Welcome to the MAXmachina 2024 cohort:
MAXmachina WEEKEND PASS
Coming up: MAXmachina 2025
Rashaad Newsome – I Come As One But Stand as One Thousand
Grayson Earle and Johannes Büttner – The Play
Nick Ryan – Sonic Sunset
MAXmachina 2024-2025
Rest
By Annie Saunders
Description
‘Rest’ is based on research about how perception is created by small slivers of sensory input that is then ‘filled in’ with what we remember or what we expect, including interviews with scientists, poets, futurists, authors and thinkers and including George Saunders, Ross Gay, David Abram, Maryanne Wolf, Mary Helen Immordino Yang.
¡Harken!
By Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez and Victor Morales
Description
¡Harken! is a transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of history written about Juan Rodriguez – a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In Harken!, Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations; distortions based on second hand accounts written by colonizers and chroniclers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, Harken! audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information, generating new images and landscapes in the process.
Join creator and theater maker Flako Jimenez in conversation with co-creator, Victor Morales and Adaora Udoji as they navigate the storytelling of Rodriquez amidst the layers of versions of the story while applying the new tools of technology. Does that lead to excavation of a lost truth or a return to a myth?
Parables for the Biotech Age
By Daniel Grushkin and Alex Darby
Description
A 75-minute multimedia storytelling adventure, blending art, music, animation and visuals. The biotech revolution will shape more than science—it will alter our emotional landscapes and the ways we connect with each other and the environment. Does a vial of DNA foretell my fate? Is a bioengineered animal organ donor my kin? Parables attaches a visceral experience to the Biotech Age’s unnerving questions. Revolutions in technology transform not just how things get done, but people’s everyday lives, their ethics, even their physical bodies. Yet the most profound transformations are yet to come. From the tiniest shifts in DNA to their ripple effects across cultures, Parables presents visions of the very near, very strange future and its inevitable moral reverberations. The show debuted at The Tech Museum of San Jose, CA in May 2024 on the largest IMAX dome on the West Coast before a sold-out audience of 200.
I Come As One But Stand as One Thousand
By Rashaad Newsome
Description
A theater/dance piece in which the artist’s artificial intelligence, Being (the Digital Griot), takes on a physical form through the choreography of 1,000 quadcopter drones, each equipped with lights. Unlike typical drones, these quadcopters are able to fly in close proximity to one another without movement and are safely operated near humans in tight indoor spaces. Newsome utilized their custom Being machine learning model to generate the dramatic script for the live actors and choreographed the dance movements with live dancers. These movements were then translated onto the drones using motion capture technology and custom drone mapping software.
During the performance, the drones assemble into a humanoid silhouette representing Being, moving in harmony with live dancers and actors. The drones alternate between corporeal and geometric forms, creating a dynamic interplay of abstraction and wonder as they move around the performers. The soundscape accompanying the performance features Being’s voice,
This innovative piece showcases a collaboration between the artist and a machine trained on the works of prominent 20th-century Black theorists, engaging with contemporary discussions around artificial intelligence, robotics, human-machine labor relationships, and racial equity.
The Play
By Grayson Earle & Johannes Büttner
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.
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.
Rashaad Newsome | I Come As One But Stand as One Thousand
Rashaad Newsome’s work blends several practices, including filmmaking, artificial intelligence, animation, collage, sculpture, photography, music, writing, community organizing, and performance, to explore the intersections of these mediums and challenge traditional narratives and techniques. Drawing from diasporic traditions of improvisation, Newsome incorporates elements from advertising, the internet, art history, and Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic works that oscillate between social practice and abstraction. Collage serves as both a conceptual and technical method, enabling the construction of new visual, performance, sonic, machine learning, and literary languages that underscore the immaterial and material expressivity inherent in Black American life. Through this multifaceted approach, Newsome not only reflects contemporary cultural dialogues but also pushes the boundaries of artistic expression.
Grayson Earle | The Play
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.
Johannes Büttner| The Play
Johannes Büttners work explores speculative and scientifically grounded socio-economic phenomena. He studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2023/24, he was a fellow at the Berlin Program for Artists (bpa//). Recently, he has participated in several prominent exhibitions, including the 16th Istanbul Biennale (2019), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2018), Kunsthalle Mainz (2020), KW Berlin (2023), and Kunsthalle Schirn (2024). Johannes has been recognized with numerous grants and awards. In 2022, his film “Platform” was nominated for the German Short Film Award. His latest film, “Soldaten des Lichts,” a co-production with ZDF’s “Das kleine Fernsehspiel,” is currently in post-production.
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.