Telematic Workshops
A six-part online gathering for experimental music and media arts communities
Hosted by: Randall Packer
Thursdays 4—5PM ET, Oct 15 through Nov 19
ABOUT THE Series
Telematic Workshops is a six-part online gathering for artists, musicians, performers, researchers, and curious audiences who want to rethink what live art can become when collaborators perform across the network.
These free one-hour sessions bring internationally recognized practitioners into conversation with Washington, DC’s experimental music and media arts communities, connecting that exchange to participants worldwide.
Whether you already work online, create experimental media or electronic music, or are just curious about the telematic arts, the Telematic Workshops offer a place to meet, discuss, test ideas, and imagine new forms of networked live performance.
Dramaturgy of the Machine: Dialogues on the Telematic Stage
Randall Packer & Salma Orenda • October 15, 4PM ET
Zakros InterArts’ Artistic Director Randall Packer together with AI Dramaturg and Computational Artist Salma Orenda invite the audience into their ongoing dialogue across theater, telematics, experimental media, and the avant-garde. Through demonstration, provocation, and performative exchange, they reveal a collaborative process in which human and machine intelligence question, challenge, and reshape one another. The browser becomes a stage and the network a charged theatrical architecture, opening new forms of agency, intimacy, friction, and creative entanglement among artist, artificial intelligence, and public.
Network Time: Latency, Synchronization, and Rhythmic Relation
Chris Chafe • October 22, 4PM ET
Composer, improviser, cellist, and Stanford University CCRMA director Chris Chafe has helped make real-time musical collaboration over the internet both a research field and a concert practice. His work with JackTrip and his studies of latency show that delay is not merely a technical obstacle: it changes tempo, anticipation, groove, and the felt relationship between players. Chafe will make network time audible, exploring how musicians sense and adapt to delay, when synchrony begins to fracture, and how rhythm can be reimagined as a relation between bodies, acoustics, and transmission paths.
Improvisatory Collaboration Across Networks
Michael Dessen • October 29, 4PM ET
Composer-improviser and trombonist Michael Dessen creates highly interactive music shaped by experimental jazz traditions, intermedia practice, and sustained telematic collaboration. At the University of California, Irvine, he co-founded the Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology program; through projects including Puentes Telemáticos, he has connected young musicians across California and Colombia. This workshop treats improvising online as more than overcoming delay: it is a practice of close listening, shared risk, cultural exchange, and collective form-making across disparate locations, technologies, and musical histories.
Sculpting Sonic Space Across the Network
Stephen Kent • November 5, 4PM ET
Didgeridoo artist and composer Stephen Kent brings the resonant voice of the didgeridoo—a traditional wind instrument from Indigenous Australian culture—into the Telematic Theater for an exploration of acoustical immersion across the network. Performing remotely from San Francisco with the Zakros studio in Washington, DC, Kent will use the instrument’s sustained drones, harmonics, rhythms, and overtones as material for sculpting a shared sonic environment in binaural spatial audio. Sculpting Sonic Space Across the Network will explore how networked performance can transform sound into spatial experience, shaping distance, resonance, movement, and presence between geographically separated sites.
Network Interaction: Tele-immersion, Intimacy, and Spatialization
Patrick Müller & Benjamin Burger • November 12, 4PM ET
Patrick Müller and Benjamin Burger have worked together at the Zurich University of the Arts to investigate telematic performance as a coupling of distinct physical spaces, not an imitation of a single conventional stage. Müller brings a background in contemporary music, transdisciplinary research, spatial audio, and telemersive systems; Burger brings direction, performance, design, game culture, and experimental theater. Their workshop reframes networked space as artistic choices: how performer and audience can engage telematically with delay, spatial discontinuity, projected bodies, volumetric images, and intimacy.
Performing Together Across Distance: The Work of Annie Abrahams
Katia Krupennikova • November 19, 4PM ET
Katia Krupennikova approaches telematic art through the curatorial lens of relation, care, and historical memory. The Amsterdam-based curator, educator, and researcher is preparing the first Dutch retrospective of Annie Abrahams, whose three decades of internet-based performance have made glitches, interruptions, silence, emotion, and vulnerability central to the work. This closing session considers Abrahams’s network as a lived social space—an “aesthetics of trust and attention”—and asks what it takes to remain genuinely present with others when bodies, languages, and signals do not fully align.