Why Whisper Series / Machine Memory Then Sound Clouds

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 03
MACHINE MEMORY THEN SOUND CLOUDS
with Rafael Zen, Khalil Alomar, Kaila Bhullar, and Stevan Oostenbrug

Thursday, August 13, 2026 / 8:00 PM / at What Lab

The third event in our series invites audiences to an evening that puts cinema, experimental music, and audiovisual improvisation in dialogue, presenting a multimedia nickelodeon cinema experience through video art and live experimental composition.

Throughout the evening, the ensemble performs original improvised scores for three video artworks investigating machine memory, information overload, and the politics of the cyborg body.

Working in duos, artists employ synthesizers, digital media systems, voice, sampling, feedback processes, and analog sound makers to create live compositions that respond directly to the images unfolding on screen.

We ask: How do technologies remember, forget, and reshape our experience of being human?

Through real-time collaboration between sound and image, the artists explore how memory is stored, fragmented, and transmitted across bodies, machines, and networks.

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.

Stevan Oostenbrug is a queer interdisciplinary artist, songwriter, and event organizer based in Vancouver, the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Stevan explores media including instrument building, mono-prints, fibre arts, and sculpture. His artistic practice touches on navigating relationships with mental illness, the interaction of humans and more-than-humans, gentleness, and collective action. Stevan creates lyric driven indie-folk music and sound work with a focus on curiosity and interconnection between the individual, their community, and their environment. His sonic material emerges alongside Stevan’s intrinsic knowledge of harmony from church-going as a child, his curiosity for sound created from physical materials, and his deep need to connect authentically. Stevan has performed at the 2023 and 2024 West Coast Composer Symposiums, participated in SFU’s student music and sound compilations, and SFU’s School of Contemporary Art’s Music and Sound Festivals.

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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