National Sawdust: Ash Koosha with YONA
Free
FERUS Festival is National Sawdust’s annual cutting-edge music and multimedia performance festival. This year’s program will explore our season’s themes with boundary-breaking music, dance, and conversations.
From the underground punk scene in a repressive Tehran to the creation of an auxiliary human named YONA, the polymath performer and self-described “software humanist” Ash Koosha lives on the front lines of the musical vanguard, both real and virtual. Created in collaboration with Isabella Winthrop using software that creates sentences, melodies, and singing, YONA produces original compositions via a complex text-to-speech process. Ash and YONA will perform “self-generated” love songs, pushing the boundaries of emotion and humanity in machine collaboration.
Stay for the talk-back with Ash, composer and National Sawdust co-founder Paola Prestini and Tateo Nakajima for insights into performance in the digital world and more.
The broadcast will take place at 3pm Eastern / 12pm Pacific.
More than ever, our city needs a home that welcomes and celebrates music in all its forms and vibrancy. Match for Music: Double Your Donation to National Sawdust today to strengthen our resiliency and keep our doors open to support artists’ livelihoods, digitally and in the future. Every dollar you contribute will be matched 1:1 by our Board Chair Kevin Dolan and President Jill Steinberg up to $300,000. Thank you for anything you can do to help National Sawdust continue to connect us all through the gift of music. Donate here: https://nationalsawdust.org/give-today/