On the final evening of Cally Spooner’s EMPAC production residency, in which she will be shooting her new film work And You Were Wonderful, On Stage in Studio 1, the artist invites you to be part of a live studio audience.

A performance with multiple actors, dancers, and stage sets that attempts to integrate the process of filming into the production itself, the event will be live-streamed and take on the format of a TV variety show. Directed by the artist and technical team to provide laughter and applause, the audience will be integral to the film’s production as both audience and actor.

Using assemblages of theory, philosophy, pop music, current affairs and corporate rhetoric to write—and casts of arguing characters to help her perform—Spooner produces plotless novellas, disjunctive scripts, looping monologues, and musical arrangements to stage the movement and behavior of speech. Appropriating different performance genres, such as the Broadway musical, the television commercial, and the radio play, Spooner considers how dematerialized, indeterminate, unmediated performance can sit within the extreme visibility of entertainment and today's attention economies.

The first screening in the series On Animation & Workflow will start with two pioneering animated films from the 1920s, Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie diagonale (Diagonal Symphony, 1924) and Hans Richter’s Filmstudie (1926). Eggeling and Richter began experimenting with abstract animation techniques together in 1918 by using painted scrolls to create sequential, directional movement, and gravitated towards film in order to synthesize image with movement and music. Eggeling made two films, of which only Diagonal Symphony survives, as a “cinematic drawing.” Synthesizing painting and film, he shot his Diagonal Symphony scrolls using stop-motion techniques. Richter, however, moved away from this painterly approach to construct films that used cutouts and optical printing to establish a new abstract filmic language of “articulated time.” By 1926, in Filmstudie, Richter had started to incorporate Dada-esque, figurative photographic elements, such as eyeballs and faces. These 16mm shorts will be accompanied by Richter’s surrealist feature film, Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947), scored by experimental music pioneer John Cage, with Paul Bowles, Darius Milhaud, and Louis Applebaum. The film follows protagonist Joe/Narcissus as he enacts a madcap business idea in order to pay the rent. Using mystical powers that allow him to look in the mirror and see the contents of his mind, he is able to sell dreams to neurotic clients. Each dream sequence, several of which include complex animations, were directed in collaboration with Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, and Fernand Léger, respectively, to create a portmanteau film that represents the artistic visions of a roll call of the greats of early 20th century art and music.

An evening of films and discussion with New York media-dance pioneer Charles Atlas. Atlas was in residence at EMPAC to produce a newly commissioned theatrical production (Tesseract) that premiered in EMPAC’s Theater in fall 2017. Intertwining dance, live and pre-recorded 3D video, the performance was choreographed in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener.

Atlas has created numerous works for stage, screen, museum, and television, consistently pioneering the synthesis of technology and performance. A key figure in the development of “media-dance,” in which performance is created directly for the camera, Atlas was videographer-in-residence with Merce Cunningham Dance Company for a decade, and continues to collaborate extensively with choreographers, dancers, and performers, including Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Diamanda Galas, and Mika Tajima/New Humans, among many others.

Commissioned, developed and produced through the EMPAC artist-in-residence program ESKASIZER is a collection of takes focusing on four women of various ages, heritage, and shape. Using the latest high-speed video equipment, the film captures vibrating flesh as the source of movement. Zooming in to the point of abstraction, the result is a dance of the flesh.


As the viewer watches, attempts to identify the body parts blur into the pure abstraction of moving flesh. They become immersed in a pool of moving flesh.

Developed and produced through the EMPAC artist-in-residence program Chainreaction is a collision of dance, animation, and sound that juxtaposes the movements of live performers with the motion of animated projections, in a continuous, interactive evolution of action and reaction.

The Vision Machine is a kinetic light sculpture that produces a 20-minute film based on the behavior of light in prisms. Drawing on optics and material science, this optical box harnesses the same physical principles that give rise to everyday atmospheric effects such as rainbows and sundogs by shining light through a series of rotating prisms and focusing it back onto a wall with a lens. The Vision Machine is conceptually based on Riccardo Manzotti’s idea of the “Spread Mind,” which proposes that consciousness is spread between physical phenomena and the individual. The viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process. In the installation, diffracted light serves as a metaphor for our consciousness as an interrelated process of worldly phenomena, partly external and partly internal, but never static. Melvin Moti worked collaboratively with a team of Rensselaer undergraduate physics and engineering students to create The Vision Machine.

ON VIEW:

Dec 4, 12–9PM Dec 5, 12–9PM Dec 6, 12–10PM

VIDEO

Blankets for Indians blends a stereoscopic study of water spurting from New York’s City Hall fountain with an intimately detailed portrait of an Occupy Wall Street march. While in the process of shooting the fountain in 2012, Jacobs serendipitously turned his camera toward a large protest marching to Zuccotti Park in support of Occupy Wall Street. The unexpected connection gives the film new life, seamlessly moving between sensual observation and political commentary, reflection, and abstraction. Using freeze-frames, text, and 3D manipulation, Jacobs questions the contemporary conditions of socio-political struggle, its relation to aesthetics, and the labor necessary to produce both.

Ken Jacobs is a pioneer of the American film avant-garde and a central figure in post-war experimental cinema. His films, videos, and performances have been received at such international venues as the Berlin Film Festival among many others; and MOMI, the Whitney, and MoMA, New York City. He was a featured filmmaker at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2004, and Courtisane Festival, Ghent, in 2014.