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logs on fire

Grounds of Coherence / the language we met in

Shen Xin

Shen Xin and Ali Van are in a remote residency, working on spatializing audio as well as improvisational approaches of engaging audiences for their presentation of a new live program as AX Archive, inspired by Shen Xin’s film Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in.

Main Image: Film still: Grounds of Coherence, 2023. Courtesy the artist. 

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drawings on a table

µ (mu)

Marina Rosenfeld

µ (mu)—whose title refers to the physics equation for friction—considers the physical genesis of sound. A visual and sonic inquiry into a turntable dubplates’ (material) grooves. Rosenfeld will record a microscopic region of the dubplate through sound and video. 

In January in the EMPAC Theater, Rosenfeld will undertake research and early-stage production for µ (mu).

In April, Rosenfeld will return to work on the post-production for the new video of µ (mu)

Main Image: Marina Rosenfeld, The Agonists, 2023. Mixed media and sound, installation detail, Museum Art Plus, for Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2023.

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Peli Grietzer

Worldmaking in Art and AI

Peli Grietzer

Scholar Peli Grietzer’s research asks what machine learning can tell us about the structures of ambient aesthetics–moods, vibes, and other qualities that give us the sense of an artwork’s (or art world’s) formal unity. In a noted 2017 essay A Theory of Vibe, Grietzer had addressed these artistic structures through the framework of autoencoders—neural networks trained to develop visual representation algorithms for digital media. He argued that the aesthetic organization of artworks is functionally parallel to how AI technologies construct a coherent body of information.

For this engagement at EMPAC, Grietzer considers what is unique about the structures of meaning within art and poetic thought, through articulating the worldmaking properties of AI’s mathematical systems. The talk draws on his recent research connecting poetic form, art and aesthetic philosophies of the Romantic movement, and the architectures of artificial intelligence. For Grietzer, machine learning’s computational structures illustrate art’s power to effect meaning through a unique material force.

Main Image: Courtesy the speaker.

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ezekiel dixon-román

On Computation

Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Ezekiel Dixon-Román’s research on computation is influenced by Black radical anti-colonial thought, as well as cybernetics and critical philosophies of technology. His work focuses partly on how algorithms may reflect and become haunting forces as they pursue certain patterns of data, reproducing the ways in which racial logics and forces of power have historically been embedded in technological systems.

Dixon-Román’s writing explores the implications of computational ideas of recursion, indeterminacy, and technology’s possibility for self-reflexivity. His work, additionally, re-reads ideas of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment period and from the human’s formation within technology and science.

At EMPAC, Dixon-Román’s talk addresses some of his newest research. He also discusses examples of contemporary artworks that demonstrate the ghostly specters at work in colonial logics, and that push AI away from mechanisms of control.

Main Image: Courtesy the speaker.

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marina vishmidt

On the Recursivity of Care

Marina Vishmidt

In her writing and research, Marina Vishmidt assesses how art, labor, and value intertwine. In this talk at EMPAC, Vishmidt touches on works that use technology and tautology to indicate the unrepresentability of care & maintenance work–be it on the home, the body, or the self. 

Feminist art from the 1970s onwards, such as Margaret Raspé’s Frautomat films from the early 1970s or Fronza Woods’ 1981 Fannie’s Film (both screened as part of this program), exhibit the entropy of maintenance. These works suggest that the foundation of care work lies not only in concern for what is ongoing, but in a recognition of the tendency of maintenance to unravel over time.

Rather than becoming an object of representation, maintenance more often provides the conditions of representation. Its practices of social reproduction pursue a temporality of ever-sameness, a ‘re-’ of production without product. 

In this vein, Vishmidt’s EMPAC-commissioned talk explores a question of recursion, examining how replication of an initial form at different scales, and in different registers of interpretation, is modified by process. Repetitive processes of housework, as in the early films of Raspé, are changed by their documentation and exploded by the mode this documentation takes. Through recursion, repetition yields difference. 

Quote by Margaret Raspé, from an interview with Magazin Florida, published in Magazin FLORIDA #02, 2016.

