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.

In this talk, artist Constantina Zavitsanos speaks about their artistic practice. Zavitsanos’s work ranges from sculpture to performance, and deals with debt and dependency, entropy, thresholds of perception, incapacity, and modes of sensing and feeling. Zavitsanos’s work is deeply sensitive to the infrastructural possibilities and limitations of any exhibition environment. In their pieces, accessibility strategies are often also sculptural strategies or filmic gestures. Tools like open captions can offer, in the artist’s words, a “backstage pass” to previously unseen aspects of a work.

All the same, for Zavitsanos, obscurity is not necessarily to be avoided. In the artist’s work, debility is often simply a material condition, and Zavitsanos regularly engages materials at the point where they frustrate or challenge our perception. Experimenting with artistic production in relation to insights from physics, some of Zavitsanos’s past works consider what cannot be sensed, or engage phenomena of interference. The artist’s Call to Post & All the Time, on view in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, features an “infrasonic ramp,” a large inclining surface that vibrates with frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.

Zavitsanos’s practice unfolds both independently and, occasionally, in collaboration with others. Peers they have written with, performed with, or developed work with include Park McArthur, Carolyn Lazard, and Amalle Dublon.

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.

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.

Rosenfeld is in residence to develop her project μ (mu) into a video installation. Building on the artist’s prior work on the video component, this residency focuses on developing presentation formats for the work’s video and sound elements, as well as extending its imagery into experimental prints.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.