MAXmachina Group VII (Season 2025-26)
Have A Good Night
Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey
Description
This piece is still in development, blurb to come soon!
Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch
Julianna Johnston
Description
Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch is a hybrid performance designed for both live and livestreamed audiences, blending choreography, responsive media, and sound. The piece will feature 4–5 performers in oversized, absurdist hand-puppet costumes, with the scrolling thumb as a central character. These performers will engage with projection-mapped surfaces and responsive screens, enacting gestures and micro-rhythms inspired by the behaviors of digital interfaces.
Impermanence
Xin Liu
Description
The envisioned project is a sculptural model of the New York City skyline, cast in biodegradable plastic designed to break down over time. Embedded within its structures are seeds, sown and awaiting growth. As the homogeneous architectural structures begin to break down, botanicals will emerge – growth and collapse will unfold in parallel. Installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the work gazes toward the living city it echoes. Through experimental materials that compress urban decay and slow geological time into a tangible, timelapsed experience, the work invites audiences to imagine the immediate locality in impermanence.
MAXmachina 2025 Spring Season
Jur A** itch Park
By Grayson Earle with PROMPT
Description
An artificial intelligence serving as director, is entrusted with crafting the optimal rendition of Anton Chekhov’s renowned theatrical masterpiece, “The Seagull.” Visitors to the exhibition assume the roles of characters within the play, guided through scene rehearsals by the AI director’s instructions. Performance assessments are conducted by the AI, using software to analyze criteria such as facial emotion, body language, and articulate speech delivery to generate a comprehensive evaluation. The rehearsal process operates seamlessly through automation, with performances systematically assessed and cataloged. Striving for excellence, the automated director preserves scenes that attain the highest scores according to its predefined criteria, compiling them into a comprehensive documentation
The advancement of artificial intelligence systems sparks numerous narratives concerning societal evolution and the restructuring of labor. Predictions range from entire professions becoming obsolete to the emergence of new ones. At the heart of the ongoing debate about AI lies the pivotal question: will humans retain control over it, or will they become subject to its influence?
The Play is, at once, a horror film and a finely tuned presentation of a literary classic. Enter the Play and discover which you experience.
Sonic Sunset
By Nick Ryan
Description
Sonic Sunset is a truly immersive sound film with a live vocalist drawing from decades of field recordings and field notes, provided by our scientific partners, Dr. Nishant Kumar, Dr. Wendy Erb, Dr. Michelle Fournet, and Dr. David Haskell. Join us for a visceral journey of three rapidly changing ecosystems and the species thriving or declining within them. Using spatialized sound and a live vocalist, Emmy and BAFTA award-winning composer and sound designer, Nick Ryan, will dramatize this research in collaboration with producer and dramaturg Kay Matschullat, taking the audience on a sonic global tour enhanced by interactive visuals to underscore the dramatic nature of the human impact on each ecosystem. Listen and you will be submerged below the surface of the arctic waters, emerging in the rainforests of Borneo and then ascending into the skies around Delhi take the audience on a sonic global tour enhanced by interactive visuals to underscore the dramatic nature of the audience’s impact on each ecosystem.
Sonic Sunset represents a rare, international collaboration between ornithologists, primatologists, bio acousticians, an Emmy-award winning sound designer-musician, and non-fiction writers.
Juliana Johnston | Vibrating Waiting for You to Touch
Julianna Johnston is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Their work uses somatics and play to deconstruct personal and collective relationships to digital interfaces and surveillance technologies. Julianna holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2018) and an MFA in Media Arts from UCLA (2024). Their work has been exhibited in venues and festivals throughout the US and abroad such as the Slamdance Film Festival D.I.G. Official Selection (Park City, UT), Athens Digital Media Arts Festival (Athens, Greece), Rathaus für Kultur (Switzerland), Studio Hüette (Berlin, Germany), RISD Museum (Providence, RI), Carnegie Mellon University Hall of Arts (Pittsburgh, PA), and Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA) among others. They have been an artist-in-residence at DOGO Residenz für Neue Kunst (Switzerland), Crosstown Arts (Memphis, TN), Mass Gallery (Austin, TX), and the Vermont Studio Center. They are the recipient of a Frank-Ratchye Art at the Frontier Grant from the Studio for Creative Inquiry and the Fine Arts Award from UCLA.
Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey | Have A Good Night
We are Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey. We collaborate together. Our work wrestles with questions of cruelty, authenticity, deception, entertainment, and power. We value simple language, functional design, autobiography, and vulnerability. Our work has been presented at Under the Radar at the Public Theater, La MaMa, JACK, Soho Rep, and abroad at the Deutches Schauspielhaus, the München Volkstheater, and the Noordezon Performing Arts Festival. We were both members of the 2017-2019 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the 2017-2018 Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater, and were Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artists in 2019. Our play while you were partying was a New York Times Critics’ pick in 2021, and was a finalist for New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. We are currently under commission from LCT3 at Lincoln Center Theater.
