Volumetric Performance Toolbox is the collaborative project of Valencia James, Glowbox and Sorob Louie, which envisions live online 3D dance performance as a new way for artists to create and perform from their own living spaces and audiences to communally experience art using minimal equipment, during this time of pandemic.
We are building a community of creators around online live volumetric performance.
The project was developed through Eyebeam NYC’s Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellowship.
VPT Founding Team
Valencia James
Valencia James is a Barbadian performer, maker and researcher interested in the intersection between dance, theatre, technology and activism. Valencia’s work explores remote interdisciplinary collaboration with creative technologists and how emerging technologies like machine learning and computer vision might enhance creativity in her contemporary dance practice and vice-versa. This research has resulted in collaboratively built, novel open- source software tools that push the boundaries of live performance. She has presented her work at several international forums such as the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, ISEA2015, TEDxGoteborg, SIGGRAPH and Gray Area Festival. She was a 2020 Rapid Response Fellow at Eyebeam and a Spring 2021 Remote Resident for Open-Source Art Tools at Carnegie Mellon University.
Glowbox
Glowbox is a spatial interaction lab which partners with artists, designers and institutions to develop immersive experiences that blend the physical and virtual worlds. Glowbox explores the human experience through shared realities built to connect, inform, and inspire.
Sorob Louie
Sorob's diverse background in electronics and interactive programming, fused with a strong interest in emerging technologies, guides his passion for creating experiences that explore the possibilities of communication. Through 3D design and animation, prototyping, research, and programming, his work as an interactive developer supports multiple aspects of the development process. Sorob is the founder of Virtu Labs Interactive Agency.
VPT Ongoing Contributors
Valencia James (Lead Artist, Managing Director)
Thomas Wester (Technical Director)
Thomas Wester co-founded Glowbox, a spatial interaction lab based in Portland, Oregon. Through Glowbox, he builds shared reality experiences that blend physical and digital to connect people to ideas, nature, and each other. He has worked with The Royal Shakespeare Company, Library of Congress, Hermès, Microsoft, Nike, MoMA, MFA Boston, and exhibited at Tribeca and Sundance.
Simon Boas (Head of Production)
Simon Boas investigates technology, culture, and aesthetics through socially engaged art and design, often working under the collective moniker Midgray. His work has been exhibited internationally through SIGGRAPH, Eyebeam, Gray Area, the Institute of Network Cultures, Neural, and Digicult. His art and research have received awards from the Oregon Arts Commission and the University of California. He received his M.F.A. degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and is currently based in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a creative technologist and educator.
Pilot Residency Artists
Alim Ringgold
Based in Portland, Oregon, Alim Ringgold is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with video + sound, ceramic sculpture, and installation. Alim draws from a deep interest in the esoteric, unexplained phenomena, and the nature of dreams, tapping in to these modalities to explore presence in a world that often feels uncomfortably concrete. They find solace in the sky, ambiguity, and the ability to interpret the mundane as symbolic.Alim is currently working towards a BFA in intermedia studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Instagram: @alim.samii
Catherine Ross
Catherine Ross is a researcher, creative technologist, and performance artist whose practice is centered in social and environmental justice as they relate to burgeoning technologies. Combatting a sense of digital estrangement from the Earth, from labor, from the collective and from the self through translations of the embodied experience, their work finds form in experimental theatre, sound, movement, and new media. Catherine currently works in collaboration with CETI, a Creative and Emergent Technology Institute, supporting a diverse and interdisciplinary community of artists, practitioners, professionals, educators, students, and researchers to design future communication architectures. Catherine holds a BFA in Intermedia Arts from the Pacific NW College of Art. Their work has been featured at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Pacific Works NW, Center of Contemporary Art and Culture, Place Galley, and Indivisible Gallery, as well across various virtual platforms.
Carlos Johns-Dávila
Carlos Johns-Dávila is a 360º video maker and interactive technologist based in Brooklyn, NY. His work involves movement and gesture to control projections and sounds in open improvisation structures. He develops these methods with theremin, quenacho, and dance to create hybrid performances that capture multiple dimensions of reality. His current interests are in 360º video and site-specific installations that create a feedback loop in the sounds of the natural environment and the ones being composed.
