Global Performance + Sound Lab

Newark + Upstate NY

June 4-June 11, 2026

(parts of this program are open to the public as indicated in descriptions)

Friday, June 5 – The Newark Gathering – 10am-9pm

Location: Express Newark located at 54 Halsey Street, Newark, NJ, Gallery Workshop 2.

This gathering will include Rutgers University-Newark faculty, staff, graduate students and greater Newark/NYC area community members as well as those traveling into Newark for the GPS* convenings.

10am GPS in Our Institutions — Creative Practice + Research
Location: Shine Portrait Studio

Orientation to GPS* Newark + Upstate NY and upcoming agenda, Alex Chang, Rutgers University, Newark

Creative Practice Research at Rutgers, Kate Doyle and Anthony Alvarez, Rutgers University, Newark

11h30 Working Lunch and Discussion
Location: Paul Robeson Gallery Workshop

1pm Location: Dana Room, Dana Library, Rutgers University-Newark main campus 4th floor & Institute of Jazz Studies

Visit to the Institute of Jazz Studies, Vincent Pelote

2pm Visit to the HIIVE Lab at Dana Library, Moksh Goel, Grad Student Manager, HIIVE Lab

Debrief

4h30 — Location: SVA’s Bio Arts Lab, 35 W. 16th St, NY
Visit with artist Anonda Bell at the School of Visual Art’s Bio Arts Lab

7pm — Orientation Dinner

Saturday, June 6 – The Upstate NY gathering (June 6-11)

Participants will be staying at the Arts Letters & Numbers (ALN) artist residency.
Mornings are meant for creative practice.

Saturday, June 6 —

Pitney Meadows Community Farm in collaboration with
Improv Spaces and Arts Numbers & Letters presents

Go Between
A Ritual for Listening to the Land

Jill Sifah Sigman

What does the soil remember? In Go Between, Sigman creates visually powerful scrolls by dancing with soils significant to climate issues, colonial histories, and local narratives. This physical process leaves marks on large-scale papers that are simultaneously documentation of Sigman’s performance and mapmaking of the memory of the site. Sigman will create a new series of scrolls with soil from Pitney Meadows and bring her environmental-performative practice to a collective listening ritual for the land at the farm.

Audience members are invited to come early to connect with the land and enter the performance through an improvisatory prelude of music and sound. 

Sigman is artist-in-resident at Pitney Farms and in collaboration with Improv Spaces and Arts Letters & Numbers with support by Saratoga Arts Community Regrant, Price Institute, Mellon Foundation, and the Rutgers University-Newark 2026 Chancellor’s Seed Grant and will be commencing the week of activities of the Global Performance + Sound Lab with her performance Go Between at Pitney Farms.

Bios:

Jill Sifah Sigman is a queer choreographer, performing artist, visual artist, educator, and activist whose polyvalent work blends dance, visual art, ecology, and philosophy. She has a holistic vision of choreography that integrates human bodies, more than human neighbors like plants and soil, and objects that people throw away in ways that catalyze connection and care. She is the author of Ten Huts, published by Wesleyan University Press, about choreographing structures out of garbage in different parts of the world. Sigman founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to raise pressing social issues through the body. In 2016 she founded Body Politic, a program of workshops and laboratories collaborating with activists in environmental, immigration and racial justice. In 2022 she launched the Social Justice Movement Lab for artist-activists to center embodiment in social change work. Sigman has been the first Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney Dance, a Distinguished Guest Artist at the University of San Francisco Performing Arts & Social Justice program, a Rauschenberg Residency artist, a Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, a Movement Research Artist in Residence, and a 2025 Bessies nominee. She is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University and a member of the Global Performance + Sound Lab. Sigman was born and raised on occupied Canarsee land in Brooklyn, New York.
Photo by Jan Mun.

