Performing An Archive

Through motion capture, immersive sound, and real-time digital systems, CHARI perform alongside Harriet, a life-scale avatar carrying a living archive of Black sonic and vernacular memory. Drawing from Black archival traditions rooted in call-and-response, improvisation, and communal stewardship, the performance understands memory as relational and alive. Together our movements shape the environment as the performance unfolds. Images shift, sound expands, and memory surfaces in fragments.

Performing An Archive turns the stage into a threshold between body and code, memory and possibility. It imagines a future where technology is not distant or extractive, but intimate, attentive, and alive.

Event Specifics:

• The event will be held in the DARC Lab (black box) in the Digital Arts Research Center on the first floor, just inside the front entrance.
• Parking available through ParkMobile just outside of the building.
• Doors will open at 7pm, and the show will start at 7:30pm

Artist Bio:

CHARI is an NY Emmy Nominated interdisciplinary artist working across performance, sound, and installation whose research centers Black archival practice as a form of technology. Their work investigates how memory circulates outside institutional systems through oral histories, sonic artifacts, and embodied knowledge, while exploring possibilities for new archival forms.

This event was made possible through support from The Center for Cultural Innovation and the UC Santa Cruz Arts Division.

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