We are pleased to announce that the Improvising the Net(Work) Residency has been jointly awarded to two creative collectives, h0t club and Dilate Ensemble.

The two collectives will be in residence at Thoughtworks San Francisco and CounterPulse, a leading performing arts incubator. Both venues are based in downtown San Francisco.

To comply with ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, these residencies will occur both online and in person at the two residency sites as appropriate.

h0t club

h0t club is a psychedelic consumer-driven company of artist technologists and music makers performing the internet and beyond. The collective features Kate Bergstrom, Martim Galvão, Alex Dupuis, Todd Anderson, Miller Puckette and Bryan Jacobs.

Kate Bergstrom, Martim Galvão and Miller Puckette will work with developers at Thoughtworks and the community of CounterPulse in San Francisco to develop and extend their performance work exploring entanglements with surveillance, systems infrastructures and the web.

Building bespoke performance systems and open source technologies with a mixture of vapor wave and agit prop aesthetics, h0t club compresses and compiles, through coding and new software platforms, guitar solos, Mozilla hubs, tubas of toothpaste, valerie bots and more in the original 3-D TECHNOLOGY, live performances and networks of Muzak-al culture jamming combatting dehumanization and corporate hegemony.

h0t club has been featured at Ars Nova, Culture Project NYC, Granoff Center for the Arts, San Diego Opera’s “Opera Hack”, Culture Hub at La Mama, Festival of Live Digital Art with HowlRound and more.

Dilate Ensemble

Dilate Ensemble is an audio-visual collective featuring multimedia installation artist Carole Kim and musicians Gloria Damijan, Scott L. Miller, Luisa Muhr and Jon Raskin.

In April 2020, Carole compressed her work in video installation to fit beneath her kitchen table, creating an intimate live “venue,” and invited Gloria, Scott, Luisa and Jon to work with Kim’s live visuals in a form of interactive improvisation-based dialogue.

Work is collaboratively developed, involving a shared visual element delivered over Zoom. Netty-McNetface is used to mix the audio in Scott’s studio, where he processes the audio tracks in Kyma—monitored by the ensemble in Netty—and OBS to produce a live a-v work that is streamed.

Dilate has embraced the latent nature of telematic performance, developing an artistic practice idiomatic to the venue of networked audio-visual art.

Public presentation at CounterPulse

Both collectives will kick off their respective 16-week residencies by participating at The CounterPulse Festival 2021, including a presentation of their upcoming projects. This will be followed by a roundtable conversation focusing on the themes of artist network collaborations.

The event: Thoughtworks Arts Improvising The Net(Work) Kick-off Talk will take place on September 15th at 3PM EDT Via Zoom, with tickets available now.