Performance: Passenger Seat

Passenger Seat is an outdoor immersive sound performance in which six cars with their doors open become a single instrument, surrounding the audience with a spatial composition. Based on a science fiction narrative Johannes Barfield has been developing over the past six years through a graphic novel currently in development, art installations, and public interventions, the story follows Pilot Coaltrain as she survives a stampede, nearly drowns, and fights to return precious artifacts. The sound piece is composed of performances by voice actors, friends, and family; field recordings of natural and urban environments; original piano compositions; and computer-processed sounds by Johannes Barfield.

The piece focuses on listening as a shared, spatial experience. It invites people to gather, move, and experience sound together, while also allowing for individual perspectives within the same environment.

Johannes Barfield is an American visual and sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans installation, video, photography, collage, sculpture, spatial audio, music, and speculative storytelling. His work explores childhood memory, wonder, and imagined futures through narratives that unfold across multiple mediums. Born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Barfield earned his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He is currently developing Pilot Coaltrain, an expansive science fiction narrative that unfolds through sound, sculpture, installation, and a graphic novel.

The Parallel Play Symposium, presented as part of the six-week Collective Futures festival, is a two-day gathering of artists, scholars, organizers, and cultural workers exploring the practices, histories, and conditions that sustain collective cultural production. Through free panels, workshops, and performative presentations, participants will examine the cultural significance of collective art-making and artist-run spaces while sharing strategies for building and maintaining collaborative cultural infrastructures.

Organized around thematic tracks—including How To: Collective Tools & Tactics, Relational Infrastructures, Precarious Solidarities, “Have You Seen the ___?”: Memory and Collective Spaces, and Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement—the symposium will feature workshops, panels, performances, and conversations presented by ATUOMAT Collective, Luster Gallery + Studio, Obvious Agency, Vox Populi, Termite TV Collective, All Mutable, FORTUNE, FJORD, Big Ramp, Da Vinci Art Alliance, cinéSPEAK, Practice Gallery, and many other collaborators.

Registration is required for each session.