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.
Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center and ISSUE Project Room present the performance of 2025 AIR Qiujiang Levi Lu’s Tapescape. The live performance on Saturday, May 16th, at 2pm within Harvestworks’ Art and Technology Program Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island marks the opening of Lu’s Tapescape installation, which is free to the public and runs from May 16, 2026 through August 23, 2026.
Tapescape is an interactive sound installation and live performance work that reimagines magnetic tape as a two-dimensional field for composition, touch, and spatial listening. Lu records and arranges sound on tapes across flat acrylic surfaces, transforming audio into a physical landscape that can be traced, activated, and rediscovered. Built from modified tape technology, custom playback tools, and four-channel sound, Tapescape invites audiences to encounter recording not as fixed playback, but as something tactile, unstable, and exploratory.
Presented as part of an exhibition at Harvestworks on Governors Island, the installation invites visitors to use a custom-built playback “pen” to draw across the tape surface and uncover sounds embedded in different directions, densities, and pathways. As audience members move through the work, sound panning across four speakers guides them to keep drawing, turning hearing itself into a wayfinding system. Playback becomes both response and instruction, leading participants deeper into the surface as they search for where sound begins, disappears, and returns.
For the exhibition opening, Lu will present a live performance activating Tapescape in real time, revealing the piece as both instrument and environment. Using the tape surface and playback device as a live compositional interface, Lu transforms tracing, pressure, and gesture into a spatialized sonic event. The performance extends the installation’s central inquiry: how sound can be stored in space rather than time, and how composition can be entered, followed, and rediscovered through the body.
Following their participation in Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program in 2025, Lu’s residency was part of an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE and Harvestworks — two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.
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Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江 is an experimental musician, media artist, and composer based in the United States. Lu invents electroacoustic instruments that use the human body as a vessel for transhumanist, embodied sound. They extend the body with cyborg-like augmentations, such as an intraoral microphone speaker feedback system, and an amplified laptop instrument, built for visceral intensity and hyperkinetic performance. Lu’s performances unfold as choreographed, ritual-inflected improvisations that bring Chinese lineages into conversation with contemporary noise and embodied technology. Their work moves through themes of body dysmorphia, queerness, and spirituality that draws audiences into a physical kind of listening where sound feels intimate, unstable, and sometimes unsettling. A Second Prize winner of the International Electronic Music Competition (2023), Lu’s work has been presented internationally at venues and festivals including MATA Festival, Send + Receive, High Zero, IRCAM Forum, Kallelse Festival, and e-flux. They have received commissions from TAK Ensemble, Popebama, Luke Helker, and Ensemble Decipher, and support including an EY Emergent Futures Fellowship and an incubator member at NEW INC. Lu has been an artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks TIP, and ElektronmusikStudion Stockholm, and is a lecturer in music at the University of Pennsylvania. They have also presented guest lectures, workshops, and performances at institutions including Stanford University CCRMA, Princeton University, NYU, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California, Oberlin Conservatory, and Parsons School of Design. They hold degrees in Computer Music from Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University and a degree in Music Composition from Stony Brook University.