Collaborating musicians:

Angus McCullough is a trans-disciplinary maker who works with objects, spaces, sounds, words, and systems. They are interested in the lives of objects, scales of time, and the vibratory nature of existence. Born and raised in New York City, they studied philosophy, music and architecture in academic and self-created learning situations. They have designed and shaped public spaces, private homes, bathing sanctuaries, soundscapes, vehicles, books, and forest ponds. www.angusm.cc

Dominique Vuvan is a multi-genre multi-instrumentalist based in the Capital Region. She plays in indie pop band Nice Hockey and space-jazz ensemble Sun Dogs, and lends helping hands to Adam Tinkle and Eric Ayotte when needed.

Followed by GPS* Participants orientation dinner

Sunday, June 7 —

9am — Morning breakfast zoom at Arts Letters & Numbers
1543 Burden Lake Rd, Averill Park, NY

Scholar / Curator Breakfast Conversation
Jacqueline Lo (via Zoom, Murdoch University) on artist Meng Yu Yan
Alice Ming Wai Jim (in person, Concordia University) on Sovereignty and Asian Indigenous

Hybrid breakfast discussion at Arts Letters & Numbers studios and via Zoom
Open to the public and via Zoom link. RSVP here for zoom link and indicate the event name in the subject line.

Jacqueline will be talking about the video work of an emerging Chinese-Australian artist, Meng Yu Yan, whose work, Double Witness has been included in the Inside the Mirage exhibition which will be opening shortly at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art in Melbourne. This group exhibition is shaped by the imaginative and philosophical worlds of artists Ian Fairweather (1891–1974) and John Young Zerunge (b. 1956). Jacqueline has been commissioned to write an essay for the exhibition catalogue.

Alice will be in discussion about her upcoming exhibition project “Sovereignty and Asian Indigenous.”

Bios:

Professor Jacqueline Lo is Director of the Indo-Pacific Research Centre at Murdoch University. She is also Honorary Professor at the Australian National University. An internationally recognised Humanities scholar and pioneer of Asian Australian Studies, her work on multiculturalism, diaspora and visual and performance studies has influenced academic and policy sectors in Australia and abroad. She is Founding Chair of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and Chair of the ANU Press Asian Australian Studies series. Current projects include co-editing the Palgrave Handbook on the Indian Ocean World and Flow: Asian–Indigenous Relationalities in Contemporary Art (with Alice Ming Wai Jim & Sebastian De Line), and several essays on contemporary art and politics in the Indo-Pacific region.

Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim is Concordia University Research Chair  in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions and Professor of Contemporary Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She is founding Editor-in-Chief with Alexandra Change,  of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.

10am —

Welcome and Philosophies Behind Arts Letters & Numbers
– David Gersten, Founding Director and President

7:30pm: 

7:30pm —

Visit to Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
30 2nd St, Troy, NY

GPS* and Troy Savings Bank Music Hall present

On Sound, Archives, Affect, and Place

Organ Performance and Conversation
Adam Tinkle (Troy Savings Bank Music Hall Artist in Residence)
Eva Giloi (Rutgers University–Newark)

Adam will discuss his practice and improvise on the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall organ. Eva will talk about “Lab+Grid = Mapping the Mazeway in 1960s Newark” and be in discussion with Adam.

Following the discussion, Improv Spaces presents visual artist Derick Noetzel, composer/musician Olivia Jones, and an open jam including members of the Improv Spaces Ensemble.

Bios:

Adam Tinkle is a multidisciplinary artist, parent and teacher from Maine, based in Troy, NY. Fueled by love for artistic community, collaboration and collectivity, and grounded in lifelong study and practice of music, Adam’s career work resolutely swerves between lanes of popular & experimental music, sonic arts and design, interdisciplinary performance, film, video, installation and public art. Director of the Documentary Studies Collaborative at Skidmore College since 2017, Adam has also been involved in founding and curating artist-run spaces and series since he was 17 – most recently Picture Lock One, a 30-seat microcinema in a former bank vault. In 2026, he has shared the stage with Klezmer legend David Kracauer, developed a new musical  score for Epstein/Bunuel’s 1928 Fall of the House of Usher, premiered an evening-length work for pipe organ as Artist-in-Residence at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, and mounted an exhibition at Saratoga Arts of films, prints and sculptures derived from his visual music practice.

