🗓️ Exhibition Dates: May 16 – August 23, 2026
🥂 Opening Reception: May 16, 2026, 2:30–4 PM
🌀 Performance by Qiujiang Levi Lu: May 16, 2 PM
🕕 Exhibition Hours: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM (Saturdays and Sundays)
📍 Location: Governors Island, Nolan Park, Harvestworks Building 10a
Outside Linear Time, an art and tech exhibition is the Spring 2026 exhibition programmed for the Harvestworks Art and Technology Program Building on Governors Island.
Outside Linear Time– is an exhibition of five artists who are exploring tactile landscapes where listening becomes a means of navigation, a re-structuring of one-self and of our systems of human and ecological resilience. Non-linear narratives explore materiality and physics, conditions of censorship and surveillance and epic tidal shifts. Selected by the Harvestworks arts committee and director emerita Carol Parkinson, the works employ mechanical sound recording and reproduction, video processing and stop motion imaging and sound objects presented through binaural and multichannel sound, video and audience activated artworks.
The exhibition features works by:
Itziar Barrio, Qiujiang Lu, Sara Stern, Seth Cluett, and Zorica Čolić
ARTWORKS
‘this meshwork of interwoven lines’ by Seth Cluett is a sound installation addressing addressing environmental collapse and ecological strain, Seth Cluett’s new installation, ‘this meshwork of interwoven lines’ presents silent and sounding works that collapse the landscape into layered juxtapositions, pointing up systems of resilience at work in the natural world that thrive despite the incursion of humanity.
“What then becomes of our concept of environment? Literally an environment is that which surrounds. For inhabitants, however, the environment does not consist of the surroundings of a bounded place but of a zone in which their several pathways are thoroughly entangled. In this zone of entanglement – this meshwork of interwoven lines – there are no insides or outsides, only openings and ways through.”
-Tim Ingold
Tapescape, 2026 by Qiujiang Levi Lu 卢秋江 Magnetic tape, acrylic panels, custom playback device, four-channel sound Tapescape is an interactive sound installation that reimagines magnetic tape as a spatial surface for composition. Rather than treating tape as a linear medium for fixed playback, Lu records and arranges sound on tapes across flat acrylic panels, allowing composition to exist as a field of directions, densities, and gestures distributed in space.
Visitors are invited to use a custom-built playback “pen” to draw across the surface of the work. By moving the pen perpendicular to each taped composition, they activate recorded sounds through a four-channel speaker system. As different paths are traced across the acrylic panels, sounds emerge, recede, and shift through the room, making each encounter distinct. Listening becomes an active process of searching, following, and orienting: rather than receiving a predetermined sequence, the audience uncovers the composition through touch, movement, spatial and embodied attention.
The work considers how sound might be composed and encountered outside of linear time. In Tapescape, recording becomes a tactile landscape and listening becomes a means of navigation.
The moment when you stop looking for them by Itziar Barrio is a cross-media installation including film, VR, and robotic sculptures. The animation and VR components present a speculative fiction dialogue-turned-flirtation between the philosopher Plato (c. 428–423 BC, died 348/347 BC) and the mathematician Euclid (fl. 300 BC) on reality, representation and form. It deploys Unity, Blender and other digital tools to explore materiality and physics with rendered objects. Original footage of Plato’s Academy in Athens, Orpheus’ cave in Lesbos, and the Aegean sea are mixed with a collaborative text generated using large language models and different materialities of corporate and non-corporate algorithms. Flushing, one of the robotic sculptures, is a choreography of materials, motors and inflation-disinflation movements using Arduino, concrete and oil slicks of Spandex. The moment when you stop looking for them reflects on our current state of technological “becoming” from a human de-centering point of view, and on how the past connects with the future.
Algorithms these days are everywhere- shaping our realities, jobs, and relationships. The moment when you stop looking for them is part of the new long term multimedia project by Itziar Barrio exploring the origin of algorithms and their influence on western logic, alongside poetry as a model of dissent.
