NÆ
My recent work involves the NÆ persona. NÆ’s musical allegories of her 2021 album Push Button Future and its surrounding body of work illustrate the cyclical dichotomies of white privilege. Through the use of multiple caricatures of white women shown in video, performance, and sound, I investigate systemic entitlement, boredom, addiction, and over-consumption as a result of privilege. The various caricatures are flippant; dominated by an insatiable thirst for social status and personify the hapless results of aspirational lifestyle marketing.
Isolazen, my current project as the NÆ persona, transitions to exploring American consumerism from a personal, intimate vantage point. While NÆ’s Push Button Future performances critique the lack of self-awareness as a symptom of systemic entitlement, Isolazen is fiercely self-aware of the overlap between consumerism, health trauma, and escapism. Isolazen will be released in late Spring, 2023.
I present NÆ in music, music videos, live and virtual performances, virtual reality experiences, and immersive installations. I often exhibit NÆ in intimate spaces – both physical and virtual. These spaces and each NÆ performance within them engages viewers with the meaning of the songs by encouraging interaction. I have presented this work in interactive installation rooms, public library engagement events, art galleries, concert venues, in a video game, and on live-streaming platforms. Through interaction, I challenge the viewer/listener to reflect upon their own status and power.
Read the Press for NÆ on the NÆ Website.
With the launch of NÆ’s album Push Button Future, NÆ and her collaborator Blizz (Producer and Artist Ryan Black) introduced a monthly, live-stream concert series in 2021 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.
Saturnae: Orbital Ice Cream incorporates 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 technology of today combined with the DIY aesthetic of early sci-fi films. Saturnae: Orbital Ice Cream is educational, humorous satire, and features both improvisation and original music.
You can learn more about Strip! The Original Strip Mall Shopping Video Game here.
JaNae Contag 