Eva Giloi is Professor of History and a Core Faculty Member of Global Urban Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, with a PhD from Princeton University. As a German historian, her research focuses on material culture, visual culture, and consumer culture; photography, copyright, and trademark law; persona studies, fame, and charisma; and urban geography, with a current project on Berlin’s transition to a modern ‘World City’ around 1900. She also writes and teaches on urban renewal in post-war Newark, with publications including “The Beauty of Blight: Creating Insiders and Outsiders through Aesthetic Invectives in 1960s Newark” and 
Making a Place: Rhythms, Ruptures and Rutgers in 1960s Newark, a large-format newsprint catalogue. From 2017-2020, she was lead PI on  Newark Rhythms, a performing arts, sonic-art, historical, and commemoration project at Rutgers University-Newark (https://newarkrhythms.org/). In 2020, she started the Lab+Grid project at Site Line Arts, centered on embodied, phenomenological mapping (https://sitelinearts.org/). The project currently focuses on a rhizomatic, affective, and cultural-history mapping of Halsey Street in Newark from the 1940s-1970s. With the understanding that no maps are neutral, including digital maps, the Halsey Street project aims to: investigate alternative ways of understanding lived urban experience; amplify and privilege voices that tend to be muted by dominant technologies; investigate how sound and other sensory perceptions create urban thresholds of access and affect; and contribute to decolonizing the history of urban renewal. In collaboration with students, faculty, and the Newark community, the project involves historical and digital mapping, audio and visual elements, and exhibition-making.

Derick Noetzel is a video artist and multimedia specialist from upstate NY. With a video synthesizer and video mixer, he creates live audio reactive analog “visuals” with video installations using several projectors and televisions.When many monitors work in unison it creates an immersive experience where light is dependent on the sounds and shapes of the room, an additional layer of video art intertwined with the sound of music.

Olivia Jones is an experimental improviser, clarinetist, and composer working across contemporary, electroacoustic, improvised music, and sonic installation. Their work has been presented internationally with ensembles and festivals across the US, Europe, and Australia. 

A prolific organiser, Olivia is the founder of Naarm (Melbourne)-based experimental jazz trio The Frank Scenario and Art Seed, an organisation creating gathering spaces for Creative Music community. Olivia is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne researching improvised electronic music through queer, feminist, and anti-racist frameworks, and is a signed composer with Aventino Avant Garde (Italy).

Link: www.oliviadjonesmusic.com

Improv Spaces is a nonprofit organization supporting composers and interdisciplinary artists working in improvisation, new music, and contemporary performance. Through partnerships across New York’s Capital Region and beyond, the organization provides opportunities for performance, an annual festival, creative development, residencies, and workshops.The Improv Spaces Ensemble brings together Capital Region improvising musicians working across a wide range of instrumentation, textures, and forms. www.improvspaces.org

Monday, June 8 —

9:00 am — Presentation and Conversation at Arts Letters & Numbers
1543 Burden Lake Rd, Averill Park, NY

Hong-Kai Wang (via Zoom, Taipei)- Our Words Don’t Suit Prophecies Anymore
Followed by presentation from artist Ellie Irons (in-person, Troy, NY)

Hybrid breakfast discussion at Arts Letters & Numbers studios and via Zoom.
Open to the public and via Zoom link. RSVP here for zoom link.

Our Words Don’t Suit Prophecies Anymore – Artist Hong-Kai Wang (via Zoom)

Feral Solidarities: Learning with and from Weeds through Ecosocial Art – Ellie Irons (in-person)

Hybrid breakfast discussion at Arts Letters & Numbers studios and via Zoom
Open to the public and via Zoom link. RSVP here for zoom link and note the event name in the subject line.

Bios:

Currently based in Taipei, Taiwan, Hong-Kai Wang is an interdisciplinary artist and holds  a PhD in Practice at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Wang’s research-based practice is primarily concerned with the politics of listening and knowing across exhibition making, performance, writing, publishing, and education. Her work seeks to reveal divergent modes of attention and to conceive of emergent time-spaces that critically interweave histories of labor, economies of co-habitation, formations of knowledge, and production of desire.      Wang’s practice has been presented internationally not only in museums, festivals, academic institutions but also in artist-run and public spaces, informal pedagogical programs and publications. Recent works were shown at Libby Leshgold Gallery, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, Nottingham Contemporary, Colomboscope, Autostrada Biennale, Ulsan Art Museum, SculptureCenter, Asia Art Biennial, dOCUMENTA 14, Museum of Modern Art New York, Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, among others. 