 

Main Image: Marina Vishmidt speaking at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania, 2016. Courtesy the speaker and rupert.it. Photo: Evgenia Levin. 

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a man in a chinese robe with a hand on his head

Grounds of Coherence / the language we met in

Shen Xin & Ali Van / AX Archive

Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in is a program organized around a new film of the same name by artist Shen Xin. Much of Shen’s recent work explores the ways language weaves together the world. The artist activates translation and live improvisation within their production process to address the discrepancies between what is stated in words and what is conveyed through affect, and to allow multiple voices to access shared histories and spaces of belonging.

This program features Shen and performer Ali Van’s first public project as the collaborative AX Archive.

Shen’s new film–from the ongoing series Grounds of Coherence–probes cultural adjacencies and emergent solidarities by dramatizing linguistic patterns alongside footage from different regions. Myths are recited in English between two lovers; words for stories are named in Arabic; protesters chant in regional Mandarin. Shen follows the spillages from sound and script into images. Overlapping forms of storytelling bring together scenes from a dense forest, a wood cabin, and a public demonstration. The result is a reflection on the power of language to forge commonalities, perhaps even before we become conscious of them.

The event unfolds around a screening of Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in (2023). Together as AX Archive, Ali Van and Shen Xin open the event with a spatialized audio performance that mirrors the narrative style in the film, including recordings from their work as AX Archive.

Following the screening of the title film, the program concludes with a workshop designed and facilitated by curator Katherine C.M. Adams, at the invitation of Shen and Van. It explores how origin myths might create their own sonic, linguistic, and social archipelagos. The workshop is a live session that the audience is welcome to observe or actively to participate in with their own projects. Writing materials will be provided.

Main Image: Film still: Grounds of Coherence, 2023. Courtesy the artist. 

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drawings on a table

µ (mu)

Marina Rosenfeld

In this talk, artist Marina Rosenfeld will present an overview of her practice. The program also includes an informal introduction to her new project µ (mu), to be developed while in residence at EMPAC.

A 48-hour piano performance inspired by abandoned Bell Labs research on environmental recording. Photographic panels that double as the physical contours for a live sound work. These are just two examples from Marina Rosenfeld’s body of work, which merges approaches from composition, sound installation, and the visual arts. Rosenfeld’s work often seems to inject physical structures with sonic forms. Her installations explore the sculptural substrata and (in the artist’s words) “material instabilities” that underlie composed works and sound performance. Inspired by musical minimalism yet critical of its histories, Rosenfeld’s works rearticulate sound as a relational field.

While in residence at EMPAC, Rosenfeld will embark on a new project titled µ (mu) that emerges from her longstanding work with dubplates. Unlike vinyl records, dubplates are one-off and hand-cut. For this project, Rosenfeld imagines the dub plate’s surface as a distinct audiovisual realm, independent of the audio it embeds. She looks at the ways in which analog agents–a stylus or a hand–modify the sonic and visual content of the plates. The artist asks what might happen if one were to focus not on the overt sound within the dubplate but on incidental phenomena along its surface. Rosenfeld’s residency is a visual and sonic inquiry into the topography of the dubplate’s (material) grooves.

Main Image: Marina Rosenfeld, The Agonists, 2023. Mixed media and sound, installation detail, Museum Art Plus, for Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2023.

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Marina Rosenfeld live @sonicprotesfestival // 24 mars 2023. Mains d'Œuvres, Saint-Ouen.

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objects throughout a white studio

Shifting Center: Studio 2

Julian Abraham “Togar”, Maurice Louca, and Gala Porras-Kim

Multiple temporalities inhabit Studio 2. Sculptural, conceptual, and musical elements coexist in the space of sound: from a year of solar oscillations, to the rhythms of a seaside rock, to the microtonality of a guitar. A disembodied voice reaches up for a more than human world and theatrical time collapses the diurnal cycle into an hour. Stars are stones suspended here like speakers in the sky. Constellations in outer space are notations with which to defy gravity and linear time.

