CAPTCHA collective
CAPTCHA collective is an amalgamation of creatives and thinkers experimenting with art and technology to imagine our intersecting collective futures. Working in dance, music/sound, Virtual Reality, Drag, visual art, performance, and immersive experience based practices we engage futurism through a queer techno spiritual lens while questing the boundaries of identity and ownership in the realm of collective work, with each other and technological beings.
CAPTCHA collective was built to formalize an interlocking rhizome of working relationships between artists across California, connecting two emergent art and technology scenes in Los Angeles and the Bay Area containing individuals working to disrupt the development of oppressive social norms in virtual and practical reality spaces. Started in 2023, the members formally collected in 2024 and acquired fiscal sponsorship from Gray Area to further ground our work in conversation with a lineage of experimental art & technology programming and artists. We work independently and bring our own lens and skill sets to each other’s practices and to new works that we form together building a model that supports and uplifts resourced and supportive collective art making.
Collective Members
(he/they) is a trans conceptual artist and Drag performer based in the Bay Area. Through sculpture, installation, and performance he gives form to semiotic and social boundaries meant to govern our identity, sense of worth, and communal relations. Their performance work lives in a contemporary and almost ready-made aesthetic, uniting the artist’s hand with the robot’s manufactured one. His practice is an amalgamation of influences ancient and new, from Greek ruins to TikTok dance trends. They make work that holds space to witness and experience both dissonant and harmonious meetings of materials, concepts, and forms.
Nick Navarro aka Pseuda Name
(they/them) is a multimedia performance artist performing based in San Francisco. They use queer nightlife aesthetics, practical special effects, technology and drag performance structure as devices, creating emotionally charged images that build to sublime climax. Their work is grounded in empathy with the characters they embody, using these antiheroes as avatars to explore identity, otherness and to create space for mutual catharsis with performer and audience. They have performed nationally and abroad as 1/3 of art collective Toxic Waste Face. In 2021 they were artist in residence at CounterPulse for their Combustible Residency. In addition to their personal performance practice, for the past three years they have co-produced "Princess", a weekly drag show at Oasis nightclub which has toured nationally and become one of the countries most notable drag shows. They also work as an in-house designer and video creator at Oasis nightclub for their many drag shows and cabarets.
is a mexican artist settling on Ohlone Territory. As a sound and lighting artist, she has mainly collaborated on movement-based theatre works and sound concerts. GG enjoys every opportunity to explore improvisational scores and seeks to compliment whatever poetic dichotomy that is longing to be found. artistically, she is held by tight-knit ancestral relatives, a hungry earth, queers that push back, special orbs above us, Aretha Franklin, and the mise-en-scène of every living moment. GG is currently serving as the Producing Technical Director at the San Francisco experimental dance venue CounterPulse and for the Weaving Spirits, 2 Spirit Performing Arts Festival. You can also hear GG’s sound works in collaboration with cellist transcriptions01 in the sound bath series Resting Between the Waveforms and Coraiñia, an improvisational concert alongside Stephanie Hewett and Tyler Holmes. And most recently, a sound design in collaboration with gizeh muñiz vengal and Ernesto Peart Falcón in Islas Breves (2022) and Auiga (2024), movement based world premieres.
(he/they) is a mixed Filipino drag king and show producer in LA’s queer punk scene. With an aesthetic ranging from Kpop to rococo, he explores the wide range of masculinity and identity outside the bounds of toxic whiteness. He is also a videographer and content creator for a number of drag shows in LA.
(they/them) is a queer multidisciplinary artist, producer and performer. They have been making work both independently and collaboratively in the Bay Area since 2011 in various mediums such as music, video, and drag. Their work often deals with the reckoning of their own queer identity through the intersections of trauma and mental health, resulting in a horrific and comical mix of abjection and absurdity.
X Medianoche
(they/she) is an artist working in sound, video, installation, print and performance with a focus on spatial & multichannel audio installation. Often utilizing their artwork as prayers and spells for union, X’s work confronts and suspends itself amongst their viscous relationship to technology and spirituality. In June 2024, X completed an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have collaborated on sound design projects with OYSTERKNIFE at Grace Cathedral and Paz G at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. Their work is made possible by god, spirit guides, angels, love, friends, teachers, time travel, strangers, music, mistakes, saturn, sound healing, synchronicities and probably you.