Uploaded July 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Made during the 2016 US election as countless individuals grappled with the imposed immigration ban, Body in Transit explores the anxiety and disorientation of displacement through transit and forced migration. Working with cinematic sounds, poetry, and moving images, this work imagines the ways in which the human body travels through physical and virtual spaces in search of home.
Featuring movement by Shinichi Iova Koga and text by Dorothy Santos.
This work was exhibited at Errant Sound as part of the Listening Biennial. The evening will include the screening of the video, poetry reading and a conversation between Surabhi Saraf and Dorothy Santos.
BIOS
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer, and founder of the Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice lives at the intersection of technology, healing and activism. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai and Hosfelt gallery in San Francisco. She has performed at the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival (Bologna), and Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Her videos have been shown at TIMES SQUARE, New York, Blanton Museum, Austin, the Hunter Museum of American Art Chattanooga, TN and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, Serbia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Out Sydney & Mumbai, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Blouin ArtInfo, Art Practical, and KQED Arts. Surabhi graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 with an MFA in Art and Technology. She was a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and 2020 resident at HarvestWorks, NY. Surabhi is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation.
ABOUT THE LISTENING BIENNIAL
THE LISTENING BIENNIAL draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. From radical empathy to weak ontology, poetic refusal to diasporic resistance, eavesdropping to intimate envelopment, listening wields a creative and critical force that may contribute to maintaining the diversity of our social adventure.
THE LISTENING BIENNIAL brings together an international group of participating artists, musicians, and researchers, as well as institutions and collectives across the globe, to foster questions and experiences of listening. The Listening Biennial is conceived as a global project and aims at a curatorial construct of shared resonances and polyvocal manifestations. This includes the exhibition of audio works, experimental performances, and discursive events presented across a constellation of collaborating institutions and venues, where listening and locality are accentuated, and cultural specificities contribute to a greater ecology of attention. From critical storytelling, experimental noise, and musical rapture to acoustic care, interspecies contact, and environments of sounded matter, the Biennial aims at fostering a listening world.
Made during the 2016 US election as countless individuals grappled with the imposed immigration ban, Body in Transit explores the anxiety and disorientation of displacement through transit and forced migration. Working with cinematic sounds, poetry, and moving images, this work imagines the ways in which the human body travels through physical and virtual spaces in search of home.
Featuring movement by Shinichi Iova Koga and text by Dorothy Santos.
This work was exhibited at Errant Sound as part of the Listening Biennial. The evening will include the screening of the video, poetry reading and a conversation between Surabhi Saraf and Dorothy Santos.
BIOS
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer, and founder of the Centre for Emotional Materiality. Her practice lives at the intersection of technology, healing and activism. Surabhi is the recipient of the Eureka Fellowship Award by the Fleishhacker Foundation (2015), the Djerassi Resident Artist Award (2012) and the Artist + Process + Ideas Residency at Mills College Art Museum (2016). She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai and Hosfelt gallery in San Francisco. She has performed at the Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival (Bologna), and Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Her videos have been shown at TIMES SQUARE, New York, Blanton Museum, Austin, the Hunter Museum of American Art Chattanooga, TN and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, Serbia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Time Out Sydney & Mumbai, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Blouin ArtInfo, Art Practical, and KQED Arts. Surabhi graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 with an MFA in Art and Technology. She was a 2019 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and 2020 resident at HarvestWorks, NY. Surabhi is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.
Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation.
ABOUT THE LISTENING BIENNIAL
THE LISTENING BIENNIAL draws attention to listening as a relational capacity, a philosophical and political proposition, a creative practice, and research framework. From radical empathy to weak ontology, poetic refusal to diasporic resistance, eavesdropping to intimate envelopment, listening wields a creative and critical force that may contribute to maintaining the diversity of our social adventure.
THE LISTENING BIENNIAL brings together an international group of participating artists, musicians, and researchers, as well as institutions and collectives across the globe, to foster questions and experiences of listening. The Listening Biennial is conceived as a global project and aims at a curatorial construct of shared resonances and polyvocal manifestations. This includes the exhibition of audio works, experimental performances, and discursive events presented across a constellation of collaborating institutions and venues, where listening and locality are accentuated, and cultural specificities contribute to a greater ecology of attention. From critical storytelling, experimental noise, and musical rapture to acoustic care, interspecies contact, and environments of sounded matter, the Biennial aims at fostering a listening world.
![Recording of [June 16] INHERENT UNCERTAINTY by Paul Geluso, Clinton Van Arnam, Ivana Dama](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tjDC2OEBwis/mqdefault.jpg "Recording of [June 16] INHERENT UNCERTAINTY by Paul Geluso, Clinton Van Arnam, Ivana Dama
Live data analysis of Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 worldwide data is used to create this generative sound piece. Data is sent through custom software into analog and digital synthesizers which trigger visuals formed by news clips recorded on June 1st, 2020 during the protests that followed the death of George Floyd.
The title Inherent Uncertainty represents our current state of affairs and the systems we are seeing crumble before our own eyes. As the viewer listens to the sound shift and change, these shifts are simply the analysis of the destruction of the virus. This project explores the unpredictability of our future and the thin veneer that we define as a ‘civil’ society.
Software engineering by John Brumley. Music by Paul Geluso and Clinton Van Arnam. Visuals by Ivana Dama in collaboration with Clinton Van Arnam. Creative collaboration with Harvestworks, New York including Carol Parkinson, and Paul Geluso. Mentorship and creative vision in partnership with Victoria Vesna, UCLA.
SOUNDING CORONA series is co-conceptualized by the UCLA ArtSci Center, and Harvestworks NY with the intent of composing and amplifying the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 worldwide data live data analysis including total recovered, deaths, and cases. Throughout this ongoing summer series, sound artists will be invited to use the texture of this data as an underlying vibration for engagement. With this collective sound and image exploration we seek to illuminate the interconnectivity of events around the world.")