Ellie Irons is an artist, educator, and parent living and working on Mohican land in Troy, New York, USA. Working across media—from watercolor paintings to un-lawning experiments—her practice combines socially engaged art and ecology fieldwork. Recent work involves collaborations about and with spontaneous urban plants (aka weeds), including co-founding the Next Epoch Seed Library and the Environmental Performance Agency. Ellie received a BA from Scripps College, an MFA from Hunter College, completed her PhD in arts practice Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2021, researching forms of artistic practice that cultivate plant-human solidarity. Her work has been covered by publications ranging from Art in America to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her book Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds was published in 2023 by Publication Studio Hudson. She is currently the Co-Director of NATURE Lab at the Sanctuary for Independent Media.

1-3pm:

Location: Arts Letters and Numbers Gallery
1543 Burden Lake Rd, Averill Park, NY

Interaction-Translation :
Movement <=> Movement <=> Sound <=> Sound
Open to the public

This workshop focuses on taking some possible first steps into a practice of collaborative movement and sound interaction among participants.  Group exercises lead movers into exploring how interaction generates a collaborative choreography of space and time, while also creating simple movement that mirrors, converses with, opposes, and ignores other movers, as well as sounds.  Non-dancers are welcome, even preferred!

Bio:

Allen Fogelsanger makes music for dances, videos and installations; teaches courses on dance and music; and accompanies dance classes.  His work, alone and as part of multimedia projects, has been presented in the Americas, Europe and Australia, including at the Bourges Festival of Electroacoustic Music and Festival Synthèse, the Phoenix Experimental Arts Festival, the Cloud Dance Festival (London), the Boston Cyberarts Festival, il Corpo nel Suono (Rome), the global telematic festival Earth Day Art Model, Chez Bushwick (Brooklyn), the NYC Electronic Music Festival, Splice Festival VII (Maine), and the 2025 Global Performance & Sound Lab gathering at Rutgers University – Newark & New York University.  Since 2017 Fogelsanger has focused on collaborative real-time movement/sound composing, making pieces with, in various combinations, Alexandra Berger, Rachel Gill, Alan Good, Nicholas Handahl, Salma Kiuhan, and Louisa Miller.  Fogelsanger serves as an associate arts professor in the New York University Tisch School of the Arts Department of Dance.

7pm —Tour of Illuminate exhibition with artist Adam Tinkle

Location: Saratoga Arts Gallery
320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY
Open to the public

and

Re Moves / Centenaries (in progress)
Screenings with London-based artist and writer susan pui-san lok.

Location: Saratoga Arts Theater
320 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY
Open to the public

susan pui san lok will share two works-in-progress, Re Moves (2017-) and Centenary/Centenaries (2022-) – both experimental filmic-essay-installations developing in tandem: exploring hi/storied ‘moments’, resisting absences and amnesias, moving in and out of galleries, studios, stores and archives, towards diasporic dialogues and polyvocal praxis.

susan pui san lok, Centenary/Centenaries (in progress), 2022/26-, installation with video, sound, curtains, wallpapers. Image: 1929, Becontree Estate: view of Terrace Walk. All images sourced from the London Picture Archive and reproduced courtesy of The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London Corporation. 

susan pui san lok, Re Moves (in progress), 2017-, multi-channel installation. Composite image: artworks by Lesley Sanderson and Neil Conroy, in the artists’ home.

Bio:

susan pui san lok < 駱 佩 珊 > susan lok pui san (aka SPSL) is an artist and writer based om London, working across installation, moving image, sound and text since the 1990s. Projects include REWIND/REPLAY (2022-23), commissioned by Van Abbemuseum (NL) for Rewinding Internationalism at Netwerk Aalst (BE), Van Abbemuseum (NL) and Villa Arson (FR). Forthcoming projects include the exhibition, East of the Aldgate Pump, Whitechapel Gallery’s inaugural Backyard Biennial (2026), and a book in the series, Scratching the Surface (2028), co-published by Sternberg & Villa Arson.

