyo.

@testucollective | testucollective.com

A person crouching on the rocky shoals of the ocean. They are wearing an ornate patterned blouse and looking back into the camera.

Eternal Oyster (Jennae Santos) (they/she) is an interdisciplinary performance artist born in the Bay Area, based in Brooklyn, with ancestral roots across the Philippines archipelago. Fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, the feminist occult, plant medicine, food ways, coastal ecologies, and animal architecture poeticized through the lens of decolonization, bloodlines, mythmaking, love songs, and pleasure autonomy, their work spans chamber prog ensemble, liberation dance music, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, communal ritual, social practice, video, sound sculpture and other intermedia generated through 3 aliases— progressive art-rock project, gushes, earth-body research-reponse container, Eternal Oyster, and sensory installation partnership, Tree+Oyster.

For Haptic Drift III, Jennae invokes the moniker Eternal Oyster to move through testu
collective’s sculptural score. Interstitial exercises dreamt in ink, foam, web, sweat, and further eco-bio
materials met with Fluxus-inspired play will inform Eternal Oyster’s movement and actionism.

Two juxtaposed people working on machinery. They are surrounded by beams of light.

MA is the collaborative sound works of ÉMU + insomniac hotel.

ÉMU aka Maria Takeuchi creates sonic and visual poems, merging organismic soundscapes with generative art and illuminating objects inspired by nature.

Using piezo microphones attached to porcelain bowls with water measurements, Maria plays and conducts the sound-objects with a delicate yet intentional focus. The subtle sound textures created by sand, dry leaves, and shells on the handmade instruments, processed for added aesthetic atmosphere.

insomniac hotel is the music of surfaces. The swirls of synthetic-organic tone-spaces and refracted microphony evoke fractal geometries; each detail a world in itself. Working alone, Alec Fellman extrudes this geography from a pool of sound-objects: modular synthesizers, meditation bowls, contact microphones. The work is of-and-beyond sound; reaching into meditative practice, producing rooms to think and be in, while never effacing the body and its capacity to listen.

maria-takeuchi.com | @sound_of_ma | alecfellman.com

A person wearing a green coat next to dunes of desert sand.

Matt Evans is a Brooklyn based drummer, composer, producer, and collaborator known musically for his unique blend of “chill complexity” (New York Times). His work draws inspiration from millennial esoterica, natural phenomena, and science fiction, resulting in hypnotic soundscapes and surreal sonic worlds that are “hyperreal and phantasmal” (Wire Magazine). Matt has presented solo projects at the Guggenheim, The Kitchen, Roulette, and 2220 Art+Archives, created music for dance projects with choreographer Ayano Elson, toured original and improvised music with projects Neti-Neti and Tigue, while playing and co-leading the piano trio Bearthoven, presenting music bycomposers Shelley Washington, Sarah Hennies, Scott Wollschleger and others. You can find his recordings on Moon Glyph, Whatever’s Clever, Dinzu Artefacts, NNA Tapes, Deathbomb Arc, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe, Perfect Wave, and Thrill Jockey.

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COVID-19 policy: In guidance with the city and state COVID-19 policies, we will no longer be requiring masks, but strongly recommend them.