GOVERNANCE (GVNC) is the collaborative project of Rebecca Uliasz and Quran Karriem. We collectively build electronic compositions, installations, and media driven interventions that take the form of audio-visual performances and multimedia publications.
Our performance work includes custom electronic instruments, analog synthesizers, and computer systems, affected in real time by gesture, movement, and interwoven patching. We use mixtures of generative and sequenced audio and video techniques to explore ideas around technical, social, and biological systems, reconceived as audiovisual structures. Audiovisual synthesis works as a method for rendering form and environment through granular textures.
In our practice we explore the concept of noise as a genre, a method, and a term derived from cybernetic sciences. Noise is conceived as both the perturbations that steer a system, causing it to mutate in form, and a means by which we filter meaning from non-meaning, both aesthetically, technically and politically.
We view the works of GVNC as an exaggeration of the performativity of knowledge production; an investigation of the gestures, affects and embodied dispositions that are culturally legible as ‘knowledge work’ and imbued with a veneer of ‘objectivity’. We seek to shift the frame away from the norms of scientific discourse to question the conditions of the production of knowledge.
The name GOVERNANCE embodies our extended interest in how technological and social systems enact forms of power and powerlessness. We are committed to an artistic and scholarly practice rooted in ethics of collectivity and care.
About Us
Quran Karriem is an experimental musician, media artist and academic working primarily with electronic and algorithmic media. His scholarly, aesthetic and speculative work examines the power relations and ideologies that inhere in the design of systems, processes and interfaces from material, energetic and temporal perspectives, and is motivated by a concern with the operative nature of the racial and the political in postmodern sociotechnical assemblages. A multiple award-winning software designer and former product executive, Quran has led development teams for a number of media and technology companies and applies years of direct experience with systems design, data management and organizational structure in the context of “start-up culture” to social critique. His product initiatives have been recognized by such global research and trade bodies as Gartner Research, the Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association (GSMA), the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) and Frost & Sullivan.
Quran has worked as a sound designer, composer and technical director for a variety of theater companies, winning several regional awards for his work on productions in Durham, North Carolina. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sound Design from the Savannah College of Art & Design and a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Georgia. He was formerly a lecturer in the Audio Technology program at American University and is currently pursuing a PhD in the Computational Media, Arts and Cultures (CMAC) program at Duke University.
Rebecca Uliasz is an artist and PhD Candidate in the department of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University. She researches contemporary computational visual culture, the history of cybernetics, experimental art practices, and machine learning technologies. Her work includes writing, installation, noise performance, custom made hardware and software.
Uliasz holds an MFA from Stony Brook University and BFA from the University of Connecticut. She has exhibited her work in a number of institutional and non-traditional venues such as- Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, SUNY Stony Brook University, The Center for Excellence in Wireless Information Technology (CEWIT), The Islip Art Museum, Marymount California University, POWRPLANT, Peripheral Forms Gallery, Gallery Protocol, The Wrong Biennial (2017,2015), and Brooklyn Bridge Park. She has performed at a number of festivals, galleries and venues including H0L0, Spectrum, NYC, Gaze Festival at Gallery Protocol, FL, CultureHub NYC, Babycastles, NYC, Radiator Gallery, NYC, and the Velvet Lounge, NY. She is currently a fellow in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Center PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.
