About
Founded by Wayne Ashley, the former Director of Arts in Multimedia at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), FuturePerfect is a new performance, art and technology initiative.
It was established to both draw attention to and mobilize the unrealized innovative, artistic, and economic potential of joining two important sectors in New York City: the long established culture industry and the city’s still emerging technology sector. Produced in partnership with leading national and international institutions, FuturePerfect highlights new hybrid performance practices and artistic ideas that continue to emerge as computers and other non-human systems become increasingly integral to contemporary culture. No longer “new,” it is technology’s ordinariness, obviousness, and seeming indispensability that offer artists and audiences alike some of the more challenging aesthetic, social, political and economic opportunities. Now that the critical euphoria that began in the 1990s around virtual reality and the Internet is already irretrievably in the past, what comes next?
A consortium of organizations offer presentation opportunities to selected artists, researchers, and collaborative groups in multiple venues throughout the city; as well as public dialogue and debate to a growing and increasingly sophisticated audience. The works include installations, performances, and interventions by artists who continue to re-configure and re-think their practice in relationship to advances in computation, electro-mechanics, optics, acoustics, networks, and robotics. The projects map the ongoing but intensifying interplay between the fields of contemporary performance and art on the one hand, and technologies of mediation, software, transmission, and simulation on the other—the crossing of live, mediated, recorded, networked, and machinic channels of address. The artists selected for FuturePerfect continue to dramatize the profound ways that technology has rewritten and is rewriting bodies, changing our understanding of narrative, place, and time; our relationships to culture, politics and sociability, and our understandings of presence, embodiment, materiality, and perception.
Collaborating Organizations: Dance Theater Workshop, 3LD Art & Technology Center, CPR—Center for Performance Research, Chez Bushwick, PS122, CUNY Graduate Center, French Institute/Alliance Française, EMPAC, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New Radio and Performing Arts, HERE Art Center, Royal Norwegian Consulate of New York, Harvestworks, Quebec Government Office, New York Public Library