The Provocations Project is currently coordinated by Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, and Jessica Rajko, drawing on their hybrid backgrounds in contemporary dance, music, and computing, as well as performance philosophy and critical theory.
From the outset, the trajectory of the Provocations Project has remained intentionally fluid, such that ongoing iterations may be (in)formed by the needs and desires of the communities in which it grows. The Steering Committee for Provocations Project is likewise open to ongoing reconfiguration to invite new voices and visions into the mix.
Teoma Naccarato
Teoma Naccarato is an interdisciplinary artist/scholar working at the intersection of choreography, technology, and performance philosophy. Her works for stage, screen, installation, and page investigate the body and identity in digital culture. Naccarato’s choreography has been presented internationally at venues such as SummerWorks (Toronto), Tangente Danse (Montreal), Rapid Pulse (Chicago), the Hemispheric Institute Encuentro (Montreal / Rio de Janeiro / Bogota), ReNew (Copenhagen), Lake Studios (Berlin), and HfMT (Hamburg). Recent publications are featured in peer reviewed journals such as Performance Research, Tempo,Leonardo, and Performance Philosophy. As a Visiting Professor in Dance at various universities, Naccarato has led undergraduate and graduate level courses in choreography, contemporary dance, intermedia performance, screendance, and performance philosophy. Naccarato holds a PhD from the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University (2019), an MFA in Dance and Technology from the Ohio State University (2011), and a BFA in Dance from Concordia University (2004). She presently lives in Berlin with her cat, and zooms around the world on a daily basis. https://teomanaccarato.com
John MacCallum
John MacCallum is a composer, media artist, performer, and musical systems designer based in Berlin. His work is focused on the aesthetics and ethics of polytemporality and synchronization, in performance and computation.
Since 2013, MacCallum has been involved in a close collaboration with choreographer Teoma Naccarato, which takes the form of performances, publications, and practices of guided breathing and listening. Prior to this, his compositional practice was centered around music in which performers listen to click tracks that vary continuously in tempo, independent of one another. In his current work with Naccarato, the unpredictable nature of bodily processes are placed in dialog with the temporalities of music and movement, serving as a critical intervention in composition, choreography, and performance.
MacCallum holds degrees from UC Berkeley (PhD in Composition), McGill University (MM in Composition), and the University of the Pacific (BM in Theory and Composition). Following his PhD, he worked as a Musical Systems Designer at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), and completed postdocs in the Terraswarm Research Center at UC Berkeley, and the Extreme Situated Interaction group (Ex-Situ) at Inria / CNRS / LRI in Paris. He is currently on staff as a researcher and media specialistat the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. http://john-maccallum.com
Jessica Rajko
Jessica Rajko is an interdisciplinary scholar/practitioner who applies critical feminist approaches to research at the intersection of somatically-informed dance and human-computer interaction design. Her most recent research investigates how and why dance-based practices and choreographic knowledge are integrated, adopted, and at times appropriated within computing research. This research is part of a larger collaborative initiative to scope out the needs, practices, and desires of the ever-evolving field of dance and computing.
Jessica is an assistant professor at Wayne State University. She joined WSU in 2019 as part of a multidisciplinary university hiring initiative in Big Data and analytics. She has presented and performed in various collaborative artworks nationally and internationally, including Amsterdam’s OT301, Toronto’s Scotiabank Nuit Blanche festival and New York City’s Gotham Festival at The Joyce Theatre. She was named one of Phoenix New Times’s “100 Creatives of 2016” and has been commissioned by the Currents New Media Festival, Breaking Ground Dance Festival, Mesa Arts Center, Heard Museum, and Phoenix Art Museum. Jessica has been invited to present her research at several transdisciplinary institutional programs such as Harvard’s Digital Futures Consortium, UPenn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities, and University of New Mexico’s ART Lab. She is a regular instructor at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at University of Victoria, where she teachings a summer intensive on movement-based approaches to understanding and designing wearable technology.
Jessica received her MFA in Dance and Interdisciplinary Digital Media at Arizona State University in 2009 and her BA in Dance and Psychology at Hope College in 2005. http://www.jessicarajko.com