Following the launch of her new book, Low Relief, artist Lucy Raven and special-effects legend Phil Tippett will present an excerpt of their in-progress moving-image work, Coming Attraction. Tippett will discuss his collaboration with Raven, and offer an in-depth look at the making of the 1997 sci-fi cult classic Starship Troopers, including an edit of footage made by Tippett during the Troopers location scout in the badlands of Wyoming.

In 1996, while preparing for the filming, director Paul Verhoeven visited Wyoming with his production crew and creature visual effects supervisor Tippett. Tippett’s footage of the scout reveals rare insight into the ways in which he provided a visualization strategy for his studio back in California, and his approach to how they would populate the barren landscape with alien bugs, transforming it into a battlefield. Under a staircase in his Berkeley visual-effects studio Tippett recently unearthed over 12 hours of VHS tapes, including the location scout and behind-the-scenes recordings made on-set during the shoot, an edit of which will be screened at this presentation.

The evening will end with a screening of Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, and Dina Meyer. Starship Troopers imagines warfare in the 23rd century. In a society where citizenship is earned through military service, the story follows young soldier Johnny Rico and his exploits in Mobile Infantry, a futuristic military unit. Earthlings have become space-exploring colonizers in search of new planets, and have encountered a species known as Arachnids. Once war is declared, the alien bugs retaliate violently against the intrusion of humans into their habitat.

PROGRAM

• Coming Attraction (work-in-progress) Lucy Raven and Phil Tippett
• Lucy Raven and Phil Tippett
• Starship Troopers Location Scout (1996)
• Phil Tippett
• Starship Troopers (1997) Directed by Paul Verhoeven
• Directed by Paul Verhoeven
• Approximate run-time: 180mins

Low Relief combines artist Lucy Raven’s multi-year research into industrial image making, conducted in part through a series of EMPAC residencies, and the artworks that resulted—RP31 (2012), Curtains (2014), and the EMPAC-commissioned cinema event Tales of Love and Fear (2015)—into a monographic book designed by EMPAC graphic artist Eileen Baumgartner.

Low Relief is introduced by EMPAC’s Director Johannes Goebel and includes essays by Victoria Brooks, Richard Birkett, Pablo de Ocampo, Joshua Clover, and Corrina Pepion, as well as the transcripts of Raven’s three illustrated lectures: Low Relief, On Location, and Motion Capture, presented between 2012-2016 at The Hammer (Los Angeles), Portikus (Frankfurt), The Kitchen (New York), South London Gallery (London), and EMPAC. Following the book launch join us for a screening of Starship Troopers with special effects master Phil Tippett.

Canadian artist Isabelle Pauwels returned to EMPAC to complete the pre-production and cast the actors for her major new moving-image work in production in fall 2017.

To initiate the residency, curator Vic Brooks screened the single-channel version of her 2014 multimedia performance ,000,. Pauwels’ new project takes its cues from the scripted artifice of professional Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), and the spectacle of the televised Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). 

Watering the Flowers was a year-long screening program. Each evening focused on a recent film or video by an EMPAC-affiliated artist, and was succeeded by a program of other shorts or features that were influential in the making of their work, whether fiction or documentary, experimental or commercial. 

Berlin-based artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz were in residence at EMPAC to produce a moving-image work with a structure that combined three choreographic approaches: an instructional score by Pauline Oliveros, a 1968 text by revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof that calls for a transition from protest to resistance, and remote-control “carts” developed by Bell Labs with choreographer Deborah Hay for the 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering performances in New York in 1966.

Everybody talks about the weather, we don’t (a working title borrowed from a Meinhof essay) was performed by five “carts” (produced at EMPAC), theatrical light, haze, a mobile camera operated by Bernadette Paassen, and artists MPA, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Werner Hirsch, and Marwa Arsanios. 

By taking cues from historically subversive actions and artworks, the artists’ films and installations disrupt historical narratives in order to renew the power of radical artworks. By subverting the original context, Boudry/Lorenz reactivate these works through the interaction of the technical (the theatrical and filmic apparatus of media production) and the performative (the current generation of artists, choreographers, and musicians) to underscore how the refusal of a fixed or normative identity is still an urgent political act. 

