Having formed the Chicago performance art rap duo Princess in 2004, Alexis Gideon and Michael O’Neill worked together for about three years before going off to do their own varied things.

Guitarist O’Neill moved to Brooklyn and joined the indie-pop band The Ladybug Transistor while also collaborating with JD Samson (Le Tigre) on the art/performance band MEN and forming a Grateful Dead tribute band, High Time.

Mr. Gideon, a multi-instrumentalist, released two solo albums along with a series of video operas he’s performed in museums around the world.

“After 10 years of not working together,” Mr. Gideon says, “Michael and I decided it would be fun to collaborate on something. It started off very casually with us creating a short instrumental EP. We used a game structure to generate the songs. We would pick an element (water, air, earth, fire) and instrument out of a hat. I might get ‘water guitar,’ and I would record that and send it to Michael, who might get ‘fire drums.’ Towards the end of working on this, we looked at each other and said, ‘I guess Princess is back together.’ ”

From there, they started working on “Out There,” a sci-fi concept video album and live performance piece inspired by MTV, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars” and “Deltron 3030” that they will premiere at The Andy Warhol Museum, North Shore, on Friday before taking it around the country. “Out There” explores the power of the Divine Feminine through collaborations with JD Samson, Pittsburgh-based visual artist Jennifer Meridian and Brooklyn alt-rock trio TEEN.

“It explores the role men ought to be playing during the current cultural reckoning of misogyny,” Mr. Gideon says. “We started working on the project soon after the Women's March in 2017 — both Michael and I were in Washington. Although we didn't set out to create a piece about it, it revealed itself to us through the process. When we were about three-quarters done with what we thought was an album, we realized there was a narrative and that it should be a video.”

The Warhol was a good landing spot for the premiere because of the supportive people there and the nature of the piece.

“[It] was one of the first institutions to get behind the piece and advocate for it — especially Jose Diaz and Ben Harrison,” he says of two of the museum’s curators. “It is the perfect venue for the premiere since the piece has an affinity to Warhol's work. The very saturated bold colors in ‘Out There’ are influenced by Warhol's prints, and the theme of challenging binary gender concepts is at home at the Warhol.”

As for the role men should be playing in the culture, he says, “I think the conclusion our characters come to is that it is a time for men to be listening and supporting — not leading and dictating. A time for passive receiving.”

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.

First Published: February 28, 2019, 5:00 a.m.