Elastic Arts, 3429 W Diversey #208, Chicago, IL (2026)

06/18/2026

TONIGHT!

Join us as the experimental electronic heavyweights TV Pow kick off a tour! Matthew Davis performs with solo project on the heels of his recent release Free, and ambient duo Open Seki kicks off the evening. Formed in Tokyo in 1995 and based in Chicago since 1996, TV Pow is a trio of composers and free improvisers working across experimental electronic music. Working across experimental electronic music and free improvisation, the trio uses samplers, synthesizers, laptops, percussion, invented instruments, turntables, and tape manipulation to create evolving soundscapes that blend electronics, ambient drift, minimalist structures, and field recordings.

Matthew Davis (J0Y.) is a Chicago-based composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist rooted in the past, working in the present and gazing to the future. His evolving practice incorporates synthesizers, plant-based sound systems, and diverse acoustic instruments to create textured, immersive compositions.

Open Seki is the duo of John Biggers (Hefty) and Nathan Tucker (SKAM, Wobblyhead, Consumers Research & Development), endeavoring to scratch that undefinable itch through pulse exploration and phased aural stimulation.

8:30 pm: Open Seki
John Biggers - electronics, various instruments
Nathan Tucker - electronics, various instruments

9:15 pm: J0Y feat. Matthew Davis
Matthew Davis - trombone, electronics, vocals

10:15 pm: TV Pow
Michael Hartman - electronics
Todd A. Carter - electronics
Brent Gutzeit - electronics

06/18/2026

We’re excited to host two nights of an immersive performance experience by poet Marty McConnell with film by Lindsey Dorr-Niro and music by Patrick Wojtak. Join us on his upcoming Sunday and Monday here at Elastic. Through language, music, and imagery, ‘Days of Wonder: it is time to be very tender with our grief’ explores curiosity and interconnectedness as methods of moving into and through personal, societal, and global sorrow, survival, and co-evolution. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis and include floor cushions, low chairs, stools, and standing space.

Tickets are $15 in advance or at the door.

06/17/2026

Saturday night we welcome John O’Neill in from California for a solo performance, alongside Chicago artists GS70 and existence decay. John will be presenting Optical Soundtracks, a project that features software-performed pieces that are yowls of playful mistranslation, interrogations of “machine authorship” before the widespread use of “AI,” rubbing up against the limits of the tools of archival preservation, extracting suspect meanings from meaningful objects and spurious meanings from meaningless ones. Personal photographs, PDFs of texts, detail scans of subtractive color prints are assembled into “scores” and fed to AEO-Light, an open-source archival software designed to translate optical soundtracks on film print scans into usable sync-sound wav files. These sequences of images are encoded (in their textures and contrast values, according to AEO-Light) with clicks and hums and idiot melodies that writhe against their arbitrariness.

GS70 is the solo project of Anastasia Gladkova, an experimental musician based in Chicago, IL. Through processed vocals and modular synthesis, Anastasia drifts between ambient textures and industrial noise to share impressions of grief, trauma, and a longing for a sense of home that might have been lost.

existence decay is the primary alias of Autumn Culp. It makes emotional electronic music, usually with computers. Themes include love, entropy, and networks.

06/16/2026

This Thursday the experimental electronic heavyweights TV Pow kick off a tour. Matthew Davis performs with solo project on the heels of his recent release Free, and ambient duo Open Seki kicks off the evening. Formed in Tokyo in 1995 and based in Chicago since 1996, TV Pow is a trio of composers and free improvisers working across experimental electronic music. Working across experimental electronic music and free improvisation, the trio uses samplers, synthesizers, laptops, percussion, invented instruments, turntables, and tape manipulation to create evolving soundscapes that blend electronics, ambient drift, minimalist structures, and field recordings.

Matthew Davis (J0Y.) is a Chicago-based composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist rooted in the past, working in the present and gazing to the future. His evolving practice incorporates synthesizers, plant-based sound systems, and diverse acoustic instruments to create textured, immersive compositions.