“MARSH” by Sara Stern is an experimental stop motion animation filmed in a saltwater marsh in Provincetown, MA (a town at the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts with rich queer and artistic history). Over the course of a full tide cycle, the site transforms from a desert-like environment to a full ocean scape, and back again. “MARSH” responds to these epic tidal shifts and this site of constant change with improvised stop motion.
Throughout the video, fantastical characters perform and sing on behalf of the marsh, as if performing a fragmented ecological opera. Several of the puppets are made out of marsh materials, such as peat (the spongy, mud-like, partially decomposed matter that defines marshlands and is a major carbon-sinking force) and marsh hay (which is swept to the edges of the marsh with each high tide). The “MARSH” soundscape integrates field recordings of the marsh from above and below water, granular synth experimentation with samples of field recordings, theremin, and voice.
“MARSH” explores the marsh as a site where human activity is metabolized but never fully digested. (If there is a nuclear disaster on the other side of the planet, traces of nuclear material can be found in Provincetown’s marsh in the sedimentary layer from that year). An Ursula-inspired character sings “In the marsh, in the marsh, all their cruelty, we’re gonna eat it, eat it, eat it, eat it.” The marsh becomes a kind of mirror to human activity, which is a theme throughout the video: characters gaze upon themselves in mirrors, send mirrors out to sea, or find their reflections in the rising tide.
“A Voice and Nothing More” by Zorica Čolić is a binaural sound installation that examines the psychological effects of living under conditions of increased censorship and surveillance. It considers how the awareness of being watched or listened to reshapes perceptions of the self and the other, blurring distinctions between what is experienced, imagined, remembered, or repressed.
Structured around three loosely related narratives – Animal, Voice, and Dream – the work traces the inner thought processes of an individual negotiating feelings of safety, exposure, and threat. The installation responds to the space itself, including an existing hole in the ceiling. One narrative unfolds as a reflection on public and domestic safety, layered with anxiety about intrusion and culminating in the imagined aftermath of an animal falling through the ceiling. The second moves from a fear of speaking under censorship to questioning whose voices are heard, developing into a conflicted reflection on truth as both eroded and necessary. The third takes the form of a dream, oscillating between flight, the fear of capture and falling, and a sudden, disorienting sense of freedom. Reality, dream, and paranoia intermingle, opening the possibility of release or transcendence.
The script draws from literary sources, fables, political speeches, as well as philosophical and psychoanalytic discourse on truth, freedom, and otherness. Inspired in part by Franz Kafka’s short story The Burrow – an allegory of a creature obsessively securing its dwelling – the work explores the tension between the pursuit of safety and the inevitability of vulnerability. The title references Mladen Dolar’s book A Voice and Nothing More, which examines the complex role of the human voice in culture.
The installation includes sculptures from the series Partial Objects, such as Not Without a Hair on a Tongue, which draws on the Serbian idiom “to speak without a hair on one’s tongue,” meaning to speak directly and without restraint.
ARTISTS BIOS
Seth Cluett is a composer and artist whose quiet, patient music explores the territory between the senses, with a compelling attention to perception. His work is driven by themes of ecological collapse and resilience, often expressed through materials found in nature. Ranging from photography and drawing to installation, concert music, and critical writing, his “subtle… seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). His research interests and critical writings investigate embodiment, sound in virtual and augmented reality, the media history of the loudspeaker, and computational creativity. The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM. His concert work has been commissioned by ensembles ranging from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the International Contemporary Ensemble to So Percussion, Catch Guitar Quartet, and Clogs and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice, and Winds Measure recordings. From May 2017 to May 2026, Cluett served as Artist-in-Residence at Nokia Bell Labs and this fall will join the faculty of Contemporary Creative Practices faculty as Assistant Professor of Sound Media in the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon University.
