NÆ
NÆ is a performed persona through which I explore questions of privilege, excess, and consumption. Through performance, video, music, and sound, the project situates itself within new genre art: work that exists outside of medium specificity and instead circulates across platforms, audiences, and sites of engagement. The work unfolds across formats including livestreams, social media feeds, immersive installations, and live concerts. Within the NÆ project, I utilize the camp aesthetic as a mode of critical strategy, one that blurs distinctions between authenticity and simulation as well as high art and pop culture.
The project is developed in close collaboration with composer, producer, and musician Ryan Black, whose role is integral to the sonic, performative, and conceptual framework of the work.
Through the performance of caricatured figures derived from the visual lexicon of aspirational lifestyle marketing, most notably tropes of white feminine leisure, the NÆ body of work investigates systemic entitlement, boredom, addiction, and over-consumption as conditions of late-stage capitalism. Blending these themes with a sci-fi narrative, the work looks at how the optimism of space-age fantasy mirrors the logic of late-stage capitalism itself: a promise of endless expansion that obscures the costs of extraction and consumption.
In the essay written for the liner notes of the Orbital Ice Cream LP (2026), Philosopher H. Peter Steeves writes, “[NÆ and her collaborator Blizz] do not pretend to be above their subject matter. What they do is never parody or modernist satire, a mocking from on high. Instead, they offer up their observations and worries from within—critiquing our plastic, disposable, contentless-other-than-dreams-and-glitter culture in the way that only someone who actually loves a plastic, disposable, contentless-other-than-dreams-and-glitter, giant, inflatable unicorn named Sparkleface can do. It would be foolish, they realize, to suggest that the rainbow unicorn isn’t cute. It would be foolish to claim that an extra pump of sugary syrup in the overpriced corporate coffee isn’t delicious. But the ultimate concern, they know, is not about the endorphin rush. It’s about the larger structural, political, and ethical problems that hide behind the “let’s hang out at the mall!” mentality. And so, with love, NÆ and Blizz map our excesses and cause us to reflect and change, all while Pied Pipering us off into space to head-bopping synth beats.”
The use of craft also plays a role in the NÆ project. Craft operates as a counterpoint to mass production, asserting tactility, time, and intention within a culture of consumption. At the same time, it creates a productive tension with the project’s reliance on digital technologies like screen-mediated performance environments. The labor of making, material presence, and its imperfections remain visible in the work.
In NÆ performances, I’m influenced by Fluxus’ experimentation with play and participation, experimental cinema, and my own Midwestern America upbringing during Y2K and 1990s mall culture. To me, the themes of wonder, play, and fantasy in this work are not about escapism. Instead, they offer ways of reclaiming one’s own agency and imagination in a post-modern context shaped by consumption, branding, and spectacle.
NÆ’s second pop LP, Orbital Ice Cream, produced by Ryan Black (Blizz) will be released on vinyl in 2026.
Read the Press for NÆ on the NÆ Website.
With the launch of NÆ’s album Push Button Future, NÆ and her co-pilot Blizz (Producer and Artist Ryan Black) introduced a monthly, live-stream concert series in 2021-2022 called Saturnae: Orbital Ice Cream. In the fantastical narrative of Saturnae, the characters NÆ and Blizz have accepted the mission of being Ice Cream Ambassadors from Earth’s International Ice Cream Consortium (The IICC). Using their Music-Powered Spaceship (the MPS-88), they exchange Earthly science and culture in exchange for recipes from other planets in order to bring them back and help bolster Earth’s own retail economy.
The Saturnae: Orbital Ice Cream live series incorporated interviews with experts from various fields in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), and other areas of scientific research including academics in sociology, psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies, as well as featured guest musical artists. Contag and Black have equipped their studio as a live streaming set, including multiple cameras, green screen effects, and they incorporate handmade arts & crafts scenes. In their show, they embrace the modern digital technology blended with the DIY aesthetic of early sci-fi films.
You can learn more about Strip! The Original Strip Mall Shopping Video Game here.
JaNae Contag 