Bergsonist: As If Reality?

June 11, 2022

3:00pm

Harvestworks Art and Technology Program

Nolan Park, Building 10a
Governor’s Island, NYC

ISSUE & Harvestworks are pleased to present two new works from multi-disciplinary artist, musician, designer and 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Selwa Abd (Bergsonist). The June 10th program features the premiere of a new video work streamed on the ISSUE website. The June 11th program is an outdoor performance and soundscape taking place within Harvestworks’ Art and Technology Program at Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island.

Selwa Abd’s residency at ISSUE is supported by Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program for artists (TIP) and is part of an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.

“This presentation is a work-in-progress that reference David Chalmers book “Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy,” and follow a creative approach based on intuition & fragment-based systems. According to Chalmers, as the physical world degrades, virtual worlds will provide us with new landscapes and new possibilities. Selwa’s new works are interested in building worlds (sonic & visual) as simulations set up for extending creative research and speculations on the future that awaits us. Selwa has noted that “I’ve always been working in fragments, whether in design or music,” and her work often delves into a prolific archive of hours of sonic and visual exploration. Often working with micro-drafts that become essential toward assembling later works, Selwa focuses on a conceptual use of fragments and intuition as ways of altering scales of perception and further understanding sonic and visual mediums. These fragments are explorations scaled within the tensions between the actual/virtual that have become a signature of the “Bergsonist” project.“

Issue Project Room

Selwa Abd (Bergsonist)

Selwa Abd is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician & designer living in NYC (originally from Morocco, North Africa). Under the guise of Bergsonist, she uses a variety of media to investigate social resonance through divergent conceptual aesthetics (minimalism and musique concrète to name a few). Through her work, she explores notions of identity, memory, and social politics.