Sarah Vitak
Body Doubling
The shape of anxiety, made visible
There are few things more exciting than the moment of recognition that passes through a story shared; an axon making contact with the next neuron; a bridge stretching over a divide. Sarah Vitak’s (they/she) work finds points of connection in stories that others might miss. Their experience in journalism, installation and audiovisual art, and science allows them to lead us into new and exciting worlds like an immersive balloon-neuron brain, a micro-organism petting zoo, or a medical storytelling podcast.
Body Doubling is a project that has been brewing for more than seven years. Through an interactive audio installation, Sarah explores the relationship between our physical bodies (along with the reactions that happen inside of it) and storytelling. It explores anxiety and dysregulation in a way we had not seen before. This year’s Festival of New Performance will be the first time they can gauge the way that a live audience interacts and responds to the piece, which, hopefully, will give them tools to develop and further polish the experience to then be shared with podcast/audio maker/media festivals.
More about the artists:
Sarah’s audio work has won a Webby and a Signal Award. In 2023, they were selected as an Audio Tune Up Mentee at RESONATE.
They were an Art-Science resident with Guerilla Science in 2018 and were shortlisted for the Ginkgo Bioworks Creative Residency in 2020. They have received two Awesome Foundation Grants and were shortlisted for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Off-Center Residency in 2021. That same year, they participated in Odyssey Works’ Experience Design Incubator.