Responding to the work of Efraín Rozas.
In this issue of VAPor where we explore the intersection of art and technology, Peruvian performer, composer, and robotics/ software developer Efraín Rozas is featured. A personal, experimental and performative response to both his work and our stimulating conversation can be found below in an interactive ecosystem. This presentation can be experienced in a non-linear, and freely navigable manner which is symbolically empathetic to Rozas’ research and philosophy. The experience responds to and repeats questions posed by Rozas, reflecting on the context of his ideas while considering how how his line of deeper questioning might be used as an instructive text for individual exploration.
Following the interactive presentation there is some writing about the conversation we had with Rozas. This writing considers Still, a new work, to be created and performed during an upcoming residence at the The Kitchen, NYC in comparison to his previous cycle of work, Myth and Prosthesis, parts I to IV: Do robots have an ethnicity?; I enjoy the world; Robot, teach us to pray; Body Rhythm Data.
Instructions: After clicking present, please allow a few seconds for the content and the animations to load. Sound will autoplay when this is complete and can be silenced on the lower navigational bar. Navigate in and out of the interface with mouse scrolls and clicks, and with the navigation icons on screen. Click on content stages until you can go no further. Click arrows, scroll back, or click the home icon if it is visible to return to a previous stage. Enter full screen viewing by clicking the expanding arrows icon at the bottom right hand of the iframe. Click on the arrow icon to play embedded videos.
Efraín Rozas and I spoke over Zoom, as has become the norm. He was in the moist warmth of late summer in Lima, while I was in Vancouver, still under the influence of seasonal affective disorder. The difference in time zone and climate was blatantly obvious from the screen display: me, pale and chilled in front of bougie white IKEA shelving, bundled in a striped sweater; Efraín, a low-res apparition under wooden beams lit by sparse incandescent bulbs, sporting the unruly flair that humidity brings to human hair. The screen split us into distinct climate zones. That stark difference—in weather, in visual tone, in presence—prefigured the contrast I would soon find between Rozas’ upcoming project Still and his earlier four-part cycle, Myth and Prosthesis.
Still will be composed and then performed at The Kitchen in NYC, starting with a residency that begins shortly, as I write this, in March 2021. The Kitchen is a not-for-profit performance space with a storied and formidable legacy, with an overwhelmingly impressive provenance, founded in 1971 by video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka in response to a scarcity of venues for video art. The legacy of The Kitchen reads like an experimental art hall of fame: Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and a kaleidoscope of other avant-garde luminaries. Their website lists everyone influential you can think of, and many more you cannot. It is mind-blowingly humbling, which I say with affection and only slight cynicism.
Rozas sent me some promotional photos for Still. They show him in the standard issue black shirt and pants of contemporary minimalism, his hair tamed into a sleek ponytail. He appears against a seamless white backdrop, overlaid by a subtle grid of off white segments. He looks serene, pensive, and composed. A far cry from the mythic chaos of his earlier work.
Still will be developed at The Kitchen, composed under a controlled and minimal set of conditions: one note, four speakers, and a light that changes. The element of light is still to be determined, but Rozas is interested in how human visual perception shifts at sunrise or sunset, those liminal thresholds of vision. Still will be performed for a small audience. Given Rozas’ background and his previous robotic collaborations, you might expect this to be a fully automated experience. But no, for Still, the artist will be present.
I suspect the need to perform comes from Rozas’ Salsa roots. We spoke about how a musician reads a room, channeling and sometimes steering the crowd’s energy. Rozas aims to use the room’s resonance as the medium. Still, a Salsa club full of sweaty, hip grinding bodies feels worlds away from a pristine cube populated by well-behaved art worlders trying not to spill their prosecco.
Rozas moves between Lima and New York, a duality that inevitably weaves itself into his work. The friction between these two cities—one humid and historic, the other fast-paced and hyper-mediated—seems to echo in the aesthetic pivot from Myth and Prosthesis to Still. Lima’s layered spiritual and cultural traditions may nourish the Dionysian urgency of his earlier work. At the same time, New York’s stark, often clinical minimalism perhaps feeds the refined control of his new direction. This bi-locational life shapes his artistic sensibility, constantly toggling between intensity and restraint, ritual and concept, body and structure. I wonder if the difference in formal aesthetics between Myth and Prosthesis and Still reflects some friction or tension between those places. Also, given my educational background in Classics, I cannot help but see a contrast between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.
Nietzsche, a key influence for Rozas, crystallized this dichotomy: Apollonian mind, order, and individuation versus Dionysian emotion, chaos, ecstasy, and unity. Myth and Prosthesis sat firmly in Dionysian territory. It was a visceral exploration of self-censorship, repression, and psychological conditioning, pushing toward catharsis and release.
