ACMI, Now or Never & Soft Centre present
PARA.CINE
Team Rolfes & The Mustang Speedrun, Eek, Kirby Casilli, Tina Stefanou
Tickets
When
Tue 26 Aug 2025
A night of expanded cinema and real-time virtual performance. See two world premiere works commissioned by Eora’s trailblazing new media curators SOFT CENTRE.
Hearsay, by Narrm-based artists Eek, Kirby Casilli, and Tina Stefanou, is an extended filmic performance that transforms the cinema into a zoological amphitheatre. Blending moving image, contemporary performance, hypnotism, and sound, Hearsay meditates on the erosion of trust — and the ways in which perception, through body, memory, state, means, and the other, undergo reconstruction and distortion.
Team Rolfes & The Mustang Speedrun is the latest chapter from NYC’s masters of real-time virtual theatre. Following the success of club theatre variety show Diskokina and an international tour of their critically acclaimed 321Rule, Team Rolfes returns with a chaotic audiovisual sprint: a misfit crew of avatar jockeys struggles to keep their failing exoskeleton operational as they speed toward a surreal championship. Brought to life via live motion capture, cinematic game engine animation, and avant-garde club musicians, The Mustang Speedrun will make you rethink the traditional cinema experience.
Credits
Curators / Producers: SOFT CENTRE
Team Rolfes & The Mustang Speedrun: Sam Rolfes, Andy Rolfes
Hearsay: Henry Lai-Pyne – Eek, Tina Stefanou, Kirby Casilli
Producer: Ari Tampubolon
Commissioned by Now or Never
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
Presented with
Artists
Team Rolfes
Team Rolfes is an NYC-based virtual performance and image studio founded by directors Sam Rolfes and Andy Rolfes, developed to pioneer real-time narrative animation with VR puppets, motion-captured abstract avatars and viscerally intense imagery derived directly from the nuances of human motion.
Honed through years in the NYC avant garde club and theatre worlds, Team Rolfes' practice has expressed itself across a spectrum of formats, from live theatrical animation on stage, to co-direction of the 'virtual club theatre' event series Diskokina, livestream improvisational comedy, print design for fashion collections, album covers, and music videos for collaborators including Lady Gaga, Arca, Danny Elfman, Holly Herndon, Danny L Harle, Metallica, Amnesia Scanner, Lunice, Dezel Curry, Nike, Adult Swim, and music festivals across the world.
Eek
Henry Lai-Pyne aka Eek is a Naarm/Melbourne based new-media artist working across moving image, live multi-media performance, game design, and broadcasting. His work considers relationships between the human and screen-focused technology and media. Henry’s practice often involves ‘kitbashing’, the merging of mixed-medium processes and found matter for visual storytelling.
Henry’s individual and collaborative work has been presented at MoNA, Soft Centre, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, ACMI, Liquid Architecture, Arts House, AsiaTOPA, and AIDLAB Hong Kong.
Tina Stefanou
Tina Stefanou is an undisciplined artist working across performance, film, music, voice, sculpture and socially engaged practice. Her work explores the performative power and potential of vocality to materialise immaterial relations between humans, animals, infrastructures and forces. Through experimental ethnography Stefanou develops long-term and co-creative collaboration with diverse interspecies communities and this usually takes the form of site-specific environments for film.
Stefanou has exhibited, performed, and published widely, with presentations at venues including Salt Museum, Istanbul; Kadist, Paris; e-flux, New York; Le Pavé d'Orsay, Paris; University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz; Sydney Opera House, Gadigal Country/Sydney; Gertrude Contemporary, Naarm/Melbourne and many more.
Kirby Casilli
Kirby Casilli (b. 1993) is an artist, performer, and curator based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across movement, improvisational song, sound, and garment-making, their practice moves through embodiment, transformation, and collision, guided by intuition and play.
SOFT CENTRE
Described as ‘ecstatic, extreme and staunchly experimental’, SOFT CENTRE events are distinctively extra sensory. Since its inception at the Casula Powerhouse in 2017, SOFT CENTRE has championed the fringes of electronic music, sound art, contemporary dance, performance art, light works and new media art. Included in Resident Advisor’s Top Ten festivals globally (June 2023) and winner of FBi Radio’s Best Music Event (2017 & 2018), SOFT CENTE stands out for its cutting-edge cross-disciplinary programming, innovative use of unconventional public space and dedicated community.
Alongside the flagship festival in Gadigal/Sydney, SOFT CENTRE has produced major programs and commissions for MONA, Dark MOFO, Svbkvlt (China), Vivid, FIBER (Amsterdam), Now Or Never and the Sydney Opera House.
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