Why Whisper Series / Feedback Collapse Zone

WHY WHISPER SUMMER SERIES
at What Lab

Why Whisper Summer Series at What Lab presents collaborations between media artists and experimental musicians through one-night-only multimedia installations and live sound art performances.

Inspired by themes of broken data, miscommunication, information glitches, noise, and overload, each event explores experimental approaches to sound, performance, and new media composition.

EVENT 02
FEEDBACK COLLAPSE ZONE
with Rafael Zen, Khalil Alomar, Kaila Bhullar, and Shervin Zarkalam

Thursday, July 23, 2026 / 8:00 PM / at What Lab

The second event in our series is an evening of experimental electronic performance, video art, and open improvisation that explores the unstable territories between signal and noise, communication and collapse, memory and technological decay.

Centered around an installation of CRT televisions displaying video artworks, the event transforms the gallery into a fragmented media environment where flickering images, analog artifacts, and digital distortions coexist.

Throughout the evening, artists engage in open improvisation using electronic instruments, digital media systems, glitch processes, feedback networks, sound collage, and noise-based practices.

We ask: What emerges from the ruins of digital communication? Can broken signals reveal other realities and other futurities?

Through collective experimentation and live improvisation, the artists investigate how obsolete technologies, corrupted data, and disrupted transmissions can become sites for imagination, speculation, and alternative modes of perception.

The event will also present an opening manifesto by Indigenous sound artist Toni-Leah C. Yake.

This project was supported by the British Columbia Arts Council.

We thank our community partners: What Lab, Vivo Media Arts and Unit/Pitt.

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Admission is free.

RSVP is recommended.

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Accessibility

What Lab is located in East Vancouver and is accessible by public transit. All-gender washrooms are available on site. The main entrance includes a staircase; audience members with mobility needs may access the venue through the rear entrance from the alley.

Please note that this performance may include loud sounds, amplified audio, and flashing lights.

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MEET THE ARTISTS

Rafael Zen (MA in Contemporary Arts) is a queer Brazilian-Canadian multimedia performer and experimental new media composer working across performance, sound theatre, video, installation, coding, and wearable technologies. Their practice develops cyborg performances that merge body, sound, and digital systems, using glitch and fragmentation as critical strategies. Through live and collaborative work, they build immersive sonic environments engaging labour, burnout, coloniality, and identity under technological mediation. Zen’s work moves between stage, screen, and installation, combining experimental composition, spoken word, and interactive systems. Performance is framed as a site of rupture where sound becomes embodied expression and infrastructural critique. Recent collaborators include the Vancouver Biennale, BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Western Front Gallery, Kokoro Dance Society, and Theatre Replacement.

Khalil Alomar is a queer Lebanese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist working across sound art, multimedia performance, and multichannel installation to create immersive, participatory environments that merge analog circuitry, digital systems, and speculative storytelling. Their practice engages themes of race, queerness, ecology, and technology, questioning how relation, orientation, and multiplicity shape lived experience. Through an anti-colonial lens, they critique extractive logics of colonial capitalism and instead propose alternative modes of being grounded in refusal, care, and imagination. Their work explores encounters between human, non-human, and technological systems, focusing on moments of connection, dissonance, and transformation. Collaboration is central to their process, enabling collective improvisation where material and relation co-emerge, producing works that imagine tender, livable, and just futures.

Kaila Bhullar (she/they) is a queer Indo-Chilean media artist, designer, and technician based on unceded Coast Salish territories. Working with experimental sound, immersive installation, and moving image, Bhullar explores techno-organic systems and post-human aesthetics. They hold a BFA from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts and are completing a Sound Design diploma at Vancouver Film School. Bhullar has worked with Lobe Studio, What Lab, and Red Gate, among others. Their layered media practice blends analog and digital textures in installations, performances, and spatial sound, with a strong focus on collaborative, immersive, and speculative environments.

Shervin Zarkalam is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist, dramaturg, and performer based on unceded Coast Salish lands. With an MFA from Simon Fraser University and a BFA from the University of Tehran, Shervin’s work blends lecture performance, dance dramaturgy, analog sound/video, and meta-theater. His thesis Soft Machines explored Persian identity, death, and humor through performance and philosophy. Drawing from Deleuze, Fiadeiro, and Bel, Shervin deconstructs narrative forms with real-time composition and critical play. Collaborations emphasize collective improvisation and formal disruption. Language becomes both meaning and misdirection in works like Rainbow Glaze Tile, cultivating performance spaces that are philosophical, irreverent, and politically charged.

Toni-Leah C. Yake (European; Kanien’kehá:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) is a composer-performer and media artist working on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. Her practice explores land, memory, dreaming, world-building, and embodied response through sound art, performance, moving image, installation, and social practices. Informed by dream interpretation, Kanien’kehá:ka epistemology, and the interplay between conscious and unconscious realms, Yake works within liminal spaces using archival recordings, synthesis, and noise. She is the recipient of the Southam Prize for Music, the First Peoples’ Cultural Council Individual Artist Award, and the SFSS Undergraduate Award for Indigenous Students. Her work has been published in BC Studies: The British Columbian Quarterly (Sound Works, University of British Columbia) and Canadian Theatre Review (Toronto Press). Her work and collaborations have been presented at the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Vancouver Biennial, and Polygon Gallery. She is currently the Core Artist with The Only Animal Theatre Company.

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