Join us for a dynamic program of performances and activations curated by the artist collective SMARTBOMB. WAVES OF KNOWING is a gathering of energy curated by SMARTBOMB, including over twenty Bay Area artists sharing performance, visuals, films, poetry, and more. Using The Unknown, a San Francisco Art Institute gathering from 1949 as a point of departure, WAVES OF KNOWING explores the power of collective thought, motion, and creation. Rather than focusing on what is unknown in the future, this experience serves as a reminder that, with openness and presence, we already know the path and can find our way forward together.
Event Schedule
2:30–4 p.m. | Screen printing featuring Nosei Sun Room
Koret Education Center, Floor 2
Please bring items you’d like to screen print on!
3:30–6:30 p.m. | Vibration Is an Invitation
White Box, Floor 4
Live music, poetry, and video performance by:
Macro Waves
Obstacs
JAS STADE
Sarah O’Neal
IDHAZ + Emily Bouton
Agnes Martian
7:15–9 p.m. | Every Point Tells a Story
Wattis Theater, Floor 1
Film screenings and A/V performances with live music by Zachary James Watkins and Melanie Marie and films by:
Anna Firth
Lauren Geiger
GAMU GAMO / W.A.L.A
Justin Tuân Smith
Eddie Leonard & Tessa Shimizu
Billie0cean
Andrew Kodama
Jules Retzlaff & Nick Derenzi
Plus, don’t miss the Oakland Roots SC x Muzae Sesay x SFMOMA Jersey Launch happening from 5–7 p.m. on Floor 5.
About the Artists
SMARTBOMB is an Oakland-based creative community and live events/multimedia platform. Since its inception in 2013, SMARTBOMB has been widely recognized and considered a vital resource in discovering and celebrating the next great boundary-pushing and genre-defying musicians, producers, beatmakers, DJs, painters, visual artists, filmmakers, photographers, and more from the Bay Area and beyond.
Anna Firth is an independent animator from Northern California working in hybrid traditional/digital 2-D animation, community-based projects, and installations. Anna’s work draws on repetition, iteration, ecology, fragmented stories, nostalgia, light, and patterns. She animates on paper and cel in her bedroom in Oakland and teaches animation at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She currently runs the new analog animation “take-home” residency called Food, Water, Carrot alongside the curatorial project Framegrabber Animation.
IDHAZ is a producer/vocalist transporting through obscured portals to sounds of undiscovered emotion, past, future, and fractured light. He began performing poetry in 2010, and since then has become a magnetic, multidisciplinary performance artist, audio engineer, and educator in the Bay Area. Combining elements of Gameboy, beat machines, harp, synth, and genre-fluid vocals, IDHAZ creates immersive, visceral soundscapes. Emily Bouton — a violinist, visual artist, and educator who uses strings to create sonic connection points wherever they arise — will accompany IDHAZ on electric violin.
Melanie Wilson is a visual artist and creative coder based in Oakland. She creates real-time, generative performances using live coding — writing and manipulating it on the spot to generate evolving 3-D visuals and video synthesis. Her performances have a layered, collage-like quality, using tools like Blender, Hydra, Python, and JavaScript to explore the intersection of sound, motion, and form. Melanie’s work often unfolds in collaboration with musicians, bringing together music and visuals in immersive, spontaneous compositions.
Billie Ocean (Laneya Billingsley) creates work that rinses your heart in the palm of her hand and powders sugar over your melancholy. Billie’s conceptual video and photo work pushes the boundaries of storytelling by spewing the subconscious into the conscious, giving sight to feeling, breath to thought, and retrieving power where it was lost. Her bubblegum afrofuturistic work blends millennial aesthetics, horror, fantasy, and asmr into unforeseen worlds to reveal beautifully mysterious truths that bite and soothe at the same time.
Zachary James Watkins studied composition at Cornish College and received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2006. Zachary has received commissions from The Empyrean Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, The Switch Ensemble, Density512, sfsound, The Living Earth Show, Kronos Quartet and the Seattle Chamber Players among others. In 2025, Zachary received an NEA grant to compose and premiere the new work Exciting Sites of Opposition III for The LAB SF featuring multidisciplinary artist Lisa E. Harris and bassoonist Jamael Smith.
Agnes Martian was started by Benjamin Rodgers and Zekarias Thompson in 2019 as a weekly ritual of unbounded sonic exploration.. The band’s first album, The Future Light Cone (Altered States, 2022), oscillates between long-format meditation and propulsive groove and features vocals by NYC–based poet gideon hart and drums by Icelandic composer Pétur Eggerts. Their second album, Coincidence (Centripetal Force, 2024), is a collection of improvisations recorded at the band’s studio in Oakland together with Laraaji, Music for Connection, and Hair and Space Museum. Recent live performances have solidified a consistent lineup of Rodgers and Thompson joined by frequent collaborators Phillip Laurent (synthesizers) and Devon Ferrucci (percussion).
Macro Waves is a Bay Area–based creative collective producing experiences centered on social justice, conceptual art, new media, and design. As artists, designers, and technologists of color, the collective embraces collaboration in their creative practice of transforming spaces into places for human connection, exploration, and play. Using technology and participatory design, Macro Waves experiments with augmenting spatial environments, disrupting human senses, and engaging in social discourse. Their practice focuses on introspective work around ancestry, intergenerational experiences, and collective care. The collective was founded in 2015 by Robin Birdd David and Jeffrey Yip and includes members Anum Awan, Dominic Cheng, and Ruka Kashiwagi.
