Jason Zeh
Ancient Futures
Our May Elastro features visiting audio/visual artist Jason Zeh, a new duo Ancient Futures that includes Scott Rubin and QūJié, and HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG.
Zeh’s current body of work involves the creation of realtime, performable, video objects built from lidar scans resulting in visceral, synthetic, minerals, and ritual actions. The work addresses questions about intimacy, the body, and the environmentally catastrophic processes of resource extraction that are necessary for the continuation of a technologically advanced civilization. Their work blends influences from long-time involvement in the underground, experimental music, noise, and sound art scenes with performance and realtime, generative, media. Zeh’s work grapples with the scraps at the edge of meaning: the noise and errors that are in the margins of any message.
Ancient Futures is the new project of Chicago artists QūJié and Scott Rubin. This work investigates clay-shaping as performance. Humanity has been creating ceramics for over 10,000 years, forging complex lineages of values, beliefs, and social structures that continue to document ordinary life. As the saying goes, clay remembers everything. The artists transform a pottery wheel into an electroacoustic audio-visual experience. Using a collection of modern and historical tools, the artists blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual; past, present, and future; calling into question our engagements with modernity, and how we hide from it.
HUMACHINE UNLEARN67NG is an audiovisual performance exploring potential timelines through nostalgia, retrofuturism, glitch, and machine feedback. Through analog and digital signal flow, the work treats glitch as a time-traveling method, allowing fractured images, unstable sounds, and recursive media systems to open memories, unrealized futures, and alternate potentialities.
Built as a real-time generative environment inside a game engine, the performance uses AI technology to create an infinite dialogue engine within a CRT feedback loop. Robot characters speak, respond, drift, and mutate through the system, while modular synthesizer and improvisation shape the room as a live collaboration between human performers, machines, and unstable media.
Together, the CRT, the game engine, AI dialogue, analog glitch, and live electronic sound become a shared temporal apparatus. Nostalgia is treated as more than a return to the past. It becomes a way to unlearn linear time and rehearse possible futures through broken signals, recursive feedback, and human-machine co-presence.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door
Artist Bios
Zeh holds an M.A. in English Literary and Textual Studies from Bowling Green State University, an M.F.A. in Expanded Media from The University of Kansas Visual Art Department and has toured extensively performing solo and collaborative works throughout the United States and abroad. Zeh has been an artist in residence at Signal Culture in Loveland Colorado, at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City Missouri, and at Extrapool in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Scott Rubin is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, composer, violist, and improviser whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His recent projects have involved collaborations with musicians and dancers, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensors, and live video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.
Qū Jié 曲洁 is a queer Chinese American interdisciplinary artist currently based in the homelands of the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations (Chicago, IL). Their work is rooted in exploring cultural identity formation within the Asian American diaspora. Through their practice of blending dance, ceramics, research, etc., they often visit themes such as inscrutability, alternative sensory worlds, and reparative knowing.
Omnia Sol
Omnia Sol is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and filmmaker working with nostalgia, media archaeology, and analog and digital glitch. Their work uses experimental image, sound, and time-based media to explore how technology shapes memory and perception.
In 2025, they founded Heavy Shell TV for CAN TV19, a glitch-art talk show and research archive for experimental media.
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Ian Kang
Ian Kang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago working with digital technology, human perception, and diasporic identity. His practice uses 3D animation, real-time audiovisual performance, experimental video, AI, and glitch to explore how technology reshapes memory, language, and cultural narratives.
By combining obsolete media, voice synthesis, analog noise, and real-time computation, his work creates temporal collisions between past and future tools. His practice imagines alternate forms of human-machine coexistence rooted in fragmentation, multiplicity, and shared agency.