Solo shows include Glasgow International (2021), Firstsite (2019), CfCCA (now esea contemporary, 1996, 2006, 2016), QUAD (2015), Montreal Arts Interculturels (2014), BFI Southbank (2008), Beaconsfield (2006). Group shows include Found Cities, Lost Objects (2022-24), an Arts Council England touring exhibition, Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Bienniale (2017); and Asia Time –1st Asia Biennial / 5th Guangzhou Triennial at Guangdong Museum of Art (2015-16). Publications range from artist books/multiples, guest-edited books/journal issues, to chapters in the award-winning books, Shades of Black (iniva/Duke UP, 2005) and The Place Is Here (Sternberg, 2019), with articles/essays in Tate Papers, Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, and Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art.

As Professor of Contemporary Art at University of the Arts London and Director of the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute, lok led the projects, Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage with the UAL Creative Computing Institute (2021-25, AHRC-funded), and 20/20 (2021-25, supported by Arts Council England and Freelands Foundation). 20/20 saw twenty artists in residence across twenty UK public art collections leading to twenty permanent acquisitions; the project received the 2026 Museums & Heritage Award for Sector Impact.

Tuesday, June 9 — 

NATURE Lab at 3319 6th Avenue, Troy, NY

2-4pm —

Co-Director Ellie Irons leads a tour of NATURE Lab at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. 

7-9pm —

Mt. Ida Preservation Association
548 Congress St, Troy, NY

Artpace San Antonio, Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (ICA LA), BAD ASIANS (UC Berkeley)
and GPS* copresent at Mt. Ida Preservation Hall:

Việt Namaste Shamanaste:
QUẾerake House Baller Ballads

Join us for a spiritual drag show (of sorts): an elegantly bombastic remix of the traditional high-energy, high-stakes, centuries-old hầu bóng Mother Goddess ceremony, re-envisioned by Việt Lê (San Francisco | Sài Gòn) with special secret-sauce GPS* guests:  local dance and music collaborators Alex Chang, Nicholas Kopp, Abu Zeyn, and Tatyanna Hall, Gentle Mothh, and Jill Sigman.

After our saucy performance, stay for a short panel/ Q&A with our musicians and performance artists including Natalie Seagriff. Putting the “trans” in “transcendence,” and making it rain (like in da club), this evening’s event will center queer ritual in Southeast Asia, its diasporas, and worlds beyond.

Việt Lê’s creative and critical practice as a queer, disabled artist, curator and researcher focuses on sexualities, spiritualities–the physical and the metaphysical. Their hybrid projects encompass experimental film, ritual performance, “pain-tings”, power objects/installations, and text towards a healing. Dr. Lê is the author of Return Engagements (Duke University Press, 2021). Lê has presented their work at the Shanghai Biennale, Rio Gay Film Festival, the Smithsonian, and other venues. Lê’s recent solo shows include trăng trắng | milk moon (2026, Artpace San Antonio),  thường (with Ly Hoàng Ly, 2025, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech), đến đèn đen (2024, sàn art | Saigon), and Việt Namaste (2023, Headlands Center for the Arts). seasal.org 

Gentle Mothh is a queer, Taiwanese American multidisciplinary artist, producer, and creative consultant based in Kingston, NY. Her practice blends performance, advocacy, and spiritual inquiry, often using 5 Element Theory as a guiding framework. The practical objective of her work is the decriminalization of sex work in New York. She is the author of Giving Body, a photo book honoring the virtues of people performing erotic labor.

Tatyanna Hall is a dancer, musician, puppeteer, and choreographer. She majored in Dance at SUNY Potsdam in 2022 and has since gone back to fulfill a dance and community based residency. Her favorite forms of dance include house, modern, breakdance, and anything happening on the dance floor or improv based. She found her love for puppeteering while working with the Vermont based puppet theater Bread and Puppet and her favorite instruments to play are the drums and the trumpet

Abu Zeyn أبو زين creates rhythmic tapestries by weaving live bass, clarinet and vocal loops with soulful improvisation. He is a child of the Nile River and the Arabian Desert. His ears were raised on the sounds of braying donkeys, the call to prayer and tuktuk soundsystems. 

