Claudia Pagès is in residence in Studio 1—Goodman.

Korakrit Arunanondchai, along with Alex Gvojic and Aaron David Ross, is in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to develop a live work of immersive cinema. The project involves the use of atmospherics, projection, and new footage and recordings from an in-progress film Arunanondchai has been developing around a decaying cinema in Thailand.

In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès Rabal, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power.

Her recent work often swerves from intriguing cultural symbols to the raw material structures that underlie them and back to the unstable substance of language. A recent work Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe at SculptureCenter New York focused on a Moorish cistern successively rebuilt across many centuries, such that each architectural update coincided with new forms of displacement and cultural erasure. Through performance, video, and sculptural installation with a custom-made LED screen she fabricated, Pagès and her collaborators move through the graffiti in the cistern. The marks on its walls become a kind of found score that enlivens a complex flow of economic exchange and evolving cultural systems.

Pagès’s work often occupies what the artist refers to as the gerund: a space of language and movement that is detached from any particular subject.

Circulating, administering, grouping, and ungrouping—Pagès’s projects explore how discrete actions turn into endless tracings of motion and generate new forms of power. Pagès is particularly interested in the cultural life of logistics, often focusing on patterns of trade as they are reflected in material culture.

In this program, Critical Intimacies: Feminist Imaginative Technologies, artist and filmmaker Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, together with writer and film/performance researcher Katie Kirkland, offer an experimental lecture through dialogue and the exchange of films and texts.

Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland explore the feminine and anti-colonial gaze across performance, video, and cinema. How can we practice critical intimacy within the realm of art, cinema, and theory, i.e. how can we de-construct and construct simultaneously? How can we transform tools of oppression into tools of liberation?

Focusing on feminist forms of resistance and re-enactment, kinship and transmission, Nguyen-Chi and Kirkland center on female artists and theorists with ancestry from East and Southeast Asia whose work grapples with legacies of Western imperialism.

As they discuss specific artistic and theoretical works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Anocha Suwichakornpong, and others, they consider the use of hybridity to resist epistemic violence, cultivate self-reflexivity, and build critical intimacy.

Through this program, Nguyen-Chi also explores approaches and themes relevant to her work on the forthcoming film project Letter to the Father (working title), which will be co-produced by EMPAC.

Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić develop a new version of their performance Permanent Trespass while in residence. They draw on projection, sound, and stage possibilities of Studio 1—Goodman to expand the work—originally script-based—into a kind of cinepoem. After premiering the commissioned new performance, the artists remain in residence to edit the film version of the project, which debuts at NW Aalst as part of Bassem Saad’s exhibition Century Bingo.

Sharlene Bamboat is in residence with collaborator Kaija Sirala to develop Bamboat’s one-channel, feature-length Both, Instrument & Sound into a multi-channel installation. Working in Studio 1—Goodman, the pair test out the project across multiple screens and draw on the immersive audio capabilities of the venue to edit the installation’s sound score.

Artist Julia Phillips is in residence to film and test scenes for Pentasomnia, a work intended to become a five-channel video installation. At EMPAC with her collaborators, she develops key movement scenes with a choreographer, uses rear projection to test scenarios for further filming, and undertakes some outdoor shooting.

Kite’s artistic practice draws from Indigenous Lakȟóta ontologies to consider the possibility of kindred collaboration with technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this engagement, the artist centers the concept of the “visual score,” a form of experimental music notation that contains symbolic forms for performers to read and interpret.

Open Rehearsal—December 5

Performance artist, visual artist, and composer Kite engages with Rensselaer student musicians in a workshop for dream scores. Audience members are invited to observe an open rehearsal as Kite leads the student ensemble in her artistic practice, discussing the musical potentials of experimental notations/scores when interpreted and embodied through sound. Attendees will also observe as Kite leads students through building scores using their own visual language, drawing on personal references and dreams.

Performance—December 6

Kite’s performances often use custom-made interfaces that bring the body into contact with the machine—such as a Machine Learning hair-braid interface—to address ethical ways of being in relation with the non-human. Kite derived this performance’s graphic notation as a score from the geometric shapes and symbols of traditional Lakȟóta quillwork and beadwork, as well as shapes and symbols that appear in dreams. The performance is followed by a discussion and Q&A session with the audience.

In this performance and video installation, Marina Rosenfeld makes the American premiere of her commissioned work μ (mu). Louis Chude-Sokei accompanies the artist on transacoustic piano and Ben Vida performs alongside Rosenfeld during the event. Titled after the mathematical term for friction or touch, and inspired by the artist’s longstanding interest in turntablism, the work takes place along the surface of a dubplate at the moment of inscription.

In μ (mu), Rosenfeld has figured the dubplate (a one-off, hand-cut record) as a distinct audiovisual landscape—here, it is a scene that stages sonic and visual events activated by friction. Rather than merely playing the digital audio embedded in the record, μ (mu) explores surface phenomena along the material of the dubplate itself, capturing footage and images at an incredibly small scale as it traces the path of a sculptural stylus designed by Rosenfeld.

μ (mu) engages both sound’s material conditions and, through the work’s focus on touch, its social aspects. Rosenfeld has also composed a score—in part from the video's own mise-en-scene—which integrates turntable sounds and recordings that play with noise, analog synth, and forms of abrasion.

This presentation of μ (mu) includes a piano performance with a Yamaha transacoustic piano, expanding the work's exploration of the entanglement of acoustic resonance with digital sound. A transducer piano resonates any sound sent through it, digital or acoustic.

The EMPAC installation also imagines μ (mu)’s acetate dubplates as a counterpart to traditional film (of which acetate is also an important component), proposing the project as a point where the materiality of image-making, sound, and touch collide. 

Permanent Trespass (Beirut of the Balkans & the American Century) is a performance jointly authored and performed by filmmaker Bassem Saad and writer Sanja Grozdanić that opens up a complex grammar of mourning in the face of impersonal, legal accounts of collective grief. The piece contends with the temporal, political, and intellectual fallout of so-called post-conflict societies beset by imperialist violence in the 20th century. Its plot centers on two traveling eulogists who encounter one another in a declining architectural estate. They must contend with the sense of an ending–of an epoch, of a revolution, of a regime.

Over the course of the performance, the project's characters gradually open up a dreamlike grasping after the principles of revolutions and their failures. Riffs off official political stances rupture suddenly into unfettered expressions that ride collective affects of public feeling and dissidence. The work touches on parallel histories--such as the breakdown of the former Yugoslavia and ongoing crises in and around Lebanon--as it shifts between the openly tragic and the melancholically absurd. What starts out as a formal reflection on a sort of "professional mourning" eventually unravels into a very different sort of historical reckoning.

This version of the performance, commissioned by EMPAC, expands the artists’ original script-based work to encompass a new sound score, film material, and additional experimental projection. Reflecting the artists’ iterative working method, this presentation includes material from their in-progress film of the same name, plus archival footage.

The artists approach this expanded version of Permanent Trespass as a cinepoem, building on avant-garde techniques for merging the sensibility of poetic writing with the possibilities of cinematic footage.