Shinboku
Partnering with Forgotten Futures’ trove of 20th Century electronic and electro-acoustic instruments, Erika Dohi frames her series as process: experimentation, instruction-scores, and iterative making as the performance itself.
Shaped by pianist–composer Erika Dohi* with Metropolis Ensemble and Forgotten Futures (in participation with Figure 8 Studios), Shinboku** explores the power of slowness in a culture of acceleration. Invited artists work with Forgotten Futures’ electronic and electro-acoustic instruments as process-driven tools—where experimentation, instruction-scores, and iterative making become the performance.
Rooted in Fluxus ethics—art fused with everyday life; DIY, anti-commercial, and “intermedia” practice—the series privileges process over product and radical audience access, echoing George Maciunas’s cooperative Fluxhouse spirit that reframed art as social practice.
Together, these concerts form a living laboratory for invention over imitation, and radical listening — right in downtown Manhattan where that countercultural spirit first took root.
*2025-6 Metropolis Artist-in-Residence at Rivington
**The title Shinboku refers to a sacred tree in Shinto: a vessel where spirit (kami) resides. These vintage machines feel similarly alive—temperamental, time-bearing, never the same two days in a row. (During sessions on the Fairlight CMI for Myth of Tomorrow, I often joked that if we left it overnight, it would greet everyone with a different soul in the morning.) We create—and in that slow, attentive process, presence dwells—inside human-made instruments that carry history like rings in wood. Erika Dohi, October 18, 2025
“Shinboku” is presented by Metropolis Ensemble in collaboration with Erika Dohi and Forgotten Futures, with special thanks to Candice Madey and Marinaro.
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