GPS* PROGRAM
Please note this is a closed program.
DAY 1 – Saturday, October 18, 2025 | 10am-10pm
Location: Express Newark, Rutgers University-Newark
(54 Halsey St., 2nd Fl. Newark, NJ)
Welcome: Stefon Harris, Express Newark Co-Director and Founder and Director of the Harmony Lab at Express Newark
Express Newark and The Harmony Lab
Stefon will introduce the mission and vision behind Express Newark and how the Harmony Lab is moving toward EN’s vision
Keary Rosen, Director Form Design Studio at Express Newark
Visit to the Form Design Studio
Keary Rosen and his Arts, Culture & Media Advanced Design students are currently collaborating with The Price Institute and Eco Art II SASN HIIVE Seed grant for “AR for Curation in the Healing Garden” through the Dean’s office. They will be creating an interactive AR/VR map and informational guide for its Healing Garden space. He will be discussing the execution of two related Rutgers University-Newark Chancellor’s Seed Grant projects. Both grants focused on digitally capturing objects and spaces through scanning processes including “Digital Mapping, Reconstruction, and Exhibition” to create digital models of the Newark landmark, the Krueger-Scott Mansion, before and during its renovation through on-site digital scanning, photogrammetry, drone captures, and architectural extrapolations. Rosen will also present working with the Newark Museum of Art to, “Digitally Scan the Newark Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection,” which have been used as educational aids in permanent exhibition displays.
Location: SHINE Portrait Studio at Express Newark
GPS* Introduction: Alex Chang, Rutgers University-Newark and Co-Director Improv Spaces
SHARING
Diaspora and Embodied Practices
Jill Sigman
Land, Love, and Garbage
Land, Love, and Garbage. My work concerns all three. I will talk about the ways I navigate the spaces between art and activism, understand modeling different ways of being as a decolonizing practice, and think about choreography as the re-forging of connections. I will share a selection of projects, including building huts out of waste in different parts of the world, grappling with my non-Indigenous identity through movement and clay, and working with soil as a keeper of memory. In my current project Go Between, I make drawings by dancing with soil—an antidote to the colonial illnesses of extractivism and insatiability and a surrogate for lost ancestral places and landscapes.
Photo by Jan Mun.
Lunch break
Việt Lê
spACE Projekt (GPS | disOriental)
Rooted in Southeast Asian cosmologies, Việt Lê continues their training and practice as a Vietnamese indigenous shaman-monk through various mediums. Remixing genres, genies, and Genesis, Lê re-presents a spiritual drag show (of sorts), rooted in the traditional high-energy, high-stakes, centuries-old hầu bóng ceremony. Putting the “quê” (country and country bumpkin) in “QUÊerakoe,” this performance Lê-cture recap takes us on a (inner-/outer) space journey: heARTbreak; eco-crisis; revenge body (of Christ); resurrection.
Location: Subtle Centers installation at Express Newark
Andrew Demirjian
Sinking In: Sensory Grammars & Perceptual Postures in Embodied Installation Spaces
This presentation discusses methodologies and practices in developing embodied encounters with space, texture, symbols and sound in the installation art of Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Demirjian from 2020 to the present.
Location: Room 213
susan puisan lok, University of the Arts London, Director of the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute
re()winding, re()playing, remove(s)
Lok will give a visual-sonic overview of more than 30 years of her practice and a glimpse into current work.
susan pui san lok, REWIND/REPLAY, 2022-23
multichannel installation with sound, magnetic tape, music stands, scores and occasional performance. Commissioned by Van Abbemuseum, NL. Van Abbemuseum Collection.
Erika Tan, University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins
Erika Tan / ancestral resonance, reverberations and (r)evocations
Erika Tan, Ancestral (r)evocations, Tate Modern, 2024
A sharing session and screening of recent work and older work which attends to questions of cultural tuning and resonance hunting, the difficulties of reverberation and the revoking and evoking of past, present, and future imaginaries.
Location: Clement’s Place at Rutgers University-Newark
Alex Chang and Adam Forman, Improv Spaces Co-Directors
Improvisation. Praxis. Connection.
Sonic Explorations in Troy at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, 2025. Photo by Kylie Spinelli.
Harpist, composer and scholar Alex Chang and percussionist Adam Forman will present their work at Improv Spaces including with their current and past series of collaborative improv projects based on the eco crisis, and their collaboration “Sonic Explorations in Troy” which they premiered in June 2025 at the Improv Spaces Music Festival. They will perform and discuss their improvisational practice and the ways in which improvisation and live performance enables spaces of openness and potentialities including discussion, community building, and connection.
Pheeroan akLaff, Director, Seed Artists
Play Like A Spoiled Baby: Why’s and Why Knots In Musical Diplomacy
Renown percussionist Pheeroan akLaff will present their improvisational practice on percussion and discuss their work as founder of Seed Artists (since 2005), a nonprofit based in New Jersey to use music to bridge gaps between generations and cultures, promote community involvement, and provide music education to underserved youth.
Online — Zoom Debrief
DAY 2 – Sunday, October 19, 2025 | 10am-5pm
Location: Performance Studies, New York University
Richard Schechner Performance Space
(721 Broadway, 6th Floor)
Welcome: Sukhdev Sandhu, NYU, Colloquium for Unpopular Culture
GPS* Introduction: Alex Chang, Rutgers University-Newark and Co-Director Improv Spaces
SHARING:
Alice Ming Wai Jim, Concordia University
Flow as Method
A presentation on exploring flow as a powerful research approach to engage with the complexity of Asian Indigenous relationalities.
Kayva Yang
wrap
A short sketch of material I have started researching to explore the presence of microchimerism, epigenetics, and maternal closeness in its falsehoods and embodiments.
Break for lunch
Natalie Seagriff
The Luna Series: Architecture of Belonging
Natalie will discuss the intersection of her various disciplines and how that manifests through the Luna Series and community-based efforts.
Seth Cluett, Columbia University
Seth Cluett – a static slice through time
Seth Cluett will share an evolving work that plays with the tension between the open expansive space of 360° environmental recording and the fictional fabrication of foley sounds under extreme magnification.
Kate Doyle, Rutgers University
Listening to the Wet Leaves of Language
Kate will speak about her recent work with poetics and sound by inviting a reflection upon listening in the act of writing. What guidance does sound offer us in complicating the boundaries and distinctions of that which is called, named, and formed?
Allen Fogelsanger, New York University and Alexandra Berger
the ability to stretch | | leads you anywhere
In this twenty-minute piece, we listen and converse, and assemble a choreomusical structure shaped by and shaping time. Movement and sound comprise the materials; the space and time of the performance set the parameters.
Debrief
Global Performance + Sound Lab 