2026 Artists in Residence
Harvestworks is excited to announce the 2026 AIR recipients. These artists have been commissioned to develop innovative projects in the Harvestworks TEAM (Technology, Engineering, Art, and Music) Lab. This year’s selections were made by a jury including Salome Asega (Director of NEW INC), Elliott Sharp (composer, performer, and author), Tommy Martinez (artist, programmer, and professor at NYU), and Ivana Dama, Interim Director of Harvestworks.
Awarded Artists:
Victoria Shen
Evicshen is a sound performance alias by Victoria Shen who manipulates records and materials of all kinds. Her sounds oscillate between moments of restraint and swells of frenetic and confrontational movement. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls ‘chaotic sound’ to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning. Her personal identity, her body, is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration of meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass-produced, the practical and the absurd.
Associated project: Iron-rich Tattoo Ink
During the residency at Harvestworks, Victoria Shen will develop an iron-rich tattoo ink that functions as magnetic audio tape, enabling sound to be written, read, and erased from magnetized pigment embedded in the skin using tape heads.
Kabir Carter
Kabir Carter has performed with and installed work within a variety of sites and environments including bodies of water, parks, industrial sites, theaters, art exhibition spaces, walkways, passages, staircases, and elevators. His research interests include dance, popular and experimental music, architectural acoustics, affective potentialities of sound-in-space, and histories of infrastructure.
Carter’s work has been presented and exhibited at Diapason Gallery, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen; HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Inter Arts Center, Malmö; Human Resources, Los Angeles; ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn; Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde; Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Pageant, Brooklyn; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. He has participated in Bergen Assembly, CTM (club transmediale), Festival Bonn Hoeren, Full Pull, Performa Biennial, Sonic Acts Festival, Tuned City Brussels, and Unsound Festival New York. He has been a Danish Arts Council DIVA Programme awardee; a fellow at Hochschule Für Bildende Kunste Braunschweig; and a resident at LMCC Workspace Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Associated project: Sound Post-Mortem Installation
During the residency at Harvestworks, Kabir Carter will distill and repurpose his performance-based sound methods into a “sound postmortem” installation for one or more spaces. Using a wide range of analog and digital tools, he will record, reproduce, estimate, and augment sounds from past performances, combining conventional and unorthodox spatial audio technologies in multi-speaker configurations. The project explores liveness and intimacy as overlapping, contingent experiences, opening new possibilities for expanded listening.
Nat Decker
Nat Decker is a Los Angeles-based artist working across digital media, sculpture, and performance. Disability is the lens through which they explore embodiment, virtuality, alienation, and liberatory networks. Their practice critically engages technology as both an assistive device and apparatus of oppression. Presently they are experimenting with autonomous internet infrastructure, researching simulation, and making 3D computer graphics. Nat is a 2026 United States Artists Fellow, LACE Lightning Fund grantee (with the collective Secret Server Club), 2025 Supercollider SciArt Ambassador Fellow, 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow (with the collective Cripping_CG), Y10 member of NEW INC, 2024 Processing Foundation Mentor and 2023 Fellow, 2024 Coaxial resident, 2024 fellow at the Decentralized web camp, 2023 resident at Latitude Chicago, 2023 Leonardo CripTech Metaverse Lab Fellow, and 2021 resident and current staff of ACRE Residency. They have exhibited work and delivered talks internationally.
Associated project: Feedback Resonance
During the residency at Harvestworks, Nat Decker will develop Feedback Resonance – a live audiovisual system that composes sound and image simultaneously using feedback as technical structure and poetic engine. In most technological contexts, feedback is treated as error or nuisance, something to be suppressed, corrected, or eliminated. Disabled bodies are often treated similarly: framed as anomalies to be cured, normalized, or engineered out of existence. In this project, feedback is treated not as accident or failure, but a resonant source of intensity and emotional force. Sonic processes generate data that shape real-time visual environments, while visual system states are fed into musical structure and probability. The loop is repeated as memory cycles the present, altered, distorted, and reshaped by all that has occurred between: by ghosts and infinity mirrors, past lives, spirals, and the self repeatedly fractured by grief.
Justin Allen
Justin Allen works in performance, video, and writing. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Shed, and ISSUE Project Room and received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. He received his BA in literary studies from Eugene Lang College at The New School and his MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art. In 2022, he released a four-song EP with his punk band, Black Boots. In 2024, he released his first book, Language Arts, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Associated project: Tap-Dance Language Instrument
During the residency, Justin will build on his work interpreting the rhythms of tap dancing as onomatopoeic language. Inspired by the common use of jazz scatting among tap dancers teaching and learning choreography, he will work with an engineer/technician and utilize various technologies to combine dance, poetry, sound, and video.
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY
A Virginia-based new media artist and poet. Known for her noisy experimental electronics and performance practice, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of computer programming and sadomasochism into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally since 2012 in spaces like Performance Space New York, The New Museum, The Kitchen, and the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. SHAWNÉ is currently an Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is also an open source software advocate and 1/2 of the ambient projects duo BONE LATTICE.
Associated project: [if] GONE-BAD-IN-THE-MIDDLE
During the residency at Harvestworks, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY will develop [if] GONE-BAD-IN-THE-MIDDLE; [return] a love disguised as “an oppositional forever”, a cyberqueer adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Using hacked fencing scoreboard systems, machine learning, electronic music, and arrangements for classical voice, the work centers two fencers whose épée bouts generate sound and image in real time. Presented as a durational opera in the round, the performance transforms competition into an embodied audiovisual system.