Cube Fest 2024: Immersive Indigenous Experiences

Christopher Poovey
Meticulously handcrafted ornamental items made with exquisite craftsmanship are considered objects of vertu. While creating Inside a Mirage of Vertu, I have been weighing consequences of generative art forms, with more focus on those that rely on artificial intelligence, and I have been trying to come to terms with how this kind of art will transform artists' craft. Inside a Mirage of Vertu does not use an AI in its production, but does use automated processes for spatialization like ambisonic granulation which generate 3D gestures and soundscapes. These soundscapes represent the surreal image of a musical singing bird box, a rather iconic object of vertu, but the piece places you inside a mirage – an apparition manufactured to exist in the world as if it were real.

Zouning Liao
I have always had a desire to create a composition dedicated to nature. To fulfill this aspiration, I embarked on recording adventures near lakes to capture the sounds of late summer, primarily focusing on the chirping of crickets and the songs of birds indigenous to Bloomington, Indiana. I was astounded by the richness of the cricket orchestra in the forest and how it transformed throughout the day.

In the opening of the piece, you will hear eight different recordings of crickets simultaneously. This auditory experience will take you on a journey, exploring the spectrum between real and synthetic sounds. I encourage you to immerse yourself in the environment and visualize the immersive surroundings as you traverse through different sections of the composition.

Steve Ashby
A not so distant past reinterprets color scale data of video sources as control sources for sound creation via note selection, amplitude modulation, and other parameters. The work captures the sonic unfolding of time represented in the visual while simultaneously giving voice to the visual stimulus. Through its generative nature, A not so distant past will provide different realizations depending on the chosen video sources and the respective mapping of parameters to sound modules.

a not so distant past
collected frame by frame
brushing off the dust
prior to memory’s revision
a transfer from past to present
with all its kinks and curves

Bill Crouse is a self-taught painter and sculptor who specializes in Native art forms. Crouse’s performance, Echoes of the Ancestors, will combine audio and"and live traditional dancing by Allegany River Seneca dancers, sharing oral traditions of the Seneca people through movement, sound, music, and light. The piece will move from creation through seasons and a traditional women’s dance.

About the Alleghany River Seneca Dancers
A Native American dance group that showcases the traditional songs and dances of the Iroquois, the Allegany River Seneca Dancers’ performances incorporate many aspects of Native American culture and share the original Seneca language and culture of the songs and dances. All performers wear traditional Native American regalia, and all the music is performed live; some highlights include the Iroquois Smoke dance, a very fast contest dance. The Allegany River Seneca Dancers have been thrilling audiences at colleges, museums, powwows, and festivals since the mid-1980s, offering an authentic, hands-on experience with Native American music and dance.

DA Mekonnen
DA Mekonnen's new experimental jazz project, dragonchild, brings the performance of BLACK: Constellation X in this immersive, multimedia spatial sound performance. Conceived and transmitted by DA Mekonnen (founder of Debo Band), dragonchild draws on decades of musical experimentation, embodied spiritual practice, and critical thinking—culminating in its debut work, BLACK. In this innovative listening experience, four one-sided LPs will be played simultaneously to create an immersive swarm.

Shawn Greenlee
Sluicer is a performance system for electroacoustic improvisation on high density loudspeaker arrays with high order ambisonics. In this work, two 20-voice, erratic synthesizers operate as a roving “chorus” under the player’s direction. Both synths have a series of multichannel effects designed to work specifically with ambisonic signals, allowing the player to create and alter spatial dimensions. As audio flows, the guiding action is like closing/opening gates in a lock on a waterway. The results are timbral and spatial churns, swells, floods and drains, motion in repetition, expansion, and contraction. Sluicer is programmed in Max with tactile interfaces being high resolution, multi-touch control surfaces and a DJ-style MIDI controller.

