Philipp Schmitt and Anina Rubin's I AM SITTING IN A HIGH-DIMENSIONAL ROOM to Premiere in October

AX (Media Art Xploration), a nonprofit organization working with artists and scientists to create live arts exploiting the scientific and technological innovations of our time, partners with 1014 Inc. to present the premiere of Philipp Schmitt and Anina Rubin's timely I Am Sitting in a High-Dimensional Room. The narrated sound simulation, which kicks off MAX's Fall 2020 season, is based on American composer Alvin Lucier's seminal work I Am Sitting in a Room andtakes the listener into a virtual space extending in many more than three dimensions.

I Am Sitting in a High-Dimensional Room premieres Thursday, October 1, at 6pm EST, beginning with an introductory reading by writer, critic, and artist Habib William Kherbek. (Total running time, including the introduction, is approximately 45 minutes.) Admission is free to those who register in advance at Eventbrite. The work remains online through November 15.

In I Am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier explored the acoustic properties of three-dimensional, physical space by tape-recording a spoken text in a room. He then played the recording back into the room and recorded again, and again, repeating the cycle until only the natural resonant frequencies of the room remain, articulated by speech.

In I Am Sitting in a High-Dimensional Room, a 1014 Inc. commission, the artists leave the physical world behind. Narrated by a neural-network-synthesized voice and performed in a high-dimensional room simulation by Dr. Felipe Orduña Bustamante, the piece offers a sonic experience of an invisible, unimaginable space. As high-dimensional, mathematical spaces underpin, for example, artificially intelligent neural networks, the work alludes to dematerialization and abstraction in contemporary science and technology, as well as the virtualization of culture during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I Am Sitting in a High-Dimensional Room is part of MAX's MAXvirtual initiative, launched this spring to present online works. MAXvirtual reflects the mission of the young organization, whose first year of programming, in 2019, brought together over 100 artists and scientists in venues including Carnegie Hall, The Exploratorium, and the Norton Museum of Art to collapse the bifurcated worlds of art and technology. MAX activates science's ability to inform and expand art, and emphasizes art's ability to humanize and unpack the rapid advancements altering the fundamentals of everyday existence.

MAX's fall season and MAXvirtual program continue with two immersive theater works. The participatory Read Subtitles Aloud, from artists Onur Karaoglu and Sister Sylvester, makes each audience member the main character in a story about a theater company trying to reinvent itself in the face of the distance created and perpetuated by the pandemic. This new MAX production features art direction by Tony Award-winner Christine Jones and set and costume curation by Zoë Hurwitz. The story unfolds over the course of daily episodes that go online November 10 through November 22. ELIXIR: The Funnel, by interdisciplinary artist Mar Hwa Wei, takes a look at the C-level internal workings of Elixir, an AI tech startup, in its journey to secure beta users for their AI clone algorithm. The premiere, on December 9, invites audiences to join Elixir execs for a 30-minute live webinar on digital immortality, followed by a unique virtual after-party.

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