ChaoticArtCircus 2000 – 2001 San Francisco

ChaoticArtCircus 2000 – 2001 San Francisco

ChaoticArtCircus 2000 – 2001 San Francisco

ChaoticArtCircus 2000 – 2001 San Francisco

the wild & woolly days…

ChaoticArtCircus: The Concept, The Collective, The Impact

ChaoticArtCircus was born out of urgent necessity and community. As an artist hustling to make ends meet, I was connecting with artists and performers across the SF/Bay — all of us hungry for work. From my production and performance experience, built from major concert work, I could create gigs at any scale. So I organized everyone together. Business-wise, it was collective force when approaching venues. CAC grew out of those connections, incubated at the OmniCircus Robotics Lab through multiple shows — the concept was right in front of me.

ChaoticArtCircus (1999–2001) functioned as a living lab for audience interactivity and multi-sensory art. By blending avant-garde dance and cosplay with robotics and complex projection systems, the project reimagined the traditional concert as a spatial installation. It was my manifesto on performance—challenging, immersive, and designed to ignite the entire venue through a synergy of technology and sound. The music ripped.

• Conceptually: It functioned as a multimedia ecosystem where live performance, sensors and visuals reacted in real time—a pre‑VR exploration of “chaotic symmetry.” This was a decade ahead of comparable installations becoming standard in festivals or museum performance spaces.
• Culturally: In San Francisco’s late‑’90s tech‑arts climate, ChaoticArtCircus aligned with Burning Man‑era innovation and the city’s ethos of art‑tech crossover. It helped define the local narrative that digital art could coexist with analog virtuosity.
• Artistically: My compositions set the standard bearer for this format — propelling artistic intuition, movement, and reaction across every element of the show. Reframing fusion guitar and theater into a wider performance vocabulary: not an isolated display of chops, but a living, reactive environment. That’s still rare, even in 2026.
• Musically: many of the compositions that would later form the Composition album took shape onstage, with arrangements unfolding live.
• Legacy-wise, ChaoticArtCircus expanded my role from musician to art technologist, laying the groundwork for later projects like FlashBangBoom and the JamWow Fusion Festival.

More broadly, it demonstrated that elite musicianship could drive tech-based art—not serve as background to it.

The Pivot

By 2001, CAC was the thing—the vision fully being realized. The third ChaoticArtCircus was locked. The infrastructure teams were ready. The band and performers were excited. Everything was converging for the October 5, 2001 performance. Then…

September 11, 2001.

The show still happened—exactly as planned. No compromises. But everyone felt it: the world had shifted. Fear crept in. Dot-com funding evaporated. People dispersed from San Francisco. That chapter closed almost overnight.

There was no time to sit around – rent & bills were still due.

And immediately, the Musicians Showcase ignited in San Francisco. From September 2001 through July 2002, over forty showcases lit up the Red Devil Lounge on Polk Street. Weekly press. Players arriving from everywhere. Community, momentum, sound—it was ON!

ChaoticArtCircus didn’t disappear — it transformed…

The beautiful soundscape album for ChaoticArtCircus: “Chaos Is Your Destiny” Kelli Wise composer. Integral to the live events. GoTo AllMusic.com

CAC3 Band Members : Lindsey Boullt –  composer/producer; Atma Anur – drums; Pete Kinkead – percussion;  Stu Hamm – bass; Julnar Rizk – violin; Ray Sayre – guitar; Kristy Gledhill – keys; Marcelo Nicoli-bass (CAC 1&2)