CLEAT Series: BARAS + Jared Kelley 'Irrational Machines'

Name: CLEAT Series: BARAS + Jared Kelley 'Irrational Machines'
Start: 2026-06-10T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Elastic Arts

Schedule

Wed, 10 Jun, 2026 at 08:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Elastic Arts | Chicago, IL

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.
Inside Human, an immersive dance performance, was created through the collaboration of choreographer and dancer Vasiliki Bara and composer Konstantinos Baras. Guided by the idea that every person carries a creature within them, the performance constructs bodies that oscillate between human and non-human forms. Skin merges with skin, bodily boundaries dissolve, and familiar gestures become strange and uncanny.
VisionProtocol, performed by Jenna Lyle, examines the tension between programmed behavior and the desire to escape existing systems. The piece uses the repetition of commands and mechanical processes to create a space where routine, obedience, and psychological entrapment coexist. An uncanny atmosphere emerges as the boundaries between human and machine are blurred.