Aline R S S de Souza
Aline de Souza, performer (text, narration, movement choreography, and images)

Brandon Hale, sound technician (composition, music technology, and sound spatialization)

This piece refers to my background living in Brazil and my specific story of migration away from a family where my dogs and I experienced a variety of forms of violence. I situate the violent approach to nature, animals and people’s bodies as a colonial way of thinking. I needed treatment for a treatable malformation from birth that compromised my breathing. My mother believed that people of “mixed races” would always have problems and were untreatable. I did not subscribe to a sense of shame for indigenous origins and being “very mixed.” Getting treatment as an adult is more complex than as a child, but I breathe well now. Away from that environment, I’m healing my body and processing immeasurable losses.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin uses new kinds of technology to tell new kinds of stories, particularly scientific stories around the environmental future. With a primary ecological research area of water, Winger-Bearskin stands with those who defy categorization.

LIQUID / REAL
Featuring live accompaniment by Eamon O’Connor, electric guitar

LIQUID / REAL at Cube Fest merges the ethereal realms of sound and the essential element of water to create a meditative, immersive art experience. Together with video projections summoning images of water, the piece intricately weaves live vocals, guitar harmonies, and transformative effects to transport audiences into vivid aquatic landscapes and speculative sonic worlds. Conceived and performed by Winger-Bearskin, a multifaceted artist who is also a singer, AI researcher, and opera performer, LIQUID / REAL invites listeners to dive into an auditory exploration of water's vital role on our blue planet.

The artwork delves into water scarcity, contamination, and humans’ sacred connection with water through this sound journey. It reflects on the physical essence of water and its symbolic significance in fostering life and connectivity among diverse communities worldwide, especially highlighting the struggles of Indigenous populations facing water injustices.

LIQUID / REAL aims to use the power of immersive technology and artistic expression to stir empathy, provoke thought, and inspire conversation about the interdependence of Earth's water systems. It challenges us to reflect on our personal water narratives and encourages collective action toward protecting this invaluable resource. This experience at Cube Fest is an invitation to perceive, feel, and ultimately understand water as a resource and shared story that resonates deeply across all walks of life.

Biography
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and associate professor of artificial intelligence and the arts at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. Winger-Bearskin is also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, the Talk to Me About Water Collective, and the Stupid Hackathon. In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project, CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD, which was part of the Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series.

She was a fellow at Stanford University in 2021 as their artist and technologist-in-residence, made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF).  In 2020 she founded Wampum Codes, an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on Indigenous values of co-creation, while a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio. She was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala, India in 2019, and in 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her virtual reality project, Your Hands Are Feet from Engadget and Verizon Media. This was also the year that nonprofit IDEA New Rochelle won the $1 million Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for its VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.

Winger-Bearskin's video art was selected as a part of Storytelling: La biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, 2e édition (Art Biennale of Contemporary Native Art) at Art Mur (Montreal, Canada). She has been a featured artist at numerous international performance art festivals since 2008 in cities not limited to Beijing, Manila, Seoul, Sao Paulo, New York, and Washington, D.C. She presented her performance art at the 2012 Gwangju Art Biennial and created an interactive portion of the Exchange Archive at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2013. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the McCord Museum.

Winger-Bearskin is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

Angela McArthur
Pankopat is a sound work centered around a community of elderly Nepalese women in Woolwich, southeast London. These women have migrated to the U.K. with a sense of connection borne out of a shared military history between the Gurkhas and British army. However, their journey is challenging, their status insecure, and their material conditions at times poor. They are vulnerable to London's systems and people, yet maintain a joyful resilience and warmth. This work frames the researchers within the process of recording and listening in order to foreground the construction of the work as an inter-subjective, participatory, and non-extractive process. These methods continue to shape the trajectory of this ongoing project.

