The Frequency is an immersive theater production where one ticket holder steps into the role of the protagonist in a weekend-long mythical adventure. As the story unfolds, key moments are documented and shared with all ticket holders. The experience blends live theater with digital interaction, offering opportunities for the protagonist and select participants to engage both virtually and in person. Drawing from historical figures and events the play blurs the lines between reality and fiction, keeping the audience guessing to whats true, whats real, what lies in the past and what might the future hold.
Their convergence was accidental, sparked during a project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1971 a group of artists, botanists and other scientists got together to reconstruct ancient agricultural practices, the rituals and the art around those practices for an exhibit. What began as an innocent assignment evolved into something far more radical.
It was the botanist, Rose Hiprchibong, who started everything when she discovered something unusual in the basement of the MET. She had been cataloging preserved specimens from the Natural History Museum's archive when her colleague, the geologist Ernest Springfield, wanted to show her the polarization effects of a calcite mineral crystal. As they were looking through the crystal Mr. Springfield's Electromagnetic Field detector started picking up a repeating signal – a frequency of sorts.
At first, they dismissed it as interference from the building's aging electrical system or the subway rumbling nearby through the New York bedrock. But the pattern was too precise, too intentional – like a heartbeat. They decided to investigate further and brought together the MET agriculture team and a few fellow friends that included Dr. Jane Chen, a physicist and Miro De Santos a film maker, working on a documentary on brain science.
Initially, their gatherings were informal, more social than serious: Lunch at the recently opened Food on the corner of Prince and Wooster, which was run by artist Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Godden, late-night debates at De Santos’ loft, and spontaneous discussions after gallery openings. They discussed art and science, but their conversations often veered into critiques of the social systems taking root around them. Deregulation was emerging as an unchallenged dogma, celebrated by economists and corporate futurists alike. But they saw patterns that they realized echoed the unpredictable yet systemic ways ecosystems react under stress.
Soon, their informal gatherings grew to include others: anthropologists, philosophers, poets, and mathematicians – all drawn together by a shared sense that they were unraveling something profound that was happening around them. The initial discovery of the fern electromagnetic frequency was not pursued, it might have been the subway after all, or something that science had yet to unlock. That spark though, lit a fire.
They called themselves the Frequency, though never in public. Their conversations and discussions led them to identify similar patterns everywhere: in the growth habits of plants, in ancient art motifs, in the invisible architecture of human social systems. They began to study the world as a vast living algorithm, one that was increasingly being overshadowed by rigid artificial structures of control and regulation. The systems underpinning society were not just flawed, but fundamentally unsustainable.
Hiprchibong pointed to the plant world as a mirror for human systems: how competition and cooperation intertwined, how monocultures inevitably collapsed, and how weeds – outliers – always found a way to thrive. She had long been fascinated by the resilience and adaptability of plants, "Nature," she was fond of saying, "doesn't resist change. It embraces it, evolves with it. That's the secret of its endurance." And even if there was collapse, the systems that life emerged from used it as a catalyst for regeneration – a rhythmic up and down, a frequency of creation that was healthy.
What started as social gathering and academic discourse evolved into something more profound. The group began writing out their findings and theories in what they called the Principles of Poetic Resistance, blending ecological theory with a deeply humanist ethos. It wasn’t a manifesto but a series of interconnected ideas, poetic and yet pragmatic, about how societies might resist collapse and regenerate, in a peaceful and constructive way.
But just as the movement was gathering steam, their work was almost undone by chance, when a stack of their writings was accidentally left behind and slipped unwittingly into the hands of gallerist Geoffrey Soxen, who believed the undated manuscript was the work of Franz Kline. Kline, an Abstract Expressionist, dealt with the subject of significance and meaning in his often monochromatic work. Soxen sold it to Noles Kusum, a banker at Lehman Brothers, who then started circulating it among the city’s financial and political elite.
The Frequency panicked, realizing their ideas could be co-opted by corporate think tanks, distorted by academic protractors, or suppressed altogether. The world wasn’t ready — or perhaps, the right people hadn’t yet emerged to carry the torch.
In the winter of 1974, they made a decision. They developed an elaborate plan to hide their research, in order to preserve it. They broke up their word into fragments: thesis pages, diagrams, and artifacts encoded with their ideas. They left hints throughout the city in art installations, architectural details, and even in the growth patterns of carefully planted gardens.
Then they vanished, leaving no trace of their gatherings, no trail to follow. Rose returned to the Bronx to work quietly in urban agronomy. The artists disappeared into the noise of the burgeoning SoHo scene. Dr. Chen and Springfield vanished into academia, Miro De Santos released a single short film before fading into obscurity, only leaving a whisper of a “manifesto” that might one day reemerge.
In the late 90’s a web site for Resonance Systems, an already defunct audio equipment company, went online. It’s believed that one of the original Frequency members put it up as a digital repository of their work or at the very least a key to finding it.
Since then its been silent. Some say they're still out there, watching and waiting. Others claim their work was nothing but an elaborate piece of conceptual art. But in recent years, as artificial systems increasingly dominate our lives, some have begun to notice familiar patterns emerging in the chaos – patterns that feel less like coincidence and more like the first notes of a long-dormant frequency beginning to resonate once again.
A Daughter’s Search for the Father She Thought She Knew
By Eve Seefold (Published in the Prospect Times)
My father, Robert Seefold, was a conservationist. Not just in the professional sense—his decades-long tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was spent preserving artifacts, coaxing color from fading pigments, reconstructing the brittle edges of history—but in the way he moved through life. He believed in keeping things, in holding onto what mattered, in ensuring that time would not erase what had once been beautiful.
I knew this about him. Or at least, I thought I did.