MAXlive 2021 Presents THE NEUROVERSE in November

MAX (Media Art Xploration) presents MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE, the organization's first New York City-based arts festival, produced in association with New York Live Arts. THE NEUROVERSE teams artists with scientists that push the limits of mind and machine through groundbreaking interdisciplinary works. Amid an explosion of new intelligences, technology opens the doors to exhilarating experiences and functions, reorienting our perceptions of consciousness and the wiring that activates it. But smart machines can also pose an existential threat to our species and life as we know it. Will the good or evil uses of these technologies win? THE NEUROVERSE explores both sides, as new artistic forms emerge within innovative reflections on existence-and its curious state on a planet where climate change renders life ever more fragile while technology expands it into new dimensions.

THE NEUROVERSE-featuring work from Boys and Girls Club of Rosebud, Andy Bragen & Daniel Fish, Stephanie Dinkins, Gershon Dublon & Xin Liu (slow immediate), Grayson Earle, Annie Lewandowski & Kyle McDonald, Ethan Lipton & Leigh Silverman, Heidi Boisvert & Kat Mustatea, NUUM Collective with choreography by NiNi Dongnier, and Philipp Schmitt-will take place November 5-7 at New York Live Arts, New Inc's ONX Studio for Extended Reality, and the Invisible Dog Art Center. On November 7, MAX presents MAXforum: Day of the Future, gathering thought leaders-including acclaimed algorithmic theater visionary Annie Dorsen as keynote speaker and science writer Anne Murphy Paul, as well as many artists featured in THE NEUROVERSE-in discussion of and expansion on the festival's core themes.

In THE NEUROVERSE, theater, dance, audiovisual installation, and lectures meld with the very technologies they consider in immersive, mind-bending works and experiences-allowing us to hear whales like we have never heard them before; to tour the globe as we fall asleep. On the flip-side, the festival programming grapples with the implications of the dawn of autonomous weaponry; of automation's replacement of human workers and human identity. Embedded in the very creation of these hybrid works is the alluring potential of breakthrough and the possibility of error. THE NEUROVERSE offers a roller coaster ride through the promise and peril of machine learning.

MAX is a nonprofit organization working with artists and scientists to create live arts that both interrogate and exploit the scientific missions of our time. The organization brings THE NEUROVERSE to New York following its first biennial arts festival, MAXlive 2019: A Space Festival, which, for San Francisco audiences, explored our new space age, the extraordinary scientific advances in this field, and how they change the way we see ourselves and Earth. As performance reemerges as an opportunity for gathering in-person, the MAXlive festival further embraces the potentials of technology to give new meaning and form to what can be done artistically in physical, and virtual, space.

MAX Artistic Director Kay Matschullat says of THE NEUROVERSE, "There's so much possibility in what machines give us, including an extended sense of humanity and greater communication with the more- than-human on this planet who can hopefully help us save it. The question isn't whether AI is fundamentally good or bad; what will determine the future of human existence is, rather, how we choose to use it. As Jacob wrestles the angel to the ground, will we wrangle smart machines to be our engines, or will they suffocate and subsume us? These questions-along with the pure drama of, 'will the technology work?'-are folded into the making of works in this festival."

MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE Consulting Producer Adaora Udoji says, "There's currently not much in the way of centralized experiences of artistic uses of these technologies: you can go to SXSW, you can go to Sundance, you can go to Cannes, and these are all critically important venues and distribution points, but MAX's work comes simultaneously out of art and technology from the ground up, solely focused on exploring this nexus in culture. MAX wants the broadest audiences to be asking questions about what media, art, and technology mean and how they impact our lives. People will be seeing a lot of these combinations of new technological tools for expression for the first time. And that's what MAX is affording you: it truly is a window into what's available to us today."

Tickets for MAXlive 2021: THE NEUROVERSE go on sale Thursday, September 30 at mediaartexploration.org.