Open Seki is the duo of John Biggers (Hefty) and Nathan Tucker (SKAM, Wobblyhead, Consumers Research & Development), endeavoring to scratch that undefinable itch through pulse exploration and phased aural stimulation.

8:30 pm: Open Seki
John Biggers - electronics, various instruments
Nathan Tucker - electronics, various instruments

9:15 pm: J0Y feat. Matthew Davis
Matthew Davis - trombone, electronics, vocals

10:15 pm: TV Pow
Michael Hartman - electronics
Todd A. Carter - electronics
Brent Gutzeit - electronics

06/15/2026

Join us Tuesday evening to hear The Harbingers season finale before anyone else! For one night only the team is doing a first-of-its-kind special event: an in-person listening party for the season finale of The Harbingers. After a hurricane nine months of magic, intrigue, romance, triumph, and tragedy, the first chapter of Adam Blackwell and Amy Stirling’s story comes to a close. Come by to hear the season finale ahead of its official release, and to share all the laughs, twists, and tears it might cause with other fans of the show. And after the episode is over, hang out for a short talkback with some members of the team behind the show. Don’t miss out on a magical evening! Tuesday night at 7:30PM!

06/13/2026

TONIGHT!!

In honor of Juneteenth, join us for this evening for a special screening of ‘Neptune Frost’ in collaboration with Black Film Club Chicago, followed by a conversation panel. Set in a futuristic e-waste camp between dreamscape and revolution, Neptune Frost is a visionary Afro-futurist musical that blends technology, liberation, gender expansiveness, spirituality, and resistance. Directed by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, the film imagines a world where those pushed to the margins become architects of a new future. Through stunning visuals, music, and poetic storytelling, Neptune Frost asks urgent questions about extraction, freedom, collective power, and the possibilities of self-determination. As we commemorate Juneteenth—a celebration of Black liberation and an ongoing reflection on freedom’s unfinished work—the film offers a powerful lens through which to consider the intersections of technology, identity, memory, and resistance.

Following the screening, the panel will respond to themes from the film, creating space for reflection, dialogue, and collective imagining. There will be an opening performance from naturalblkinvention and Dark Matter Resident Amari Amai. We’ll see you this evening at 8pm!

06/12/2026

TONIGHT!

The CLEAT Series we welcome Seth Andrew Davis in from Kansas City for a solo performance, followed by three pieces from Duo Riso.

Duo Riso is an ensemble project founded by pianist Zaira Castillo and clarinetist Evan Kopca. The Duo creates immersive, boundary-blurring performances that reimagine the traditional concert experience through sound, space, and collaboration. Rooted in a shared spirit of curiosity and play (riso, from the Latin word for “laughter”), the duo embraces humor, spontaneity, and deep listening as essential parts of their artistic practice.

Duo Riso, dedicated to expanding the sonic possibilities of piano and clarinet, premieres multichannel works by Zouning Liao, Pedram Diba, and Curtis Rumrill. The program encompasses elements of satire, found objects, and gesture ultimately leading to the culmination of a large-scale theatrical experience. The duo is equally comfortable in written and improvised formats, drawing on aesthetics from contemporary classical music, experimental sound, and intermedia performance practices.

Seth Andrew Davis is a performer, composer, improviser, technologist, scholar and educator from the Kansas City area. Davis is involved in the improvised music/free improvisation, experimental, and electronic music scenes in Kansas City. Davis’ music runs the gamut of compositions for orchestral and chamber ensembles, performances with free-jazz/free improvised music ensembles and large groups, solo performance, collaborations with dancers and video artists, and the design and collaboration of autonomous and interactive artificial life agents and 3D environments. Tonight he presents An American Is A Complex Of Occasions, a new piece for electric guitar, live electronics, virtual improviser, and interactive video. The piece explores a multi-movement structure that explores the maximalist terrain of American culture in the 21st Century.