Abu Zeyn أبو زين is a child of the Nile River and the Arabian Desert. The date palm shaded and nourished his youth. His tongue was tuned to cardamom and tangerines. The salt of the Red Sea cured his infant skin and the sands of Alexandria baked his tender feet. His ears were raised on the sounds of braying donkeys, the call to prayer and tuktuk soundsystems. 

Nicholas Kopp aka djdrummernk is an artist, musician and educator whose work spans a wide range of genres across a variety of projects ranging from jazz, electronic, experimental noise, and musical theater. Thanks to eclectic background, he has opened for an uncommonly diverse collection of artists, from Mobb Deep to the New York City Ballet.

Alex Chang is a New York–based harpist, composer, and improviser whose performances create immersive listening experiences through electric and acoustic harps, live electronics, and collaborative improvisation. Her work moves fluidly between experimental music, jazz, indie and contemporary composition, balancing expansive sonic textures with a strong sense of form and immediacy.

Chang presents solo and ensemble projects, often collaborating with visual artists, poets, and performance artists. She is part of the cross-genre ensemble Rock City Falls Trio. She is the co-founder and co-director of Improv Spaces, a nonprofit organization supporting improvising artists through performance, residencies, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is based at the Arts, Culture and Media Department, American Studies Program, and Price Institute at Rutgers University-Newark. Her solo album Abandon will be released in 2026. www.alexchangmusic.com

Natalie Seagriff is an Architect, artist, musician, and curator of Luna, a monthly music and arts series in the Capital Region that explores the intersection of sound, space, and spirit. With a Bachelor of Architecture and minor in Studio Art from the University of Miami (2005) and a Master of Science in Construction Management from New York University (2008), Natalie brings a multidisciplinary approach that bridges design, performance, and healing. They have been a Registered Architect in New York since 2013 and Massachusetts since 2026.

In addition to curating Luna, Natalie is a contributor to the Healing Gardens initiative through the Price Institute at Rutgers University—an ongoing project focused on transforming urban landscapes into spaces of restoration and community wellness. Their architectural practice is deeply informed by the same sensibility that guides their music and curation: a belief that the environments we create, whether physical or sonic, can nurture the soul and reconnect us to each other.

Through Luna and their broader creative practice, Nataliecultivates spaces where artistry and spirit converge—where sound becomes architecture, light becomes language, and gathering becomes a form of healing.

Additionally, Natalie has been exploring the art form of Lapidary focusing on cultural & spiritual pieces.

Sigman is a queer interdisciplinary artist and agent of change whose work exists at the intersection of dance, visual art, and social practice. She founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to think about pressing social issues through the body. In 2016, she developed Body Politic, a program of workshops, trainings, and performance laboratories to ask salient political questions somatically, and in 2022 she initiated a Social Justice Movement Lab for artist-activists. Working with things we cast off such as “garbage” and “weeds”, Sigman helps us to re-imagine our relationships with the natural world and each other in meaningful and empathic ways. Sigman has created community by building site-specific structures out of waste, dancing in public spaces, food sharing, and tea serving, and has partnered with activists, legal advocates, janitors, anthropologists, and farmers. Since 2022, she has been developing Re-Seeding, a multi-year project that investigates living as a non-Indigenous person on occupied land.

Wednesday, June 10 — 

EMPAC, 50 8th Street, Troy, NY

1pm —

Tour of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center with Amadeus Julian Regucera, Curator, Music. We will learn about EMPAC’s ongoing work with arts and technology.

2:30pm —

EMPAC, Studio 2

Workshop:

Kayva Yang

Cellular wrap: existing within each other

This 75 minute session is dedicated to a movement inquiry and experiment through improvised gestures and the sounding body. Using a practice of embodied research that borrows from cellular science, participants are invited to explore senses of closeness between human bodies and land ecologies. What lives within each of them? What does my body sense when moving closely with, not solely across, the land I occupy? How might moving with closeness as a collective help us disrupt uneven systems governing people and land or even find new possibilities for interdependence? The group may engage with a brief text or memory writing in situ and may move or sound as able in the indoor and outdoor space weather permitting. This space is open to everyone. No experience in movement or vocals is required.