Boudry / Lorenz have been working together since 2007. Their staged films and film installations often start with a song, a picture, a film, or a script from the past. They produce performances for the camera, staging the actions of individuals and groups living—indeed thriving—in defiance of normality, law, and economics. Their films upset normative historical narratives, as figures from across time are staged, projected, and layered. These performers are themselves choreographers, artists, and musicians, with whom Boudry and Lorenz engage in a long-term conversation about performance, the meaning of visibility since early modernity, the pathologization of bodies, and also about glamour and resistance.

Program

• Silent(2016)
• Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
• To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (2013)
• Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz
• I want (2015)
• Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz

Magic Electronics is a 2014 work by French artist Laure Prouvost, in which she installed moving lights and synched audio into a gallery in order to animate and narrate her exhibition of objects. In doing so, she transformed the static exhibition into a stage. Magic Electronics is exemplary of an approach that slips between formats (video, sculpture, installation) and registers (speech, image, object, light), deliberately mistranslating and misunderstanding as it goes.

Magic Electronics figured as the center of an evening-long conversation between Prouvost and EMPAC curator Vic Brooks during which the pair screened and discussed a selection of Prouvost’s work, taking the audience on a journey from the pre-recorded and situated to the live and one-off. Prouvost was in residence at EMPAC to develop a new performance, which will be premiered alongside her solo exhibition at Walker Art Center in 2017–18. 

Los Angeles-based artist Martine Syms is in residence at EMPAC to shoot An Evening with Queen White, part of a new feature-length film project to be shot using a 360-degree camera rig. For this event, Syms will introduce a program of videos by herself and others, alongside a discussion of moving images that have been influential to her work.

An artist, performer, and designer, Syms also founded the imprint Dominica Publishing, which publishes artist books exploring blackness as a topic, reference, marker, and audience in visual culture. Her book Implication and Distinctions: Format, Content and Context in Contemporary Race Film considers performances of blackness in mainstream cinema from 1990 to the present. Other work includes The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, which calls for the culture of the African diaspora to focus its energy on Earth rather than toward transcendence in the cosmos.

PROGRAM

• My Vine Comp (2016) Martine Syms
• Century (2012) Kevin Jerome Everson
• footage from a studio test of NO NO NO (2013) Sondra Perry
• Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) (2015) Rami George
• Monkey (2016) Marco Braunschweiler
• Nine Hour Delay: Printemps-Été-Automne-Hiver 2058 Irena Haiduk
• The Fall of Communism (2014) Hannah Black
• The Borrowers (Ndinda) (2015) Nicole Miller
• The Bucket (2015) Asha Schechter
• Doomed Poet 1-4 (2016) Theo Darst
• Contemporary Artist (1999) Ximena Cuevas
• Double (2001) Kerry Tribe

Watering the Flowers is a new year-long screening program. Each evening focuses on a recent film or video by an EMPAC-affiliated artist, and will be succeeded by a program of other shorts or features that were influential in the making of their work, whether fiction or documentary, experimental or commercial. 

Artist Charles Atlas introduced a program of films that were influential in the development of his 3D video and dance performance work, Tesseract, which premiered at EMPAC in January 2017 in collaboration with choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. 

Cube2: Hypercube, is a 2002 science fiction feature by Andrzej Sekuła that was filmed almost exclusively within the constrained space of a metal-
framed “cube” of diffused light. Reliant on active camera work that renders identical rooms with variable timescales, gravity shifts, folding spaces, and deadly CG effects, the film portrays a group of increasingly disoriented protagonists as they attempt to puzzle their way out of a quantum maze.  

PROGRAM

• Jill and Freddy Dancing (1963) Andy Warhol
• The Midnight Party (1938) Joseph Cornell and Lawrence Jordan
• Cube²: Hypercube (2002) Andrzej Sekuła

Watering the Flowers was a year-long screening program. Each evening focused on a recent film or video by an EMPAC-affiliated artist, and was succeeded by a program of other shorts or features that were influential in the making of their work, whether fiction or documentary, experimental or commercial. 