Itziar Barrio is an interdisciplinary artist producing long-term research-based projects that involve different agents and collaborators. By rewriting the dominant narratives through which our societies, identities, and realities are constructed, her work opens up new futures. Barrio has been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship. Her survey exhibition was curated by Johanna Burton in 2018, and her monograph was published by SKIRA in 2023. Barrio’s work has been presented internationally at CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Salt Istanbul, ONX Onassis Foundation, e-flux, PARTICIPANT INC, MACRO, MACBA, Museo del Banco de la República, Belgrade’s Contemporary Art Museum, and Havana Biennial. She has received awards from Brooklyn Arts Council, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, New York Foundation for the Arts and Ministry of Culture of Spain. Barrio is a New Museum’s NEW INC alumni and she was a recipient of the Spanish Academy in Rome Fellowship (2018-19). She has participated in residencies including Harvestworks, Skowhegan and ISCP. Barrio’s work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ART PAPERS and BOMB. She has lectured internationally at Whitney’s ISP Program, New Museum, Yale, Hunter College and the New School. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Sarah Lawrence College in NY. She is a critic at NYU Steinhardt and Rhode Island School of Design, RISD (2025 – 2026).
Qiujiang Levi Lu 卢秋江 is an experimental musician, media artist, and composer whose work centers on the body as a site of sonic transformation. Through custom-built electroacoustic instruments, feedback systems, and live performance, Lu explores how sound can become intimate, unstable, and physically charged. Their practice often extends the body through cyborg-like augmentations, including intraoral microphone-speaker systems and amplified laptop instruments, creating performances that merge ritual, noise, and embodied technology.
Drawing from Chinese lineages while engaging themes of queerness, spirituality, and body dysmorphia, Lu creates choreographed, improvisatory works that invite audiences into a deeply physical mode of listening. Their work has been presented internationally at venues and festivals including MATA Festival, Send + Receive, High Zero, IRCAM Forum, Kallelse Festival, and e-flux. Lu has received commissions from TAK Ensemble, Popebama, Luke Helker, and Ensemble Decipher, and support from the EY Emergent Futures Fellowship and NEW INC. They have been artist-in-residence at The New School, ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks TIP, and ElektronmusikStudion Stockholm, and are a lecturer in music at the University of Pennsylvania. Lu holds degrees from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and Stony Brook University.
Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Her recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. Stern has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore). Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. In recent years, Stern has participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (Cherry Grove, Fire Island, NY), the Artist Residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (West Rutland, VT), the Harvestworks New Works Residency (New York, NY), and The Watermill Center Artist Residency Program (Water Mill, NY). Stern is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program on Governors Island.
Zorica Čolić is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Serbia and based in New York City. She uses video, sound, found materials, text, and installation, to explore the issues around the human body as a cultural symptom, examining how health and well-being intersect with politics, gender, sexuality, ideology, and the economy. Čolić was a resident artist at Harvestworks, Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, SOMA Summer (Mexico City), and Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred, NY), to name a few. She is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts.
Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including institutions in New York such as Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, Microscope Gallery, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Mama Projects, WhiteBox, and in Europe: Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (Germany), The Energy Museum of Santralistanbul (Turkey), Museum of Yugoslav History (Serbia), and more. In addition to her studio practice, she is engaged in research, teaching, and curating screenings. Recent projects include curating the screening program (Un)invited Collaborators at Anthology Film Archives and a presentation at the international conference Odorous Object: On the Materiality of Scent at Brown University.
The Harvestworks Art and Technology Program is funded in part by the New York City Dept of Cultural Affairs, The New York State Council on the Arts, mediaThe foundation Inc, Cycling 74 and Friends of Harvestworks. www.harvestworks.org
ABOUT HARVESTWORKS: Founded in 1977, Harvestworks offers an environment where artists can make work inspired and achieved by electronic media. Harvestworks helps the community at large to understand, assimilate, and make creative use of new and evolving technologies. Harvestworks creates a context for the appreciation of new work, advances both the art community and the public’s agenda for the use of technology in art; and brings together innovative practitioners from all branches of the arts by fostering collaborations across electronic media.