Bio:

Kayva Yang is a performing artist whose movement navigates across visual media, writing, and living material. Her work deals with intimacies between human and land ecologies, which is rooted in embodied research while also draws on memory, science, and archived history. Her most recent projects Lost 40 and Elastic Elm perform choreographed improvisations on public land and on video. Her work has been presented at New York University’s Kimmel Center, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis, and the Southern Theater, Minneapolis. She was a 2020 Laundromat Create Change Fellow and has been supported by the Jerome Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has danced for Jill Sigman, Dustin Maxwell, Pramila Vasudevan, and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea. She holds an M.A. in Arts and Public Policy from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She produces performances at The Museum of Modern Art.

With support by the Rutgers University-Newark Chancellor’s 2026 Seed Grant and the  Impact Seed Grant for the Decolonizing Curatorial & Museum Studies Project (DCMP), Price Institute, Mellon Foundation.

6-8PM — Microcinema at Collarworks
50 4th Street, Troy, NY

Art making – Artists in discussion
Janine Randerson (Aotearoa, via Zoom) –
Art-making in post-military ecotones
Mako Kikuchi (Seattle, via Zoom) –
Activating the Archive – exploring intersections between archives and art practices

Hybrid zoom artist discussion and casual dinner

RSVP here for the zoom link and indicate the event name in the subject line.

Artist Janine Randerson will speak about her new work in Korea and about her work Critical Minerals and composer, musician, and archivist Mako Kikuchi will share his work, exploring how his work as a community archivist intersects with and informs his work as a musician and sound artist. 

Bios:

Janine Randerson is an artist and writer based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. She makes creative works of film and video in collaboration with community groups and environmental scientists from urban meteorologists to glaciologists and bryologists. She curates events, performances and artworks to foreground the changing climate for the World Weather Network and is working on a project with Somerset House in London; and a new collaborative project with sound artist Rachel Shearer in South Korea, in Cheorwon-Gun near the DMZ demilitarised zone. She is also a host of LASER talks (Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous) and a contributor to diverse publications in the Environmental Humanities. Janine’s book “Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art” (MIT Press, 2018) focuses on modern and contemporary art that engage with our present and future weathers. She is an Associate Professor at AUT University, Aotearoa New Zealand, and a member of the Regenerative Environments Network at AUT.

Mako Kikuchi is a musician, faculty at South Seattle College, and lead advisor for the community donated music collections at the Northwest Nikkei Museum (JCCCW). His current project is based in the preservation and digitization of home recorded acetate discs dating from the 1930s – 1950s, some of which were recorded inside Japanese American incarceration camps during WWII. His work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, Chamber Music America, and New Music USA, among others.

Thursday, June 11 —

Noon-2pm — Open Studios at Arts Letters & Numbers

Artists will present their work and thoughts developed during their stay at Arts Letters & Numbers.

Margin Tianya Zheng
The Legend of Yuliang
Evening Performance presented by Arts Letters & Numbers, time tba

Concluding Dinner at Arts Letters & Numbers

Thank you for making GPS*2026 happen with the support of
the Rutgers University-Newark 2026 Chancellor’s Seed Grant,
Art, Culture & Media Dept at RUN, Arts Letters & Numbers, Price Institute,
Mellon Foundation, Pitney Farms, Express Newark, Shine Portrait Studio,
Paul Robeson Galleries, Dana Library and Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, HIIVE Lab, EMPAC, Troy Savings Bank Music Hall,
Saratoga Arts, Mt. Ida Preservation Hall, Improv Spaces,
Sanctuary for Independent Media and NATURE Lab,
Microcinema at Collarworks, and School of Visual Arts Bio Arts Lab.

Special thanks to the generosity and tenacity in spirit
to the staff at Arts Letters & Numbers and
Art, Culture and Media Dept at Rutgers University-Newark
and to all the collaborating artists and participants!