In this borderland performance/dialogue, Praba Pilar and Anuj Vaidya (a.k.a. Pilarvaidya) ask: where is the future? In this program, they share stories of the queer kinship that spills across their pluriversal lives, show excerpts from their collaborations with a range of intelligences — from the artificial to the microbial and the mycelial — and theorize utopia as an everyday practice of crawling from necrotic egocentrism toward biotic ecocentrism.

Anuj Vaidya is a media maker, curator, and educator. His work draws upon a wide range of forms including theater and performance, multi-media installation, social practice, curation, and artivism. Deeply invested in collaboration, he seeks to break down the divide between artist and audience by engaging spectators not only as content consumers but also as co-creators through participatory processes. He is pursuing a PhD in performance studies at UC Davis.

Praba Pilar is an adjunct faculty member in the Critical Studies department at California College of the Arts. She holds a PhD in performance studies from UC Davis. Over the past two decades she has presented cultural productions integrating performance art, live work, digital works, video, electronic installations, radio programming, street theater, websites, and writing, which have traveled widely around the world.

Vaidya and Pilar are founding members of Larval Rock Stars, a multi-modal conceptual project encompassing digital, textual, performance, sound, and video experimentation. They visit Berkeley in conjunction with the Townsend Center's Collaborative Research Seminar on “Rethinking Futures." The Fall 2024 seminar enables a group of faculty members and graduate students to collaboratively explore "the future" cross-culturally and across time, especially in light of the many existential threats now facing humanity — including environmental crisis, war, and democracy's sudden fragility.