New Museum presents DEMO2023

Extended Realities

ONX Studio

June 21-25, 2023

New York, NY, June 2023- The Dark Laboratory is pleased to present Coralline Frequencies: A Climate Coda, Part One 2023 by Tao Leigh Goffe part of a group exhibition featuring works by Matthew D. Gantt, JAZSALYN, New Art City, Antariksha Studio, Steven Reneau, Ina Chen and Calvin Sin, LaJuné McMiillian, and Lisa Jamhoury at ONX Studio in New York. The exhibition is the culmination of NEW INC’s 2022-2023 NYC-Based art, design, and technology incubator led by the New Museum. The artists focus on how human values are incorporated into tech as the boundaries between physical and digital worlds are becoming increasingly blurred. By exploring virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, the installation engages with the Metaverse and the ways in which we have come to extend and overextend ourselves online. Drawing on XR production, choreography, and performance, the exhibition represents how lived experience is mediated by computing.

Exhibition Dates: Wednesday, June 21- Sunday, June 25, 2023

Location: ONX Studio, Onassis Foundation Gallery, Lower Level, 645 Fifth Avenue, (Enter either on 51st or 52nd Street), New York, NY 10022

Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12:00pm – 7:00 pm

Performance by Ina Chen and Calvin Sin, Lisa Jamhoury, and LaJuné McMiillian: Friday, June 23, 7:00pm – 9:30pm

Exhibition Walk-through with artist Tao Leigh Goffe and Ben Mylius PhD (Columbia University): Friday 1:00pm – 2:00pm

Panel: Breathing Underwater: Coral Futurism and Transatlantic Witness, July 31 on Zoom. Visit www.darklaboratory.com for more information.

Coralline Frequencies: A Climate Coda, Part One 2023 encompasses Tao Leigh Goffe’s multi-media art practice that explores racial crisis as part of the climate crisis. The title of Goffe’s installation draws from the second chapter of her forthcoming book After Eden (Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK), 2024), which explores the regeneration of endangered corals through sound technologies. Celebrating the biodiversity of these marine invertebrate animals, the artist looks to corals as species that has witnessed transatlantic atrocities including the trade of enslaved Africans from 1526-1807. It has been determined that some species of living corals are as old as 500 years old.

Reflecting on the early voyages of Charles Darwin in 1834, Goffe remixes his research on coral reefs and volcanoes to tell a history of emancipation and extractivist geology. Corals were an impediment to colonialism, tearing into the hulls of ships attempting to dock on tropical islands. The artist explores the racializing regime of Asian indenture which followed the abolition of racial slavery in the British Empire (1834-1838). Traveling on the HMS Beagle (1831-1836) Darwin, wrote his first book entitled The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs during the age of emancipation. The budding geologist used surveys and maps from the East India Company to sail in quest of coral reefs to learn about how they connect with volcanos. Goffe asks what Darwin must have ignored on the high seas about race and exploitation, and how these experiences may have shaped his future research on evolution.

This marks Tao Leigh Goffe’s New York debut. Her work is also currently on display at the Institute of Jamaica, the Caribbean island’s natural history museum in Kingston. Bridging art, science, music, and technology, Coralline Frequencies comprises a unique and evolving mixed reality experience that envelops visitors within a new realm of physicality, visuality, and sound. The experience explores contrasts between individual and collective ways of being, and between non-human and human-made underwater architectures, drawing inspiration from the sea.

Visitors are invited to experience the installation using a VR headset, transporting them to a multi-sensory submarine gallery of coral experimentation. The ONX Studio fountain becomes part of the immersive experience, responding to local architectures of sound - St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Radio City Music Hall. An archive dedicated to corals forms a library of the past in full color. In the interior room, inside the gallery the future is represented in monotones, black and white, representing the bleaching of coral reefs as they lose life. Sound and how it shapes space is a key component, with a changing soundscape accompanying the experience. Goffe believes a call-and-response from the past to the future and the future to the past is necessary for climate solutions that won’t continue to betray the present.

