ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Thursday, May 7th at 8pm, ISSUE presents Audience As Virus by new media artist Eva Davidova (2020 AIR and TIP fellow). The event features composer Selwa Abd (2022 AIR and TIP fellow), who collaborates with Davidova in developing an interactive musical score for the work, choreographer/ dancer Vinson Fraley, a longtime collaborator making his ISSUE debut, and Danielle McPhatter with EY Intelligent Realities Lab.
Following her participation in Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program in 2020, Davidova’s experimental online performance, Global Mode >, was supported by ISSUE and marked the organization’s first program collaboration with Harvestworks. Her residency was further supported by the New York University Tandon School of Engineering Integrated Digital Media Motion Capture Lab, with mentorship from engineers at Nokia Bell Labs.
Audience As Virus is an interactive immersive installation-performance that involves the audience in the possibility to break AI predictions of human movement, and offers the public a clear capacity to intervene. Large Language Models trained on human movement rely on statistical convergence — privileging patterns over exceptions, coherence over ambiguity. But there is a potency in information that cannot be processed. Audience As Virus uses anti-efficiency and glitch to provoke new unpredictable, perhaps absurd (but imaginable) movements and expressive relationships. It mis-uses ChatGPT and Human Movement Diffusion Model or HMDM, to counter the patterns of replication, mimicry and averaging. It pushes the AI-s to deviate through intentional complications that are visible to the audience, inspired by a growing database of texts by choreographers and dancers. Joining the evening are artists Dafna Naphtali, Wobbly (Jon Leidecker), DeAndra Anthony, and Mattie Barber-Bockelman. Digital and physical costumes by MX Oops and Daveed Baptiste.
“Technology shapes our identity, forcing ideas about who we are onto us, producing homogenization, classification, behavior adjustment and retrofitting. We use these technologies (AI) and ecosystems (XR) to create space for un-flattened identities and extended expressions in hybrid worlds.”
— Danielle McPhatter, Creative technologist and co-director of Audience As Virus
Note: This event is standing room only. Patrons requiring accessible entry or seating accommodations, including wheelchair access, are encouraged to contact tech@issueprojectroom.org at least 48-hours in advance so we can best support your visit.
Eva Davidova explores behavior, ecological disaster, and the political implications of technology through performative works rooted in the absurd. Her practice is project-based, and involves research, drawing, performance, 360 video, Game Engines, participatory Virtual Reality and interactive, site-specific immersive installations. She works with the human gesture and expression as a way to “mix” with, and disrupt technologies, and use the failures in these technologies to reclaim them. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the UVP at Everson Museum, the AKG Buffalo Art Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, La Regenta, ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks, Instituto Cervantes, and the Museum of the Moving Image in NYC.
Selwa Abd is a Moroccan-born artist and composer based in New York City. Her prolific and thought-provoking output challenges critical questions surrounding the future of technology, her own fragmented personal identity shaped by the complexities of post-colonial urban environments, and the influence of virtual realities on contemporary society. She is a recipient of the NYFA x Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment Women’s Fund Grant (2024), the Jerome Hill Artist Alternate Award (2023), an ISSUE Project Room Artist-In-Residence (2022), and the Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program Fellowship (2022). She is also the founder of the community resource Pick Up The Flow and has been an NTS Radio resident since 2018. Her latest album “Maghreb” was featured on NPR's list of the best albums of 2024.
Vinson Fraley is a New York City–based multimedia artist working across voice, theater, dance, and image-making. Born in Statesville, North Carolina and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, he received his BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Fraley has been a member of A.I.M (Abraham.In.Motion) and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, and has collaborated with artists including Carrie Mae Weems, Anne Imhof, Bobbi Jene Smith, Damien Jalet, Sterling Ruby, Holland Andrews, Janet Biggs and Boys Noize. His work has been presented by institutions and venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, The Joyce Theater, Danspace Project, Arts at CERN, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been shown internationally across Europe, Asia, and North America. Vinson’s movement direction has been seen in videos by Calvin Klein, Burberry, H&M, Serpentwithfeet, Madonna, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Nike, Theory, Pattern Beauty, and The Cut.
Danielle McPhatter is a Creative Technologist at EY Intelligent Realities Lab, focused on building experiences that leverage emerging technologies such as the metaverse, XR, and interactive systems. She is also an artist working across a range of technologies and mediums, including IoT, sensing and physical computing, hybrid experiences, movement, and sound. McPhatter has advised artists through Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program and in collaboration with ISSUE Project Room. She also contributes to the Experiments in Art & Technology program at Nokia Bell Labs, directed by Domhnaill Hernon, with co-production overseen by Ethan Edwards.
Dafna Naphtali is a sound-artist, vocalist, electronic musician and guitarist, born, raised and based in New York City. She’s a composer/performer of experimental, contemporary classical, vocal and improvised music, creating custom computer programming for her projects. Her work with well-regarded musicians and video-artists have been presented internationally since the mid-90s, projects including live sound-processing of voice/instruments, field recordings, music for robots / mechanized piano, “Audio Chandelier” multi-channel sound and “Walkie Talkie Dreams” audio augmented-reality soundwalks, interpretations of Cage, Stockhausen and others. Dafna has received generous support from NYFA, NYSCA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and others and is a Guggenheim Fellow (Music Composition 2023).
Jon Leidecker has been producing music under the name Wobbly since 1990, exploring the many ways in which society’s relationships with music were changed at the moment we gained the ability to capture, manipulate and re-amplify sounds at will. Technology promises us the ability to permanently document any sound as if it were an object; musicians react by using it to redefine the act of improvisation, creating a music which inherently resists the act of being recorded. Recent performances deploy a battery of mobile devices driven by their built-in microphones, reacting instantly with error-prone variations on the notes and sounds they believe they are hearing: a tightly-knit orchestra with inhuman reflexes, resulting in structures which the human performer influences more than controls. Wobbly’s live and studio collaborations with Negativland, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Matmos, Fred Frith, John Oswald, Thomas Dimuzio, Huun-Huur-Tu, Sagan and the Freddy McGuire Show compliment live mix media collages executed twice a month on Negativland’s Over The Edge radio program on KPFA FM.
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