Weilu Ge
Tell is a spatial soundscape composition that explores stories and music expressions of the Qiang people, an Indigenous group since the ancient time living in the mountains in Central China. The original field recording part was collected during a field trip visiting a historical Qiang village in Sichuan, China. The motivation behind the trip was to help document the cultural heritage of Qiang, since a lot of their libraries and archives were destroyed during the big earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, following continuous decaying of passing down various cultural traditions and artistic practice. As many Qiang traditions are continuously marginalized today, the younger generation has adapted to speaking different languages and is alienated from their culture. Composed of field recording, noise, and electronic improvisation, Tell aims to create a shared listening space to interrogate critical issues related to culture displacement, disembodiment and the disconnected communication between generations in Indigenous culture.

The soundscape unfolds in an intimate listening space where a senior Qiang man sits in a dark corner singing a ballad to a past lover from his young age while trying to recall the most precious memories. This singing voice is developed and transformed throughout the piece to construct a first-person listening perspective (In Qiang culture, people are often forced to separate from their true love to follow a marriage arrangement from their family and usually marry people who live in a different mountain they have never seen.). This kind of traumatic experience and sense of loss can be perceived in many aspects of indigenous life in Qiang culture today, especially after the earthquake when not only people but also many familiar home places shattered into pieces of debris. Through the lens of a first-person perspective, Tell then zooms out from the singing voice and takes the audience on an immersive soundscape listening journey by reconstructing various moments from Indigenous Qiang activities, such as musicing, ritual performance, hunting, and playing.

Matias Vilaplana Stark
Funeral for a Whale developed from my curiosity regarding the funeral practices of whales and other marine mammals, some of whom carry their deceased relative’s body for days as a manifestation of their mourning. Sometimes, whales and dolphins will even keep vigils around their deceased family members or companions. I found this at once so strange and uncanny, and yet also so immediately relatable as a communal expression of grief and loss. This piece is an attempt to imagine that space of grief and reflect on their ceremonies of remembrance. I often feel reluctant to impose a narrative on my music for fear of it being too restrictive for listeners. My goal when creating music is always to encourage reflection and imagination, not to be too overly prescriptive regarding what the music is really about. My hope is that Funeral for a Whale can reconcile my anxieties by offering some context for the piece as I was creating it, while still inviting listeners to weave together a story of their own.

Eric Lyon
A Sudden Light was commissioned by Annie Stevens as part of her project, The Memory Palace, a concert of music and dance created for the Cube in 2024. My composition pursues the idea of music as a “memory palace,” working with performed percussion sounds that reappear in transfigured forms. The piece was inspired by a passage from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance:

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing, a weathervane, a windmill, a winnowing flail, the dust in the barn door; a moment — and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again.

“A Sudden Light” was created in collaboration with Annie Stevens, testing and recording many percussion instruments until we found an ensemble that resonated for both of us. The piece starts as a virtuosic solo that gradually becomes spatially inscribed into the architecture of the Cube, creating a memory palace for Annie's performance as it unfolds into space.

home: gokǫ̀
home: gokǫ̀ is an immersive audio and video performances demonstrating the artist’s culture and how he continues to push it forward using technology and experimentation, revealing a sense of life in Canada’s Arctic.

Casey Koyczan is a Dene interdisciplinary artist who uses various mediums to communicate how culture and technology can grow together in order for us to develop a better understanding of who we are, where we come from, and what we will be. Koyczan creates with whatever tools necessary to bring an idea to fruition, specializing in sculpture, installation, 3D/VR/AR/360, video, and audio works such as music, soundscapes, and film scores. Koyczan has participated in residencies, exhibits, festivals, and collaborations in parts of the world such as Finland, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, the Netherlands, the U.S., and the U.K. Koyczan is also a musician, producer, filmmaker, actor/narrator, and advocate for future generations of artists and musicians.

Andy Rudolph is a freelance sound designer whose work spans nearly all facets of audio creation: post-production, mixing composition, production, performance, installation, field recording, hardware/software development and many points in between.

The Indigenous Social is an hour of cuts by popular Indigenous recording artists, hand-picked by Alicia Aldaz, Melissa Faircloth, Victoria Ferguson, and Eddie Polanco, and spatialized to a fully surround experience by Eric Lyon. Sit, back, relax, and enjoy this unique set of tracks!