Presented in partnership with the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Mythscience, and 2220 Arts & Archives, and organized in conjunction with the exhibition Too Fast To Sing, curated by Hugo Cervantes.
Romi Ron Morrison and friends present a special live performance building on Morrison’s Kitchen residency in New York, where they developed Song Book: Quotient of Desire. Both a publication and a series of graphic scores, Song Book probes the life and music of Julius Eastman, the radical composer whose embrace of Blackness and queer desire transformed experimental music. The project also investigates how Eastman’s life collides with early predictive computing technologies pioneered by the RAND Corporation in the late 1960s and 1970s, resulting in significant housing loss in New York City. Morrison situates these systems in relation to Eastman’s own experiences of homelessness in New York during the same era, examining how data infrastructures shape and surveil precarious communities in addition to creating graphic scores inspired by the Eastman’s contingent networks for living, driven by desire.
At The Kitchen, Morrison activated Song Book through live performance, inviting musicians to interpret one of their graphic scores in real time. This Los Angeles presentation restages work with L.A.-based musicians – to be announced at a later date, bringing the project into the city where predictive policing first emerged. The performance amplifies the book’s central inquiries into displacement, surveillance, desire, and contingent living, while inviting new sonic interpretations rooted in local histories.
Accessibility
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Romi Ron Morrison
Romi Ron Morrison is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and writer. Their work investigates the personal, political, ideological, and spatial boundaries of race, gender, and social infrastructures within digital technologies. Using maps, data, sound, performance, and video, their installations center Black diasporic technologies that challenge the demands of an increasingly quantified world—reducing land into property, people into digits, and knowledge into data. Their current projects explore theories of Black Computational Thought, entropy, and forms of kinship that thrive in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.
Romi has exhibited work and given talks at numerous exhibitions, conferences, and workshops around the world including Transmediale (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), ALT_CPH Biennial (Copenhagen), the American Institute of Architects (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Queens Museum (New York), and the Walker Museum of Art. They have been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology, The School for Poetic Computation, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. Their writing has appeared in publications by MIT Press, University of California Press, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Logic(s) Magazine.
They have taught courses at Parsons School of Design and the University of Southern California (USC). They are currently an Assistant Professor in the Design Media Arts program at UCLA in Los Angeles and a 2024-2026 Just Tech Fellow.
Star Feliz (Priestussy) is an artist originally from New York, NY currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Their artistic practice activates the intersections of spirit, ecology, and technology. Building upon their ancestral Afro-Taino lineage of multi-dimensional healing — Feliz works within sculpture, performance, installation, sound, and plant medicine to expand upon themes of hybridity, knowledge, and healing. Feliz has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally including The Hammer, Los Angeles, CA; The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; The Horse Hospital, London, UK; among others. They have been awarded numerous fellowships, residencies, and grants including The Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, ACRE Residency, Mohn LAND Grant, and the Printed Matter Emerging Artist Publication Grant. They are a graduate of the MFA program at UCLA’s department of Interdisciplinary Studio.
Adee Roberson (b. 1981, West Palm Beach, FL) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is a meditation on symbolism, rhythm, and texture. Through painting, video, and melodic composition, she melds technicolor abstraction and vibration into portals of sound and color. Her practice traces a refracted timeline of Black diasporic movement, weaving familial and sonic archives with landscape, spirit, and experimental form. Her recent installation BLUE NILE (Cosmogram #2) was featured in Monument Eternal at the Hammer Museum, curated by Erin Christovale.
Roberson has exhibited and performed at institutions including MOCA Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, UTA Artist Space, and the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans.
Her work has been featured in Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Frieze, which named her one of Five Emerging Artists to Watch at Frieze Los Angeles 2025. She is a recipient of the Los Angeles Artadia Award and the New York Foundation for the Arts Cutting Edge Grant.
Roberson lives and works in Los Angeles, where her practice moves between sound, form, and the unseen.
Kumi James, also known as BAE BAE, is a multidisciplinary artist working across sound, music, and video. She organizes innovative spaces for collaboration and community, including the LA underground party Hood Rave. Through a historical materialist lens, James’ work confronts capitalist exploitation, neocolonialism, and racial and gendered alienation. Her uncanny sonic assemblages and mixes evoke memory through the senses, stirring embodied reflection. She creates spaces that challenge conventional ideas of gathering and community, emphasizing a solidarity expansive enough to radically hold difference.