06/12/2026

Today we celebrate the 2026/2027 cohort of our Dark Matter Residency! The residency serves Chicago-based performing artists from a diverse range of performing arts disciplines including (but not limited to) music, performance art, dance, drama, poetry, film, multimedia, and puppetry. Residents perform in Dark Matter Series events, Community Outreach events,
AfroFuturist Weekend, and other Elastic programs throughout the year. Keep an eye out for these artists presenting work here and throughout Chicago! ��

Xavi is an artist, writer-poet, educator, and organizer, because their communities are fighting for liberation. They’ve edited the literary, culture, and politics magazines La Respuesta and Que Ondee Sola and exhibited multimedia installations at Instituto Sactar in Brazil.

AQ, most known for rap, also began collecting vinyl, practicing turntablism, DJing, and making beats in the late 90’s. He dove into noise via an interest in the vintage electronics that made early hip-hop and house music, often incorporating loops, scaratches, grooves, and occasional raps into performances.

udochukwu anidobu (she/they) is an Igbo-American artist, landscape architect and DJ born and based in Chicago whose work physically and sonically challenges our understanding of African and diasporic landscapes, traditions, and ecologies through an exploration of traditional crafts, music and lived experiences.

Amari Amai (he/they) is a black nonbinary storyteller and world builder born and raised in Chicago. Amari’s work is rooted in oral tradition and archival resurrection on and off the page, using poetry, folklore, soundscapes, and performance to bend time towards a pre-colonial past and decolonized future. Amari is the founder of Crossroads Writers Collective, a communal writing group for Black q***r folks based in Chicago.

Nova Zaii is a drummer, music producer, educator, and sonic experience designer from Chicago. Zaii invented and patented a touchless musical instrument called the Nova Portals. He performs genre defying, futuristic live sets, making music out of thin air with the Nova Portals while knocking satisfying rhythms on drums to his original mus

06/11/2026

Please join us this Sunday for a closing reception of our current visual gallery exhibition ‘Too Tender Headed’ where you can experience this beautiful show one last time and hear from the artists in a small panel discussion. In ode to the ‘two & tender-headed’, this installation asks us to recall what once moved us to submission, contrasting society’s contract for survival, that which demands our hearts hardening. Through sensory play, we carve space for the sacred, investigating when we began alchemizing our corporeal sentiments into indifference. Free admission for all!

Gallery Hours 3pm-6pm
Artist Talk 4pm-5pm

06/10/2026

TONIGHT!

At the first of two CLEAT Series events for June this week, we welcome BARAS and Jared Kelley.

All products of human expression are being drawn into systems that compress us into data and return approximations of what was taken. Kelley has been drawn to building systems and watching what they do on their own, but in witnessing larger and more advanced systems consume and flatten human complexity, he sees the less interesting their output becomes. Irrational Machines starts with the uninteresting outputs in a series of small mechatronic sculptures that automate the behaviors no one would bother to steal: small, irrational, human gestures that have no value to extract. One sweeps the floor carefully around something that has broken. For this CLEAT performance, one machine sweeps through a soup of language, unearthing words the way a language model might, except the words it finds drive the content and quality of the audio around it. The more aggressively it sweeps to clean up the mess, the more words surface to feed back into its own behavior. It has no agency and is authoring its own actions simultaneously. The resulting sound is distributed across the audio array, steered in mutual coercion by the machine and the performer.

Inside Human, an immersive dance performance, was created through the collaboration of choreographer and dancer Vasiliki Bara and composer Konstantinos Baras. Guided by the idea that every person carries a creature within them, the performance constructs bodies that oscillate between human and non-human forms. Skin merges with skin, bodily boundaries dissolve, and familiar gestures become strange and uncanny.

VisionProtocol, performed by Jenna Lyle, examines the tension between programmed behavior and the desire to escape existing systems. The piece uses the repetition of commands and mechanical processes to create a space where routine, obedience, and psychological entrapment coexist. An uncanny atmosphere emerges as the boundaries between human and machine are blurred.

Join us tonight at 8pm!

Elastic Arts

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