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The Music Center’s Black Bar Social: Dancing with the Ancestors

The Music Center’s Black Bar Social:
Dancing with the Ancestors

Provocateur: Sultan Sharrief 
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. 
The Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

RSVPs are now closed

Join us at The Music Center’s Black Bar Social for an evening with Sultan Sharrief, featuring the premiere of the AR piece Dancing with the Ancestors, a performance viewable with custom AR masks exploring ancestral themes through movement. Complementing the performance are dance workshops connecting participants to their ancestry, an interactive worldbuilding workshop, and a collaborative exercise in which participants model and engage with the narrative potentials and social impacts of generative AI and decentralized technology. Guests can also experience guided somatic healing sessions, capture live footage with a volumetric recorder and enjoy the unique AI Photo Booth. Don't miss this immersive and innovative event!

About the Provocateur

Sultan Sharrief

Sultan Sharrief is a trans-media activist, filmmaker and XR designer. His work explores the intersection of digital technologies, social impact and personal growth and enrichment. He has a BA in Film from the University of Michigan, an MS in Comparative Media from MIT and is a PhD candidate in Media Arts & Practice at USC. His directorial debut feature film, Bilal’s Stand, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and he has since produced two additional feature films, a documentary, a TV program and four virtual reality apps/experiences. In 2018, he founded the Quasar Lab at MIT, an institutional-hacking research lab that uses disruptive community organizing as a strategy for futurist design. With a custom Sufi design methodology, the lab designs decolonizing prototypes using Augmented and Virtual Reality, algorithmic data aggregation and blockchain. When not making media and organizing, Sharrief enjoys doing absolutely nothing, playing rugby and occasionally visiting the University of Michigan Ice Carving Team, which he founded in 2003. 

Join us for other Black Bar Social events!