¡Harken! by Modesto Flako Jimenez

Saturday, January 17 @ 3 PM (Salon at 4 PM)
Saturday, January 17 @ 6 PM (Salon at 4 PM)
Sunday, January 18 @ 12 PM (Salon at 1 PM)
Sunday, January 18 @ 4 PM (Salon at 1 PM)

Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, Floor 4, New York, NY, 10013.

50 minutes

¡Harken! is a transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of his­to­ry written about Juan Rodriguez, a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In ¡Harken! Juan Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations and distortions based on secondhand accounts written by colonizers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, ¡Harken! Audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information, generating new images and landscapes.

As part of the salon series Collaboration as Resistance, join Modesto Flako Jimenez for a salon-style conversation among collaborators and the audience to explore all the layers of collaboration nestled in ¡Harken!, between Juan and the Dutch, Juan and historians, Flako and Juan, Flako, Juan, and AI. Are we excavating a lost truth, returning to a myth or finding a new horizon with the added tool of “intelligent” technology?

Modesto “Flako” Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised, multi-hyphenate artist. As a poet, playwright, educator, actor, producer, and director, his work exists in and explores the intersections of identity, language, mediums, cultures, and communities found in his personal life and beyond. Jimenez’s recent work includes Taxilandia, a site-specific performance in a moving taxi that received a Critic’s Pick from Time Out New York and The New York Times and was recently recognized with an Obie Special Citation Award. Jimenez is the founder of ¡Oye! Group, a nonprofit that serves as an incubator for artists, both native and immigrant to New York City. Jimenez is addressing gun violence as a Public Artist in Residence at NYC Health + Hospitals as part of the NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs’ PAIR program in 2023. Jimenez has been selected as a Princeton Hodder Fellow for 2023-2024. In 2021, Jimenez received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in performing arts and theater. Jimenez received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. Currently, Jimenez is working on Mercedes, a multi-disciplinary art experience exploring the relationships between matriarchy and ancestors, familial bonds and inherited trauma, and how our own identity can impact our mental health.

Ker Chen is a multimedia artist who signals through creating virtual worlds and producing live experiences. Ker explores myths, fortune-telling, and AI algorithms to capture data points from the future and validate the present. Concerned with the simulation of sensations by endogenous chemicals, Ker strives to find elements of control within the invisible and chaotic aspects of existence, looking inward to the body, outward to the surrounding environment, and beyond to the external world.

Megan Lang has designed lighting at BAM, La Mama, Abrons Arts Center, EST, Under St. Mark’s, the Wild Project, Dixon Place, 59E59, JACK, and Atlantic Stage 2, among others. Recent designs include Help Me Draw Your Feelings (Brick Aux, dir. William Burke+Bryn Herdrich), Now Go and Act Accordingly (Target Margin Theater, dir. David Herskovits), and annually the Ubumuntu Arts Festival in Rwanda. Assistant/associate special effects work on Broadway includes Sting’s The Last Ship, Paradise Square, and Beetlejuice. Learn more at meganlangld.com.

Kay Matschullat originates, produces and directs performances around the globe. She has directed premieres of plays by Nobel prize-winning Caribbean playwright Derek Walcott, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Ariel Dorfman, and Playwright President Vaclav Havel. Other credits include Threepenny Opera, Carson McCullers’ Talks About Love, (nominated for a Drama Desk Award), off-Broadway with composer Duncan Sheik, Echoes of A Thousand Hills with Masharika Theater in Rwanda, Pantomime, Dimetos, and Widows at Williamstown Theater, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Skin of Our Teeth. Since founding MAXlive, she has produced the multi-venue biennial festivals MAXlive 2019: A Space Festival, the inaugural MAXlive festival in San Francisco creating collaborations between scientists and performers, MAXlive 2021: The Neuroverse, pushing the limits of intelligence and investigating applications of AI in performance, and MAXlive 2023: Where Is My Body – dance music and immersive performance exploring the changing nature of embodiment. Partners include Carnegie Hall, The Exploratorium, MASS MoCA, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, The Museum of Science (Boston), California Academy of Science, and Highland Center for the Arts.

Henry Pedersen is an environmental scenic designer and fabricator based in NYC. Most recently, he designed Flako’s Mercedes, Pt. 1 at BAM. Henry is excited to explore this next production with him. Henry also contributes to events at David Stark Design & Production and as a prop stylist on campaign photoshoots. Previous credits include Bacardi Bar installation for the 2024 VMAs, Power Play in the Park with ASU & Phoenix Children’s Hospital. He also designed multiple productions at the University of Michigan, where he earned his B.F.A. in Theatre Design & Production.

Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, Floor 4, New York, NY, 10013.

By Subway: N/Q/R/W to Canal Street; J/Z to Canal Street; 6 to Canal Street.

Visitors can enter the building at 390 Broadway through the street-level entrance. A wheelchair-accessible ramp is available at the entrance for easy access. Once inside, an elevator services all floors, including the third floor where Onassis ONX is located. ADA-compliant restrooms with ramp access are available onsite. Service animals are welcome at Onassis ONX. Please notify an Onassis ONX employee and ensure that service animals are appropriately trained and remain under control at all times. For questions or to request additional accommodations, please contact [email protected], with subject line ADA Access, at least 72 hours before your visit.

Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform dedicated to elevating innovative creators in the development, presentation, and distribution of new media artworks and immersive experiences. It provides artists and teams with capacity-building programs, incubation and applied research initiatives, acceleration services, seed funding, exhibition opportunities, fellowships, and partnership-driven collaborations through its hubs in Athens and New York City. This holistic engagement throughout the creative process enables artists to build worlds at the frontiers of AI, immersive, spatial computing, gaming, and other emergent time-based media. Onassis ONX provides a stage for creatives to imagine new futures by questioning the systems through which culture is produced, circulated, and remembered, actively fostering new forms of creative expression to meaningfully engage with audiences around the world.

For over two decades, the Under the Radar Theater Festival has brought bold, risk-taking work to New York City, celebrating groundbreaking theater and performance from around the world and just down the street. Produced in collaboration with dozens of venues at a selection of historic and emerging theaters across New York City, the festival showcases innovative multidisciplinary artists whose work speaks powerfully to the present moment. Under the Radar’s influence sets a cultural standard that resonates through the artistic landscape far further and beyond our January schedule. In coordination with Festival founder and Director Mark Russell, Producers Thomas O. Kriegsmann and Sami Pyne of ArKtype, and with the addition of this year’s highly-esteemed Co-Creative Directors Meropi Peponides and Kaneza Schaal, UTR is positioned to continue to capitalize on the Festival’s rich history and expand on a tradition of trailblazing new direction. The 21st edition of UTR will run from January 7-25, 2026 presenting over 32 productions at various partner organizations across the city.

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