At the first of two CLEAT Series events for June this week, we welcome BARAS and Jared Kelley.

All products of human expression are being drawn into systems that compress us into data and return approximations of what was taken. Kelley has been drawn to building systems and watching what they do on their own, but in witnessing larger and more advanced systems consume and flatten human complexity, he sees the less interesting their output becomes. Irrational Machines starts with the uninteresting outputs in a series of small mechatronic sculptures that automate the behaviors no one would bother to steal: small, irrational, human gestures that have no value to extract. One sweeps the floor carefully around something that has broken. For this CLEAT performance, one machine sweeps through a soup of language, unearthing words the way a language model might, except the words it finds drive the content and quality of the audio around it. The more aggressively it sweeps to clean up the mess, the more words surface to feed back into its own behavior. It has no agency and is authoring its own actions simultaneously. The resulting sound is distributed across the audio array, steered in mutual coercion by the machine and the performer.

More info TBA

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door