Jason Akira Somma (B.F.A. ’02) is used to receiving awestruck reactions. “That’s okay, I’ll give you a minute,” he says, laughing.
Somma is a multimedia artist whose images and performances incorporate technology he’s invented and engineered using scrap parts. In a piece for Manhattan’s Location One gallery, he created an interactive hologram of iconic dancers such as Mikhail Baryshnikov that spectators could control. For some performances he works as a sort of video deejay, creating the visuals in real time, sometimes interacting with a dancer and playing with feedback. He’s been dubbed a “glitch art” pioneer for his still images of video interference. But technology scares the hell out of him.
“That’s why I work with it,” says Somma. “What better way to confront it than to have dancers who have a physical presence with their bodies interact with it?”
Somma’s education started in visual arts at another art school but something was off. He found the experience “anti-communal” and started flailing – literally – in trying to describe it. Somma, who had a visual arts and dance background, says his wild gesturing and loss of words caused an epiphany.
“I realized I’m an artist but I know nothing about my body. If I know nothing about the vessel in which I live in and yet this is how we take in information around us then how can I call myself an artist? So I thought if I’m going to study dance, I want to focus on the psychology of kinesthetics and what people are saying when they’re not saying anything. I wanted to know the inner workings of the body.”
“VCU’s dance program was very unique in the training, all the different classes and techniques from around the world that we learned, and all the different body conditioning techniques. The faculty was really amazing. Plus, you’ve got one of the best sculpture programs.”
As a Dance and Choreography major, Somma took advantage of VCUarts’ interdisciplinary focus by inviting sculpture students to collaborate. “Those kinds of dialogues are great and it completely informed my dance practice.”
Thanks, in part, to the freedom and diversity of his training, Somma’s practice often centers around non-traditional dancers. He gained notoriety for a performance and film he created with 89-year-old professor Frances Wessells that premiered at the Chaillot National Theater in Paris. “The theater director told me, ‘it is not every day that an American can come in and make us cry and move us in this way.’ That was probably my proudest moment.”
Much of Somma’s work is about bringing awareness back to the spectator, whether it be through a surreal video distortion of the spectator, or watching movements of a dancer with a unique body type. “It makes you question your own abilities.”
Somma’s first solo museum show opened in The Hague in October 2015, and he is now working on a film project with refugees who are overcoming trauma through movement therapy. He’s also excited about an ongoing collaboration with a group of street in East New York, Brooklyn.
Somma’s creativity has brought him to a place he never expected to be: in demand for high-end technology consulting for the likes of MIT, Disney and artist Marina Abromovic.
“I’ve been in a room with MIT engineers wondering what the hell I could tell them but I’ve realized the power of creativity and objectivity – the power to rethink the whole thing.”
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