Terri Ayanna Wright
Terri Ayanna Wright (multimedia artist) hails from Baton Rouge, Louisiana by way of Houston, Texas, and has called New York City her home since 2011. She is an honors graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program, with a major in dance and minor in computer science. Immediately after graduating, Ms. Wright toured internationally as a company member with Ailey II, where she was completely enthralled by the wide-range of live production teams, theaters, and audiences from city to city. She has since been granted opportunities to choreograph and teach all over the world, most notably as an Ailey Extension Instructor in Italy for Orsalina28's Summer Intensive. After performing with Carolyn Dorfman Dance for two seasons, Ms. Wright joined The Met Opera, as an ensemble dancer in Porgy & Bess, choreographed by Camille A. Brown. Through this experience, she began exploring the many facets of live production, beyond the performance act itself. She is a recent honors graduate of Parsons with an MFA in Design & Technology, which has allowed her to expand her storytelling capabilities through the marriage of dance, digital video, and visual effects.
http://www.terriayannawright.com
Antoine Hunter
Bay Area native, Antoine Hunter also known as Purple Fire Crow is an award-winning Internationally-known African-American, Indigenous, Deaf, Disable, choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, Producer and Deaf advocate. He creates opportunities for Disable, Deaf and hearing artists and produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival. Antoine’s work has been performed globally, most recently in Turkey, UK and Russia. He has lectured across the U.S. including at Kennedy Center’s VSA, Harvard and Duke University, and the National Assembly of State Arts. He is Vice President of Deaf Counseling, Advocacy and Referral Agency (DCARA's) Board, a non-profit, community-based social service agency serving the deaf community.
Remi Harris
Remi Harris is a Barbados born and Brooklyn bred dance artist exploring the intersectionality between performance, new media and black female representation through movement improvisation, choreography, XR and curation. Recent work explores creating liberated and inclusive dance spaces under the performance/party project Yes! Yes! Yes! with Mark Schmidt and XR as an extension of performance.
Maryann Talavera
MaryAnn Talavera is a creative technologist, filmmaker, and polyglot with a love for storytelling and travel. She studies immersive media, 360 video, XR, and virtual production in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In addition to graduate school, MaryAnn works as the Associate Director of Recruitment in the Office of Special Programs at Tisch. Born in the Dominican Republic, she cultivated a passion from an early age for cross-cultural communication, studying abroad in Italy, France, and Brazil.
https://maryanntalavera.wixsite.com/rolos
Residency Instructors
Tony Patrick
Tony Patrick is a WorldBuilder, Immersive Director, and founder of the Tenfold Gaming Initiative. As an author/director of numerous screenplays, documentaries (HBO) and published comics (Batman & The Signal, X'ed), Tony's penchant for creating fictional worlds has catapulted him into future-facing residencies sponsored by Sundance New Frontier, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Verizon 5G and Ryot, laying the foundation for a new XR format termed Experiential Comics. When he is not generating opportunities for underrepresented youth to pursue game design and innovation careers, he is catalyzing new artworks, prototypes, and civic solutions in his Community-WorldBuilding workshops with artists, entrepreneurs, and communities-at-large.
LaJuné McMillian
LaJuné is a New Media Artist and Creative Technologist creating art that integrates performance, virtual reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. LaJuné has had the opportunity to show and speak about their work at Pioneer Works, National Sawdust, Leaders in Software and Art, Creative Tech Week, and Art & Code's Weird Reality. LaJuné was previously the Director of Skating at Figure Skating in Harlem, where they integrated STEAM and Figure Skating to teach girls of color about movement and technology. They have continued their research on Blackness, movement, and technology during residencies at Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, Barbarian Group, and Barnard College.
Marin Vesely
Marin Vesely is an LA based graphic designer with a passion for art, technology and activism.
http://www.marinvesely.com/graphic-design
Selwa Sweidan
Selwa Sweidan is a media artist, designer and researcher of emerging technologies. Her work critically probes technological epistemes through collaborative, and embodied methods. Selwa has conducted foresight research across technology sectors and has co-curated exhibitions and symposia including Beyond Embodiment, Performative Computation, STACKED Expo, Super Radiance and Clustering. She was a "Collective Resident" at NAVEL, a postgraduate Fellow at ArtCenter College of Design, an Interactive Design Fellow at Fabrica, and was awarded “Best Overall” at the Microsoft Design Expo ’15. She holds a BA from Smith College, an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design and is an Annenberg PhD Fellow in Media Arts + Practice at the University of Southern California.
