In June 2013, ISSUE Project Room and the Goethe-Institut New York present PAN_ACT, a multi-faceted series of performances, talks, and installations exploring parallel strategies in conceptual art, underground dance, and experimental music. Curated by ISSUE Project Room’s Lawrence Kumpf and Berlin-based designer and founder of the PAN label Bill Kouligas, PAN_ACT presents a diverse array of artists working in Berlin, London, Boston, and New York, drawn largely from the PAN roster. Sixteen events span multiple venues including ISSUE Project Room and the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building, as well as collaborative presentations with MoMA PS1, The Bunker, Mutual Dreaming, Make Music New York, NPR Music, and Non-Event (Boston).
PAN_ACT presents pioneering sound/performance artists Jutta Koether, Thomas Brinkmann, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Henry Flynt alongside a younger generation of conceptual artists including James Hoff, Eli Keszler, and Ben Vida, as well as forward thinking electronic music producers like Terrence Dixon, Regis, Lee Gamble, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Juan Atkins, and Heatsick among many others— teasing out linkages and lines of intersection from the flourishing yet oft-overlooked dialogue between contemporary art and music. As a central component of PAN_ACT, the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building presents a series of talks and conversations exploring the practices, strategies, and methodologies of artists including Joseph Hammer, Steve Warwick, James Hoff, Jutta Koether, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mathew Dryhurst, Rashad Becker, and Thomas Brinkmann. Eschewing the lenses of “sound art” and avant-gardism typical of academic culture, PAN_ACT forgoes the popular in explorations of populist forms of music production and their interrelation to underground artist communities, and dematerialized distribution of art objects.