Xin Liu | Impermanence
Xin Liu is an artist and engineer, known for her interdisciplinary approach to dissecting the epidemiology of science and technology, exploring tensions and reconciliations between the systems and the individual. She creates installations, sculptures, films and generative digital worlds to reclaim the narratives of space exploration/immigration, biotechnology/motherhood, petroleum/land, neutral networks/dreams. Her current research centers on Cosmic Metabolism: the metabolism of our planet and how it has been affected by technological infrastructures in the past few decades.
Nick Ryan | Sonic Sunset
Nick Ryan is a multi award winning composer, sound designer, artist and audio specialist, widely recognised as a leading thinker on the future of sound. His extensive and diverse practice, as an audio expert, sound designer and music composer involves working with film, motion graphics, animation, TV drama and documentary, interactive media, technology innovation, instrument making and orchestral ensemble. Among his awards are a BAFTA for Technical Innovation, a Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel for sound editing, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Sound and an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Plymouth University.
As a practitioner and thinker he has worked with organisations throughout the world such as The MIT Media Lab, The BANFF Centre for the Arts, The Montreal Film Festival, Screen Australia, The European Broadcasting Union, The BFI, BAFTA, TEDx, Aldeburgh Music, The Royal Institution, Tate, BBC Research and Development and UK Government Department of Trade and Industry.
Nick established the studio, based at Somerset House Studios in London, as a high-end music and sound design practice with the core mission of creating experiences that push the boundaries of listening and engage new audiences with audio. It delivers many kinds of work, from award winning feature film scores and sound design, avant-garde sound installations and bespoke museum projects to audio concepts for major products and brands. The studio operates a small and agile internal team and with our large network of highly specialised associates is able to rapdily mobilse delivery of a wide variety of projects from the highly focussed to the large scale.
Grayson Earle | Jur A** Itch Park
Grayson Earle is a contemporary artist and activist from the United States. His work deals with the role that digital technologies and networks play in protest and political agency. He is known for his guerrilla video projections as a member of The Illuminator, a guerrilla video projection collective, and Bail Bloc, a computer program that posts bail for low-income people. His film Why don’t the cops fight each other? (created while in residence with Media Art Exploration) deals with the source code governing police officers in video games and has been screened at SXSW in Texas, Oberhausen film festival in Germany, ACMI in Australia, and more. His art and research has also been presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Singapore Art Museum.
Annie Saunders | REST
Annie Saunders is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences, and has made award-winning installations and performance works for major arts institutions as well as immersive projects in disused buildings and experiential works for public space. She is a member of the inaugural ONX Studio and an alumnus of the Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater. Saunders is the founder and artistic director of site-specific performance company Wilderness, and her experimental project The Wreck for Opera Omaha was called ‘ingenious…a persuasive expression of complex female feeling,’ by the Wall Street Journal.
Flako Jimenez | Mercedes
Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised theater maker, producer, and educator. In 2016 he received the ATI Best Actor Award and Princess Grace Award Theater Honoraria. HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer for 2017. Flako is best known for original productions and three signature festivals produced with his company ¡Oye! Group. Flako has appeared in Taxilandia (¡Oye! Group, New York Theatre Workshop, the Bushwick Starr, & The Tank, NYTimes Critic’s Pick), Early Shaker Spirituals (Wooster Group), Last Night At The Palladium (Bushwick Starr/3LD), Yoleros (Bushwick Starr/IATI theater), Conversations Pt.1: How To Make It Black In America (JACK), Take Me Home (3LD/Incubator Arts Project), Richard Maxwell’s Samara (Soho Rep.), Kaneza Schaal’s Jack & (BAM). In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in The Public Theater Under The Radar Festival with his show ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn. in 2021 he received a Jerome Foundation fellowship and Foundation of Contemporary Arts award in performing arts and theater.
Daniel Grushkin | Parables for the Biotech Age
Daniel Grushkin is a biotechnology thinker and entrepreneur. He is Founder of Biodesign Challenge, an international student competition and education program that partners artists, designers, and scientists with students to imagine and create the future of biotechnology. He is the Editor of the anthology Grow the Future. Daniel is Cofounder of Genspace, a nonprofit community laboratory dedicated to promoting citizen science and access to biotechnology. He was a Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and an Emerging Leader in Biosecurity at the John Hopkins Center of Health Security.
As a former journalist, he has reported on the intersection of biotechnology, culture, and business for publications including Bloomberg Businessweek, Fast Company, Scientific American and Popular Science. He was recently a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome.
Alex Darby | Parables for the Biotech Age
Alex Darby is an interdisciplinary cultural strategist, artist, and creative producer. Darby is the founder of The Hybrid Studio, an art lab and creative production studio. She is an accomplished producer and curator of programs in new media and technology, and her creative projects traverse installation, new media, technology, performance, and critical inquiry. Darby has worked with institutions such as NEW INC, The Biennale of Sydney, and Nokia Bell Labs and her interdisciplinary work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Creators Project, WIRED, and Fast Co. Design, and shown at festivals and institutions such as SXSW, Sundance, MoMA, New Museum, NY Live Arts, MANA Contemporary, and The Biennale of Sydney.