Jessy Escobedo
Jessy Escobedo is a Product Designer at Magic Leap and an independent researcher interested in the participatory design of near and far XR futures. Her independent research centers around decolonizing XR prototyping practices and deploying the AR co-visioning mobile app PLANNAR in urban communities. She has worked with Acumen, Sidewalk Labs, IDEO CoLab, Autodesk, and the City of LA on a variety of digital products and strategic work, and has presented her work at Primer Conference, APF FuturesFest, and Refactor Camp. She holds an MFA in Media Design from ArtCenter College of Design and a BS in Architectural Studies from USC.
Residency Advisors
Lauren Lee McCarthy
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an LA-based artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She is the creator of p5.js, an open source JavaScript platform that aims to make creative expression and coding on the web accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, and beginners. She is an Associate Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts.
https://lauren-mccarthy.com
Evelyn Eastmond
Evelyn Eastmond is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher exploring trauma and embodiment through sculpture and installation. She’s been an artists-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and at the Gushul Studio Residency Program in Canada and has taught digital media at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has also held positions as a researcher and fellow at YCombinator Research, the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research. In 2018, she founded the Norfolk Artists Residency Program in Massachusetts, which hosts artists for week-long residencies. Currently, she is a Senior Design Researcher at Microsoft studying spatial technologies and their use in art studio practice, remote creative collaboration and distance education.
Freya Björg Olafson
Freya Björg Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, animation, motion capture, XR, painting, and performance. Her praxis engages with identity and the body, as informed by technology and the Internet. Olafson’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally at the Bauhaus Archive (Berlin), SECCA - SouthEastern Center for Contemporary Art (North Carolina), LUDWIG Museum (Budapest), and The National Arts Center (Ottawa, Canada). Olafson has benefitted from residencies, most notably through EMPAC - Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center (New York), Oboro (Montreal), and Counterpulse (San Francisco). Olafson holds an MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute / Donau Universität and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at York University in Toronto since 2017. This past spring Olafson was a recipient of the national 2020 ‘Sobey Art Award’.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an Artist and Technologist who creates playful work with XR,VR,AI,AR,AV and other esoteric systems of story and code. Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the stupidhackathon.com. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist for Contentful and host of the Contentful + Algolia Developer Podcast DreamStacks. She is working on ethics based dependencies for software development as a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.
Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.
Jerron Herman
Jerron Herman is a dancer and writer. He has created pieces for The Whitney Museum, Danspace Project, and Performance Space New York. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Dance/USA and was named a 2020 Disability Futures Fellow by the Ford Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Tyler Musgrave
PhD Student at University of Michigan || Ignite Fellow || UX research, HCI, XR, Ethics
Tyler is a Maryland native who aims to bridge gaps in the social sectors utilization of tech. She was recently awarded with an XRStudio fellowship at Mozilla to utilize mixed reality tools to create creative installations. She has worked within a pre-adjudication youth diversion program called Community Works West harnessing the power of restorative justice to heal those who have been impacted negatively by the justice system and crime. Previously, Tyler has served as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon working to build capacity and support for health services centered around youth in mainly HIV/AIDS, sexual reproductive health, nutrition and life skills. She loves dancing afro-house, watching foreign films and long walks on leveled ground (still getting into hiking grove).
Contributors
Tunisha Singleton, Ph.D.
Dr. Tunisha Singleton is a consultant, educator, public speaker and creative strategist committed to making all forms of business equally meaningful, inclusive and fun for everyone. Armed with a Ph.D. in Media Psychology, Tunisha is a professional 1-2 punch of art and science. She has 15 years of experience blended across business development, content creation and emerging forms of new media including podcasting and XR/VR/AR projects. With an expertise in fan identity and community engagement, Tunisha’s work focuses on using storytelling, innovation and consumer insight to inform the design of content development and integrated marketing strategies. Tunisha aspires to work with more brands and non-profits on projects about building positive experiences, eSports, mental health, fandom, amplifying Black voices and race/gender/LGBTQ+ empowerment.
Ra Malika Imhotep
Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer + performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia currently pursuing a Doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies and New Media Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her intellectual + creative work tends to the relationships between queer articulations of Black femininity, vernacular culture & the performance of labor. She is co-convener of an embodied spiritual-political education project called The Church of Black Feminist Thought.
Keith McGraw
Keith McGraw is a musician and sound artist based in Brooklyn, New York.
Julienne Rencher
Jules is a dancer, maker and “worker of the arts” living in Queens. Born in St. Louis Missouri She traveled the jazz circuit to reincarnate and reclaim ancestral practices through the intersections of dance plant medicine and ancient sound, movement and divination practices. Jules uses movements, patterns of physical labor and all things mundane to channel and orate scores of the moment.