AKTIV8 Archive Portal

New York, NY

AKTIV8 Archive Portal at The Shed’s Open Call was a ritual performance installation led by artist and archivist AnAkA. Featuring live ceremonial music, a four-screen video installation, and companion webVR experience, the work created a sacred container for showcasing ancestral wisdom practices. The installation design served as a portal honoring the four directions, opening The McCourt space to a performance and presentation of AKTIV8 Archive: an ethnographic visual research project, music and dance piece.

Year: 2021

Location: The Shed

Medium: Multimedia installation, webVR companion exhibition

Artists:

  • AnAkA (lead artist)

  • India Sky Davis (performer)

  • Victor Morris (musician)

  • Serket (ceremonialist)

Technical:

  • Custom stage/set design

  • Four-screen projection mapping

  • Interactive digital environments

Support: The Shed's Open Call program

As experience designer, I worked with AnAkA to create a four-screen configuration; a sacred geometry where each screen could serve as a cardinal direction for this temporary temple. Between them moved the performers – ceremonialists, musicians and dancers – as filmic archives documenting indigenous elders, crafts persons and knowledge keepers played on the four screens. I designed and produced a companion webVR environment to extend the AKTIV8 temple into the virtual realm. This was a browser-based virtual environment that hosted a live stream of the performance.

Merging technological precision and ceremonial presence allowed us to creatively challenge traditional binaries that exist between digital and sacred spaces, themes that show up in my earlier work with Manifest 1.0. At the time of the AKTIV8 Archive Portal, I had also just entered into the incubator that would go on to produce Black Metal. This tension between advanced technologies and spiritual, philosophical inquiries would also show up as a frame for that speculative world-building project.