Planet/Tear: Early Warning Systems is a collaborative performance centered on sound, technology, objects, and signal. The project imagines a world in which objects begin to sense and communicate before humans recognize what is happening.

Bringing together artists across disciplines, the work unfolds as a shifting environment of unstable systems, where sound is not simply performed but transmitted, obstructed, and transformed. Signals emerge, overlap, and dissolve, forming a temporary network that resists fixed structure or control.

Inspired by boundary-pushing collaborations—including Butch Morris and David Hammons, Camille Billops and James Hatch, and Robert Rauschenberg with Jim McGee—the project treats performance as a living system shaped through collective action. Across these lineages, collaboration becomes a method for pushing against the boundaries of form, authorship, and medium.

Planet/Tear refers both to the planet and to rupture—environmental, social, technological, and emotional. Rooted in a belief in animism as an extension of intuition, the piece asks what early warning systems already surround us, and what might become possible if we learned how to listen.

Sculpture by
pap souleye fall
Sonia Kahn
Michael Candy
Maggie Boyd
Séan
Marcus Jahmal
Liz Zito

Music by
Braxton
Gladstone Deluxe
Char Jeré
Brandon E.

A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.

Working in a range of disciplines, spanning sound, installation, sculpture, painting, video, and film, Char Jeré has an artistic vision rooted in a philosophy they have coined Afro-fractalism, a term that builds on the foundations of Afrofuturism. Within this framework, time is conceived as nonlinear and multidimensional, a conduit that connects the past, present, and future through intergenerational communication with ancestors. Jeré’s work investigates fractures and connections within a Black diasporic history along with the possibilities for reclaiming and reshaping narratives around race and technology.