Critical Acts: Performance Lectures exploring how power operates in the digital age

Critical Acts was an immersive gathering and a platform for surveying emerging net and digital cultures through performance lectures.

This event hosted at the School of Digital Art (SODA) at Manchester Met unraveled the intricate ways in which power operates within our interconnected lives and emerging models for existing and engaging with an online world. Each presentation placed an expansive lens on the tenets of Web3, virtual worlds and AI, whilst challenging us to reconsider our understanding of control, agency, and resistance in this moment of transition.

Through a diverse collection of performative essays manifesting as sonic explorations, verbal monologues, moving image collages and animations we explored how digital networks and systems shape our identities, communities, and political realities.

Our Critical Act artists were:

Nina Davies
Nina Davies is a Canadian-British artist who considers the present moment through observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed.

Tati au Miel
Tati au Miel (they/them) is an alias of Montreal-born and raised multi-disciplinary artist Tania Daniel. Their practice encompasses sound, performance, sculpture, textile, and XR, blending experimentation, abstraction, storytelling, and rituals to forge intimate and personal experiences in their work.

Michael-Jon Mizra
Michael-Jon Mizra (he/him) is a computer musician based in London, interested in how programmatic thinking, data-structure management, and algorithmic modelling can be used to compose and perform.

Petra Szemán + David Blandy
Petra Szemán (they/them) is a moving image artist working with animation and game-like landscapes. David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history and science to arenas of play.

Critical Acts is part of a two year curatorial partnership at School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University. Find out more about the partnership and other events happening in the programme.

This programme is a collaboration between Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and Modal gallery at Manchester Metropolitan University’s School of Digital Arts (SODA). AND is supported with public funding from Arts Council England.

Image: Critical Acts at School of Digital Art for Abandon Normal Devices. Credit: Joon Bajaj