The Movement Lab presents: the Artificial environments / environmental Intelligence Festival
The Ae/eI Festival features work-in-progress installations and performances in the Movement Lab every day during the week of February 21-28, all of which are free and open to the public. It is guided by the question, what happens when we close the loop on the constructed binary of nature and technology?
Artificial environments / environmental Intelligence Festival Night 6:
ECHO
Created by Yaching Cheung, Donghwi Han, and Joshua Tazman Reinier
Monday, February 26th | 6:30pm
“ECHO’’ is a 20-minute movement-based performance, integrating projection mapping, sound, and motion tracking. The piece reimagines the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus in a modern and artificial environment. It reflects on how AI technology is designed to cater to and reinforce human self-perceptions, ideas and biases. We want to create a visual poem that explores how our perceptions and self-images are distorted and modified.
Doors open at 6:00 PM and showing begins at 6:30 PM
Capacity in the lab is capped at 40 audience members. Attendees who have RSVP'd before the event will have priority, and admission will be determined on a first come first serve basis on arrival. If you RSVP before the event but you arrive late, we reserve the right to give your spot to someone on the waitlist.
Attendees who have not RSVP'd will be put on a standby waitlist if they arrive in-person before the event.
Yaching Cheung is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in dance, visual arts, and multimedia. She earned her BFA from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2020 and is currently pursuing her MFA at Hunter College in New York City. During her undergraduate studies, she studied abroad in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and learned Butoh dance with the Mortimaru company in Berlin.
Residing between Berlin and New York, Yaching's artwork has been showcased at various international exhibitions such as The Bunker in Beijing, Basis Frankfurt, and Fotogenia Film Festival. Her work is distinctive for its exploration of the interplay between the human body and its surroundings. She delves into the dynamics of urban living, illustrating how city life molds the human physique and psyche. Yaching's pieces often depict intense, dreamlike settings that challenge viewers to rethink their everyday interactions with the environment and objects around them. Drawing from her Butoh background, she emphasizes the fluidity of movement and the concept of the 'borderless body', merging human forms with architectural and natural elements in her art.
Donghwi Han is a Korean graphic designer and media artist that creates theater experience and performances using new media and interactive graphics. In December 2021 he directed Little child, production of Yeonjak and written by Anthony Kim at Ansan Arts Center in Korea. He designed a concept of virtual space for WEATHER# online multimedia opera, Spoleto, Italy in 2021. Donghwi directed the media facade opening show, a culture night in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Cheongju, in 2021. He designed an art concept of Telematic Embrace, a telematic performance performed live online. Donghwi holds a BFA from the Seoul Institute of the art in the School of Media Arts Visual Design and an ADA from the School of Design, the Seoul Institute of the arts.
Joshua Tazman Reinier's work tightropes the boundary between speech and sound, often taking the form of creative/critical hypertexts, performances, and installations. Inspired by posthumanist ideas, his work challenges anthropocentrism, using technology and multimedia to articulate technological, ghostly ways of being. Reinier attended Oberlin College and Conservatory, where he studied composition and comparative literature. He received Highest Honors for his undergraduate thesis, "Demons of Analogy: The Encounter Between Music and Language After Mallarmé," which investigates how French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé theorizes a musical poetics, and how music speaks back at this poetics. He has designed and taught four courses in Oberlin's Experimental College which explore experimental literature and posthumanist philosophies. He currently lives and works in New York City and studies in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts MFA program at Brooklyn College.