  • Julian Abraham “Togar”
  • Rocker’s Gonna Rock, (2021)
  • Color video with sound, 37 min. 9 sec.
  • Maurice Louca
  • Missing Notes (or, what if stones could sing?, (2023)
  • Omnidirectional sound, 43 min. 11 sec.
  • Commissioned by EMPAC
  • Gala Porras-Kim
  • Proposal for the reconstituting of ritual elements of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, (2019)
  • Polyurethane and acrylic paint, pigments and document 56 ¼ × 15 ¾ × 10 ¼ in.; 100 ¾ × 18 ½ × 11 ¾ in.
  • All Earth Energy Sources Are Known to Come From the Sun, (2019)
  • Brass, sunlight
  • Dimensions variable
  • Ambient sound of a pyramid one year of solar oscillations, (2019)
  • Ambient sound recording, 23 min. 43 sec.

Main Image: Gala Porras-Kim, various works, 2019 (detail). Maurice Louca, Missing Notes (or, what if stones could sing?), 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC.

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a steel volcano sits in the middle of the concert hall on a platform

Shifting Center: Concert Hall

Beatriz Cortez, Nancy Mounir, and Cannupa Hanska Luger

A volcano arrives at the concert hall to settle across the seats and displaces the frontality of the stage. It is an acoustic object that transforms the sonic properties of the space. When a volcano erupts, magma surfaces from beneath to scramble stratigraphic time. Its ash spreads far and wide and settles in other places.

Clay is matter of the earth and becomes medium in our hands—it is among the oldest technologies we have. A small amount can fill a room when shaped into a whistle. When such an instrument is played, it alters our sense of scale. In molding clay, we are holding time itself.

A dirge is a song that holds the loss of time. It carries absence forth as that which remains. A site is always already multiple sites. The earth opens onto an underworld and an afterlife. 

  • Beatriz Cortez
  • Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, (2023)
  • Steel
    Approximately 144 x 234 x 120 in.
  • Co-commissioned by EMPAC, Storm King Art Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
  • Cannupa Hanska Luger
  • Volume (Fox, Ocelot, Vulture, Armadillo, Turtle), (2023)
  • Globular whistles made from clay, fired three ways: pit-fired, wood-fired, electric kiln-fired, ceramic, sound installation
  • Dimensions vary
  • Commissioned by EMPAC
  • Nancy Mounir
  • Solћ (reconciliation), (2023)
  • Higher Order Ambisonics, sound installation, 15 min. 28 sec.
  • Commissioned by EMPAC

Main Image: Beatriz Cortez, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Shannon K. Johnson/EMPAC.

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a clear tube is inserted in the back of a clay bird flute head

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Volume (Fox, Ocelot, Vulture, Armadillo, Turtle), 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.

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an actuator sits atop a rock

Shifting Center: Studio 1—Goodman

Tania Candiani, Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães, and Clarissa Tossin

The artworks tune in to resonant frequencies from across time and geography. Activated in sequence, the spatial audio installation and the multi-channel video work transpose the acoustical properties of specific architectural and geological sites through a sensory journey of music and performance. Both recorded on-location, the spaces we now perceive in the room with us were acoustically excited by voice, wind instruments, or digital tools. The artists relocate the physical properties of the sites, and thus their potential for sounding, through the process of audio reproduction. These works are joined by sculptures that provide a material connection to their corresponding video or audio work. Each resonates visually through acoustic forms that collapse the space between the instrument and the site in which it can be heard.

  • Tania Candiani
  • Concert One. For the Animals, (2020)
  • Two-channel HD video with sound, 8 min. 2 sec.
  • Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães
  • Each Absent Breath, (2023)
  • Wave field synthesis, sound installation, 13 min. 47 sec
  • Tania Candiani
  • Percutor, (2020)
  • Musical instrument, custom sound mixer, solenoid array, dependent amplifier circuit effects, Modular Piezo microphones, Yamaha 6-channel mixer

Main Image: Tania Candiani, Percutor, 2020. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.

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mayan flutes of various deitys sit on risers in the darkness of studio 1 at empac

Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães, Each Absent Breath, 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artists and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.

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two persons standing before a pile of rocks that is being amplified by pezio actuators

Tania Candiani, Percutor, 2020. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.