Hudson-based artist Ephraim Asili will screen and discuss his recent film Return of the Electric Love (Take II) and other films that are influential to his work. Return of the Electric Love (Take II) is an optically printed 35mm film made from found footage of Kung Fu movies. The sequel to a film Asili had recently completed, which was immediately lost in transit from the film lab, Return of the Electric Love (Take II) reuses this same archive of footage as its source material. His technique of re-photographing short gestural sequences from the original films adds washes of color to the action.

A riot of fast-paced images and their fractured, synchronized soundtracks, the film moves from repetitive Kung Fu gestures—flying kicks and spins—to abstract blocks of color, each frame saturated red, pink, green, and blue in quick succession. In the making of this film, the projector light picked out the time-worn scratches, dust, and water damage etched upon the surface of the celluloid. Asili then photographed these marks using the optical printer and exposed new frames. At times these imperfections dance across the screen, as much a part of the image as the bodies of the martial artists. 

Ephraim Asili is an African-American artist, filmmaker, DJ, radio host, and traveler. Inspired by his day-to-day wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on everyday experience and media culture. Through audio-visual examinations of societal iconography, identity, geography, and architecture, Asili strives to present a personal vision. The results are perhaps best described as an amalgam of pop, Afri­can-American, and “moving image” culture, filtered through an acute sense of rhythmic improvisation and compositional awareness. Asili teaches at the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College and hosts a radio show on WGXC 90.7 FM Hudson, New York. 

PROGRAM

• Return of the Electric Love (Take II) (2016) Ephraim Asili
• Bridges Go Round (1958) Shirley Clarke
• Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) Arthur Lipsett
• New York Eye & Ear Control (1964) Michael Snow
• Made For Television (1981) William Farley
• Kindah (2016) Ephraim Asili
• Halimuhfack (2016) Chris Harris
• Blacktop: The Story of the Washing of a School Play Yard (1952) Charles & Ray Eames
• Lodz Symphony (1993) Peter Hutton

Watering the Flowers is a new year-long screening program. Each evening focuses on a recent film or video by an EMPAC-affiliated artist, and will be succeeded by a program of other shorts or features that were influential in the making of their work, whether fiction or documentary, experimental or commercial. 

San Francisco-based artist Patricia L Boyd presented her new video work, commissioned by EMPAC. The project is grounded in Boyd’s research into what she calls “the protocol of production-as-exhaustion,” which acknowledges the debt (of time, vitality, and labor) that must be paid to capitalism by every living body, as well as the internal economics of self-preservation that a body must undertake to honor this debt. In light of such demands, Boyd’s work depicts an “unproductive” body within a structure of “wasted” time. 

The shoot, which took place over five days in spring 2016, used a system of four moving cameras in the EMPAC Theater—two bird’s-eye views moving up and down on vertical axes, and two horizontal tracking shots—to surround and relentlessly document the space in which performer Nour Mobarak took up an extended and repetitive series of gestures. Within this matrix of cameras—running in constant motion according to pre-programmed commands—the system inevitably documented itself, each camera puncturing the frame of the others and capturing the static lighting rigs and technical equipment used on-set. Mobarak’s body, like all the objects represented, was passed by again and again and thereby could never become a fixed subject of the film since the system was not programmed to privilege her presence any more than the adjacent objects.

As a counterpoint to the screening, Boyd commissioned a new piece of writing from poet Anne Boyer, which was read in person at the event. The text formed part of Boyer’s ongoing On Care series, a “meditation on the politics of care in the age of precarity,” previous installments of which influenced Boyd in the making of her work. 

The final On Screen/Sound program of the spring season presents two films with sonic and visual elements constructed through complex tracking shots.

In Miguel Angel Rios’ Untitled (The Ghost of Modernity) (2012) a CG-rendered cube floats across a desert landscape, while a spare Cageian composition punctuates this modernist exploration of silence and space. Shot with an automated camera that could be controlled to move in 360 degrees, Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale documents the landscape of northern Quebec and was scored using the sine waves and electronic pulses of the technical camera apparatus itself.

PROGRAM

• Untitled (The Ghost of Modernity) (2012) Miguel Angel Rios
• La Région Centrale (1971) Michael Snow
• Approximate runtime: 190 minutes