The first work in the cycle, Do Robots Have Ethnicity?, questioned how technology might be culturally encoded, Western biases hardwired into code. Rozas programmed a robotic drum to follow non-Western rhythmic logic, then performed with it, man and machine in mutual response. The drum became both a collaborator and an altar to his ancestors. The work rejected the myth of individual genius in favour of lineage, legacy, and cultural continuity.
The remaining works in the cycle built mystical experiments around his own body. In one performance, for example, Rozas created a ritualistic setup that involved a robotic drum and improvised chanting, performed nude under red light, which echoed both a sacrificial ceremony and a nightclub spectacle. Secrecy, ritual, psychedelia, poetry, robotics, coding, nudity, and vulnerability all came into play. It was part theatre, part invocation, part dare. Rozas sought not just to make art, but to build his own mythology.
The images from Myth and Prosthesis show a man immersed in the mess of becoming. The PR shots for Still, by contrast, show a man who has become. Or at least one who has taken a deep breath. Yet both projects share Rozas’s signature insistence on asking deeper questions about systems, histories, and the cultural frameworks shaping our reality.
Talk of Western versus non-Western inevitably slides into a comparison of capitalism versus socialism, Marxism, and beyond. But Rozas gestures toward a “third way,” one not framed by opposition but born from something more emergent. As someone with centrist political leanings, I get this. I also get the anxiety of today’s increasingly rigid binaries.
If Myth and Prosthesis was a theatrical quest for transformation, then Still is its quiet, reflective sequel. Both skirt the edge of cliche yet remain sincere. Rozas has said that one insight from his journey was the realization that we must live and let live. Cue 1970s poster art and a lounge version of Born Free. It is kitsch, sure, but also telling. In the oversaturation of irony, this kind of unadorned sentiment—even when it arrives wrapped in nostalgic cliché—can strike a nerve. Rozas seems to be aiming not for the effect of profundity but the actual thing, however slippery. And in that, perhaps sincerity becomes a radical gesture. Still, bratty ambivalence aside, I agree with the sentiment. Deeply.
There is something that connects the two hemispheres of Rozas’ oeuvre, and I suspect that thing is time.
Musicians, perhaps more than any other artist, think through time. Music is time. It cannot exist outside of it. So, for Rozas, musician and anthropologist, time becomes the core material.
Western music is built on Western ideas of time. But non-Western traditions offer nonlinear or cyclical models. The Ancient Greeks had two terms: chronos, sequential time, and kairos, a charged moment of significance.
Most early cultures leaned toward cyclical or layered temporalities. The Australian Aboriginal concept of dreamtime overlaps intriguingly with modern physics’s spacetime. But non-Western traditions offer nonlinear or cyclical models. The Ancient Greeks had two terms: chronos, which refers to sequential time, and kairos, a charged moment of significance. Most early cultures leaned toward cyclical or layered temporalities. The Australian Aboriginal concept of dreamtime overlaps intriguingly with modern physics’s spacetime.
If Rozas is using generative sound and performance to probe human consciousness, then time is not just a container; it is the content. It is the medium. Myth and Prosthesis gave him mystical glimpses of non-linear time. Still invites others into that contemplative field.
Where Myth and Prosthesis was theatrical and eruptive, Still is poised and generous. It manipulates light and sound to open space for kairos, those fleeting moments when meaning glimmers. Perhaps Rozas is once again reading the room. And perhaps, he is right, this may be the time we need now.
Photos: Promotion for Still; Documentation of Myth and Prosthesis IV: Body Rhythm Data by Sandra Arenas; Documentation of Myth and Prosthesis III: Robot, Teach us to Pray; Documentation of Myth and Prosthesis II: I Enjoy The World by Ameer Kazimi; Promotion for Myth and Prosthesis I: Do Robots have an Ethnicity? by Juan Pablo Aragón.
About the artist: Equally an artist, academic, musician, and mystic, Rozas holds a PhD from New York University on new integrations of body, mind and technology through ritual and rhythm. His time-based and performance artwork has been described by The New Yorker as “A heady confluence of technology, culture and cognition” and by Wire Magazine as “A deep psychonautic dive”. Rozas is recipient of many grants and awards who has also performed at prestigious institutions. He is currently preparing for a residency and exhibition at The Kitchen in New York City beginning March 2021.
www.efrainrozas.com IG @efrainrozas
About the writer: Jennifer Mawby is a contemporary artist and sometimes curator and art writer with a focus on projects for artists using accessible language. Jennifer is the co-founder and director of Vantage Art Projects. Her work can be found here: www.jjtmstudio.com and on Instagram: @jenniferjeanmawby.