Jessika Khazrik

A portrait of Jessika Khazrik standing next to a silver sphere against a concrete backdrop with a circular gate, holding with her raised arms a web of scintillating threads
Photo credit / Image credit
Robert Sieg

Jessika Khazrik is an artist, composer, technologist, educatress and DJ whose indisciplinary practice ranges from machine learning to performance, steganography, visual art, philosophy of intelligence and history of science and music. Khazrik works with a trans-millennial production of knowledge based on an environmental understanding of the techno-politics of voice, media, and code. While probing the unity of science and the multi-dimensionality of experience in an age that institutes separation, her indisciplinary practice revolves around the collective search and need for polymathic resonance in the 20th-21st centuries and long-term future. She holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University(LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT(US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.

Astrophysical, hyper-bodily and alchemical, Jessika Khazrik’s live musical practice is deeply devoted to communal solace, collective transcendence and trans-generational healing. With genre-defying mercurial treatments of voice, drums and space, her sonic scapes intimately investigate the ecological and techno-political premises of continua we inhabit, co-create or forget. Concocting scores from trans-millennial compendia of healing, space and biosensing technologies and on-site/online detritus, her live and hybrid sets are deeply informed by ancestral chanting traditions skewed with a quaint AI-aided techno and incomputable Iqaa.

Khazrik has been a fellow at Home Workspace Programme(2012-13), Digital Earth(2018-19), HfK Bremen(2020), SHAPE Platform(2021-22) and Art-Science Interactions Fellow at Helmholtz Center (2022-23) and is at present a visiting artist fellow at MA Live Art Forms at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg(DE, 2022-23). As technologist, she has worked on AI policy and digital rights trans-continentally and is the founder of the techno-study group ‘ قراءة الحواسيب READING COMPUTERS’, the peer- to-peer web platform and collective study group ‘POST-CORONIALISM’ and the transclusive research platform ‘Cartography of Darkness’. Having grown up around a quarry contaminated with toxic waste, she has been active in struggles for environmental justice since early adolescence.