Force and Motion

For one month every year, Comfort Station gives over its space toward exploring “performance” in a variety of contexts, with programming every weekend of the month. From experimental sound art and performances combining video projection and movement, to a weekend of loud Latinx-fronted bands, Force and Motion aims to re-imagine and re-contextualize how bodies, sound and vision occupy our space. 

In its fourth year, Force and Motion’s August 2023 season engages artists in the task of collectivity. How do the relationships we build in turn build the work we engage in? This year around and within SCAFFOLD, three Chicago-based performance collectives in different iterations of collaboration populate the public lawn with work that examines our relationship to one another and the possibilities that can be tapped into through those relationships.

Contributors for this year’s program include:

Suspended Culture is an emerging Black art collective based in Chicago, IL. A Suspended Culture is a culture on pause, a movement interrupted, a dream deferred. As a collective of visionaries, our work together inhabits the liminal space of a dream. Time is no longer necessary here; rather, time collapses into an ever-expanding radical presence. In a Suspended Culture, we play. We rehearse the future and we invite love to bind us to what liberates us. A Suspended Culture considers love a revolutionary practice through which it can conjure anything required, and a Suspended Culture exists in an alternative reality rooted in love. A Suspended Culture embodies Afro-surreal interpretations of Black futures, embraces the absurd, and thinks with the body. A Suspended Culture uses pleasure as its map and sinks into the portal of “Yes, and…”. A Suspended Culture is a moment of rest!

{\}() {\}∆‡!(){\} - Tangential Unspace Art Lab is located at 1542 N Milwaukee Ave Floors 2 and 4:

Since its Foundation in 2010 {\}() {\}∆‡!(){\} has served as a prolific artistic platform for experimental Performance Art and cultural production combining language, image/sound-making,  presentations, screenings, workshops, and a unique 3-6 month live-in Artist-in-residence program. In 2022 we organized thirty exhibitions, where we presented and collaborated with more than 250 artists from Chicago and around the globe.

While existing as a self-maintained/sustained artist-run space, {\}() {\}∆‡!(){\} has worked to foster a local and global border crossing arts network, aiming to contribute to an accessible exchange of ideas that are deeply concerned with critical concepts of socially implanted origins, identity, the affirmation of agency, intimacy, spontaneity, and collaboration in how art is created, discussed and experienced. https://nonationartlab.cargo.site/

//sense is an experimental time-based artist collective that features new media, technologies, performance, video, sound, installation, and beyond. It focuses on experimental theater production through large-scale collaborations. As a safe space for experimental expressions, this troupe develops synergy through unleashing concealed potentials that would otherwise be unachievable in solo practice. By fostering a common ground to practice and cultivate collectivism, individual expertises transcend into a collective experience.

Intermarrying new media, happenings, and performance, we expand audiences' and performers’ perceptions, experience, and consciousness through immersive, improvisatory, interactive, devised, participatory, and site-specific theatrical models. Our team fluidity ensures a unique experience across different productions. Besides revolutionizing the art-making process, we encourage audiences to elevate their role as spectators into active participants, hence enabling the art-making process for a wider population. By activating the entire venue space and deskilling in arts, we invite artistic inclusivity to empower the community through actions.