As the climate crisis accelerates corals, which are found across the equator, are becoming increasingly endangered by rising sea levels, temperatures, and acidification. Goffe explores regenerative futurist technologies for underwater biodiversity by channeling the power of coral reefs. Using collage, spatial sound production, virtual reality, painting, and sculpture, Goffe creates an immersive and interactive experience as climate critique. Part one of an extended creative sonic practice of Black feminist futurist climate critique by the artist. With coral bleaching caused by hurricanes, cruise ships, luxury tourism, and ocean acidification. Using analog and digital sonic media components, a Black diasporic call-and-response from the future to the past is performed with sound as a temporal throughline. Coralline Frequencies tunes into the underwater frequencies of the vibrant biodiverse life forms we are losing due to the climate crisis. With exterior and interior elements in the gallery space, the virtual speculative environments, sculptures, and a retro-futuristic multimodal digital experience combine to form a commentary on the mono and stereo elements of soundsystems and DJ’ing as Black technologies of prophecy and time travel.

The installation includes virtual reality and augmented reality components to form a mixed reality XR experience. It can be accessed in multiple forms via desktop, mobile, and headset using the QR codes and links below.

Coralline Frequencies Instagram Filter

A flooded future, visualize the rising tide in your environment with this speculative filter for underwater imagining. Access here on mobile device and share your photo on social media using #CorallineFrequencies. Alternatively, search in Instagram filters for “Coralline.”

Coral Sound Clash - VR Futuristic Experience

The installation has developed as part of an art residency funded by Columbia University (2022-2024) on sonic narratives, climate imagination, and climate crisis. Tao Leigh Goffe is a writer, professor, interdisciplinary artist, and sound artist. She makes videos, sound sculptures, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way of critiquing overlapping European colonialisms and creating sonic kinship through technologies. Her works examine how metadata and other taxonomies function as colonial sorting tools attempting to segregate life.

Goffe was born in London, United Kingdom, raised in New York City and New Jersey, and lives and works in Manhattan. She teaches as a tenure-track assistant professor at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Yale University and her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. Goffe’s curatorial contributions have been made to exhibitions in venues including CCADI, Harlem and Pen and Brush, New York. She is the founder of the Dark Laboratory, an organization for research on climate, race, and creative technology. Goffe has given invited lectures on sound, technology, sexuality, and race at University of the West Indies, Yale University, Leiden University, University of Chicago, and the California College of the Arts.

About Dark Lab

Founded in the summer of 2020, the Dark Laboratory is a creative technology collective and design studio that research climate and race. Expanding a galaxy of projects on Black and Indigenous futures, the lab’s philosophy is inspired by the ethos of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark (1993). We imagine the Western hemisphere as a haunted house founded on stolen land and built through the labor of stolen lives. Theorists and storytellers center the study of race and ecologies, using immersive technologies, (VR, AR, sound design, films, video games) to produce solutions towards tackling climate crisis and racial injustice. The lab is part of the Year 9 cohort of NEW INC.

About NEW INC

As the first museum-led cultural incubator, NEW INC was conceived of as a not-for-profit platform for furthering the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas. Now in Year 9, NEW INC’s membership model continues to support a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing new creative projects and businesses. NEW INC is directed by Salome Asega and was cofounded by New Museum’s Toby Devan Lewis Director, Lisa Phillips and Deputy Director, Karen Wong in 2014.

About New Museum

The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.

ONX Studio is an XR accelerator for artists for artists, in partnership with the Onassis Foundation founded in 2020.

About DEMO2023

The New Museum’s cultural incubator NEW INC announced the full schedule for DEMO2023, a new, three-day festival presenting exhibitions, installations, performances, and talks by industry leaders and NEW INC members at the New Museum and partner venues across New York City. Running from June 21 to June 23, 2023, DEMO2023 will feature speakers and performers including Anicka Yi, Dong-Ping Wong, Eartheater, Hassan Rahim, WangShui, Embaci with Studio Junbi, Onyx Collective, M Lamar, Eileen Isagon Skyers, and Yemi Amu, and will spotlight innovative projects from twenty-five current NEW INC members, whose interdisciplinary work spans art, design, technology, and science. The complete schedule is available at demo2023.org.

Dark Lab extends special thanks to audiences of workshops at the “Sound Carries” symposium at University College London organized by Tariq Jazeel and Tom Western in June 2022 and participants at Columbia University in May 2023. Gratitude is also extended to NEW INC, EY Metaverse, the Society for the Humanities, Columbia University Climate School, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, Cassandra Press, Heather Hart, Alisa Petrosova, Ben Mylius, and Tao Leigh Goffe’s research assistant, Leanna Humphrey, and curatorial assistants Kendall Greene and Ariana White.