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https://instagram.com/p/BWRZ6aoFRW7/ [Photo by: Josh Dookhie, Performers: Freya Olafson, James Phillips, and Lise McMillan]

CounterPulse is launching into an electrifying fall season with a series of performances that seek virtual bodies, radical bodies, quantified bodies and missing bodies through movement. We face extinction and environmental toxicity while finding resilience in community, pleasure, and corporeality. We'll kick things off with new works from Combustible, CounterPulse's newest residency program that synthesizes body-based art and creative technology. Residents Freya Olafson and Yagiz Mungan, and Kinetech Arts (Weidong Yang and Daiane Lopes da Silva), have created bold new

As technology complexifies with increasing vigor, it’s easy to overlook perhaps the most complex (and intimate) technological system: the human body. At the intersection of dance and creative technology, projectors illuminate dancers; beneath the canvas/dermis exists a intricate network of blood vessels channeling through bones that protect our organs that keep us alive. The projector and body respond to one another in an infinite debate of free will versus determinism. Chicken or egg. Does artificial technology dictate our organic movement?

It’s not immodest of me to say that CounterPulse is one of the best things that could have happened to the Tenderloin, because it’s true. Although we have been in operation at 80 Turk since March 2016, we are still the new kids on the block. The mission of CounterPulse is deeply rooted in social justice, and it is through this lens that CounterPulse engages the world. Block Fest has been a ten month laboratory for public art on the

The American Health Care Paradox The American Health Care Paradox - Why Spending More is Getting Less - is a great book for those trying to understand the gaps on the USA health care system. According to the authors, not enough money is invested in social services. They say " They continue to pay top dollar for hospitals, physicians, medications, and diagnostic testing yet skimp in broad areas that are central to health, such as housing, clean water,

Artists like Rick Lowe have changed the landscape of Art Practice in this country. In ART MATTERS we survey artists who have created major works that give us powerful models to reference, learn from, be in dialogue with as artists engaged in social change, civic engagement, and/or community engaged work. Project Row Houses, is one of the project models we'll be looking at and discussing: The mission of Project Row Houses is to be the catalyst for transforming community through

Traveling Mural Block Fest participants Late in the winter of 2016, CounterPulse’s call for artists invited me to their new home in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin.  That evening inspired the idea of a mural created on a collection of canvases made by Block Fest participants. The mural would travel around the Tenderloin and San Francisco as a showcase of collective art-making and community. I’d appropriately name the project the Traveling Mural. When I got to my studio

Where does art fit in the landscape of social justice? Through peering into social constructs, can art instigate direct action? Where is the line drawn between performance and audience, and is the most transformative art those without a clear division? These questions I pondered prior to Annie Danger's production, The White Stuff, immersing me into the experience weeks before it began. I theorized with friends, their grimacing faces inquiring “how can you promote social justice by separating races? Isn’t that, like, segregation?” The noise surrounding