Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo | The Datacenter Does Not Exist
March 9
Victoria Shen is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound and performance based in San Francisco.
Shen’s practice is concerned with the materiality of sound and its relationship to the human body through a lens of disruption and experimentation. She creates and manipulates custom-built sculptures and extensions specific to her body to challenge conventional methods of sound production and erode the boundaries between performer, tool, and audience.
Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls “chaotic sound” to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning. Her work resists passive consumption. Instead, the body as both subject and instrument, using movement and tactility to provoke visceral, often confrontational encounters with sound. Her performances are deliberately physical, unpredictable, and ephemeral—rejecting polish in favor of raw immediacy.
Through a discursive practice spanning sound, performance, installation, sculpture, and non-traditional means of distribution, themes of spectacle, violence, control, and gender are interrogated. The intention is not to comfort or entertain, but to destabilize: to push systems, tools, and traditions until they reveal something unexpected.
Part of ACT’s Spring 2026 Lecture Series, this program is in collaboration with the List Visual Arts Center and Non-Event.
The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. Register here.
