We find ourselves in a cultural moment where art emerges from focus groups and market analytics, where algorithms predict our desires before we feel them, where even experimental theater arrives pre-digested and ready for consumption. Cultural Drifts celebrates those moments when a sentence refuses to resolve itself, when a gesture on stage hangs incomplete, when dialogue creates a tingling sensation of almost-but-not-quite understanding. These experiences retune our senses like unfamiliar exercises whose benefits reveal themselves only through practice. We know that certain forms of art, like poetry, make nothing happen – and in that very refusal to happen lies their power to alter how we perceive the world.

The Buddhist concept of neti neti – neither this nor that – speaks to our condition: we find ourselves on a moving train, its destination not of our choosing. Holding too tightly to our seat only makes the journey more jarring, more likely to leave us disappointed when the train takes an unexpected turn. But from our window, we can see other trains moving in different directions, carrying different stories, different possibilities. This is the human condition: perpetual motion, perpetual change. The trick is learning to look outward even as the ground beneath us shifts.

We live in an era where algorithms vomit out endless variations of the same stories, where Netflix categories have replaced genuine discovery, where even our dreams arrive pre-packaged and market-tested. Against this machinery of sameness, we position ourselves as experimenters in discomfort. We’re interested in those moments when the body doesn’t know how to respond to an image or a sound, when language fails to categorize what’s happening on stage, when the familiar grammar of entertainment breaks down and something else – raw, undigested, possibly useless – emerges. These are the moments when culture stops being a museum of dead certainties and becomes a laboratory of live questions.

We claim no allegiance except to the pursuit of alternative ways of seeing. We begin with the radical acknowledgment of birth’s lottery – that no one chooses their initial conditions, their body, their place, their time. This recognition becomes our foundation for discussing fairness, justice, and beauty. We know that facts alone don’t change minds, that respect for tradition often becomes the rationalization for maintaining oppressive status quos, that all art is political – yes, including Robert Ryman’s monochromes and John Cage’s 4’33”.

Like Bartleby, we believe the ideal stance for an artist is to declare “I would prefer not to.” We embrace the role of trickster, traitor, the one who becomes deliberately disloyal to tribe and ethnicity. These acts of disloyalty create the conditions for new ways of seeing, like the unexpected pleasure of touch in an unexplored erogenous zone – a sensation that reconfigures one’s entire bodily awareness.

We assert that all art, like science, is a form of research into sensations and ideas. Great art should crack open the sensory world, making it impossible to return to previous modes of perception – like the cave-dweller in Plato’s allegory who, having seen the sun, can never again be content with shadows.

Through performances, writings, plays, films, and interviews, we bring forth voices that have been systematically overlooked – not as victims requiring sympathy, but as autonomous beings demanding to be heard on their own terms. Our events are designed to create bodily sensations akin to arousal – a form of political foreplay that gradually guides audiences into emotional and intellectual spaces where political realignment becomes not just possible but inevitable.

Cultural Drifts exists to make visible what others choose to rationalize away. We are not here to comfort. We are here to awaken and transform, to make return to the familiar impossible. We seek not the polite nods of agreement that maintain the status quo, but the visceral shock of recognition that precedes transformation – that moment when the body knows what the mind has yet to accept.