OBSTAC is a sometimes-organizer and artist in Bay Area DIY art communities. Their primary practices blend sound, visual art, and environmental design with spontaneous, experimental event production. They often collaborate with local collectives to create inclusive, joy-driven spaces in hopes of fostering human connection beyond the limits of traditional capitalist structures.
Sarah O’Neal is a Moroccan and Black artist and writer born and raised in the Bay Area. Sarah’s work grapples with the impact of colonial violence on familial memory and our most intimate relationships. Her writing has been featured in the Institute for Palestine Studies, The Nation, and Bandcamp. When she is not writing, you can find her scheming on the end of empire, swimming laps, or on IG @atayqueen and Substack @bintelnass
Lil’ Zen Ten is the visual art pseudonym of longtime Smart Bomb affiliate Justin Tuân Smith, a San Francisco–based multidisciplinary artist whose other exploits include music and film. He has directed and animated several music videos as well as a series of conversations between Bay Area rap legends Andre Nickatina and Mistah F.A.B. featuring Mac Dre. He is also the cofounder and curator of TigerBunny Studio, an art gallery dedicated to showcasing emerging artists.
Eddie Leonard is an Oakland-based beatmaker obsessed with vintage samplers and who still saves his beats on floppy disks and zip drives. Known for his raw, experimental boom-bap beats and engaging online content, he’s built a dedicated community of hardware heads through YouTube and Patreon. His music and content inspire people to dig into old machines and start creating music on their own terms.
Tessa Shimizu is a Japanese American visual artist and contributing member of SMARTBOMB, born and raised on the border of France and Switzerland. Driven by the world around her, she translates her observations and understandings primarily through the tools of analog photography and video work. Further inspired by the intangible, ethereal, and textural qualities found when recalling dreams and memories, she blends those elements back into her work, representing the liminal space between one’s day-to-day reality and the surrealness of the subconscious.
After residing in Oakland for twelve years, she is embarking on a new chapter in Ōsaka, Japan, for a deeper dive into her heritage while continuing to evolve and expand her creative work.
Founded in 1972 by Larry Reed, ShadowLight Productions expands awareness of shadow theater as both a traditional and evolving art form. Reed, one of the first Westerners trained as a Balinese dalang (shadow master), invented cinematic shadow theater, fusing ancient techniques with modern filmic approaches. The company preserves indigenous shadow traditions worldwide while pushing the medium through innovative, interdisciplinary works. Performed on a 15’x30’ screen, productions combine silhouettes of puppets, actors, dancers, and cutout sets illuminated by multiple light sources to create live cinematic effects, developed collaboratively with artists across disciplines and cultural perspectives.
Laur is an interdimensional mixed-media artist working across the realms of performance, video, fashion, and installation. They work through a process of vision articulation to bring forth the complex unseen worlds of the spiritual, emotional, cultural, and mental into an embodied form of visceral image, choreography, or stylization. Their work builds characters, stories, and worlds, aiming to connect with people through sensory experience to unlock new perspectives on existence. They value portraying strong internal/external conflicts while elevating the true essence of the person/people of focus. Their work is to get free in the pursuit of individual and collective truths and ascension. Recent contributions to the creative ecosystem include: Visual-Spatial Dramaturgy for Amy Grace Lam’s 2025 Rainin Award supported work, Out of the Box, which held two technical residencies at Z Space, San Francisco, 2024; Creative Direction for Aroma’s “Piss Off” music video, 2024; and starred in and directed the film, Living Inheritance, which premiered at Roxie Theater, San Francisco, September 2025.
Drawing upon her background in classical guitar & art rock (as 1/3 of Oakland band Gumby’s Junk), Jas Stade blends whimsy & technicality into an ever-shifting sonic landscape. Smoke & Mirrors, Jas’ debut album released in the summer of 2025, is a textural delight for the world of guitar music. Recorded to 1/4 inch tape in the woods of West Marin, Smoke & Mirrors is meditative, tongue in cheek, and best enjoyed late at night. Tracks shift from wobbly, surreal walls of sound to crisp fingerpicked ditties. Improvisational shimmering tones mingle with fingerstyle and folk in this enchanting kaleidoscope of sound.
Nick DeRenzi is a first generation Chicano – Oaxaca – american photographer from the SF Bay Area. Starting from a young age, Nick has been using photography as his main medium for nearly 15 years continually documenting the world, communities and cultures around him. He has a BA in Political Science from San Francisco State University and studied photography part time at both the Academy of Art and City College of San Francisco. His formal education has influenced his photography and storytelling praxis, each from their own vantage point but collectively expressed in the images he captures & chooses not to. After his time at SFSU, Nick joined the Abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, where he gained skills in grassroots community organizing and storytelling for advocacy. Nick also curates accessible community programming to empower others to use the camera as a way to tell their stories and preserve history.
Jules Retzlaff is a born and raised San Francisco queer housing organizer and experimental multimedia-maker.