This event is FREE in celebration of the launch of Programming EMPAC, The First 4,158 Days

The first screening of the new series On Screen/Sound focuses on analog and synthetic experiments by US-based artists who pioneered new approaches to the correlation of a film's sound and image tracks.

Presenting films and videos from a 15-year period of intense experimentation with electronic synthesis, animation, and editing techniques across all media, this program begins with Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart's Mosaic, in which the artists composed the soundtrack by engraving it directly onto the filmstrip. McLaren followed this in 1971 with Synchromy, taking this approach further by photographing sound-card patterns on the soundtrack and reproducing them on the celluloid's image track in order to directly visualize the sound.

Built from the manipulation, distortion, and looping of found footage and televisual images, both Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut's Video Tape Study No. 3 and Dara Birnbaum's iconic Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman are videos structured by the original sound as well as its image.

These experimental shorts, which combine animated and live-action techniques and materials, are followed on an industrial scale by Steven Lisberger's acclaimed 1982 feature film Tron, with a soundtrack scored to combine both synthesizer and orchestra by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos.

PROGRAM:

• Mosaic (1965) Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren / Sound mix: Ron Alexander
• Synchromy (1971) Norman McLaren
• Video Tape Study No. 3 (1967–69) Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut / Sound: David Behrman and Ken Werner
• Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) Dara Birnbaum
• Tron (1982) Steven Lisberger / Music: Wendy Carlos

Introduced by London-based artist Cally Spooner, the final fall event for the On Screen/Sound series presents an evening exploring the specificities of transforming the musical from theater to screen.

Cally Spooner's EMPAC-produced musical And You Were Wonderful, On Stage is a picture that appropriates the choreography of different performance genres, such as the Broadway musical, the television commercial, and the political speech. Spooner considers how dematerialized, indeterminate, unmediated performance can sit within the extreme visibility of entertainment and today's attention economies.

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound Recording, the iconic Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical Gold Diggers of 1933 was based on the play by Avery Hopwood and translated to screen by director Mervyn Le Roy. Including expansive overhead shots that follow classic Berkeley set-pieces, the musical is set to songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin.

PROGRAM:

• And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2015) Cally Spooner
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) Mervyn Le Roy

Footsteps, the screech of car tires, a gunshot—these events, devoid of their identifiable sounds, would render their image nearly powerless. It is the unity of these elements that binds them together and gives them visceral effect. The seventh screening in the On Screen/Sound series examines the influence of Foley and sound effects on moving image.

Creeping tension is defused by the banality of production in Deborah Stratman’s Hacked Circuit, while the hyperactive, fantastical sounds of magic highlight the otherworldliness of an episode of Kou Matsuo's Japanese anime Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta.

The feature film of the evening, Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, a sonic response to Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic Blowup, finds a movie sound-effects engineer (John Travolta) in the wrong place at the wrong time as he unwittingly records the sound of a murder and is drawn into a web of intrigue. Hacked Circuit will be introduced by Chicago-based filmmaker Deborah Stratman.

PROGRAM:

• Hacked Circuit (2012)
• Deborah Stratman
• Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta - No. 7 (2013)
• Kou Matsuo
• Blow Out (1981)
• Brian de Palma

The second program of On Screen/Sound presents a series of shorts from the past five decades that use human movement to embody the connection between image and sound.

Inspired by the repetitive looping structure of Steve Reich's musical compositions, Gunvor Nelson edited footage of her daughter to the increasingly abstracted and overlaid repetition of her voice. This tactility of the body, as a cypher through which sound and image can create a new psychological space, is reversed by Martin Arnold, who distorts the frame-by-frame flow of a short excerpt from To Kill A Mockingbird, deliberately stuttering the bodily gesture and creating a new film that violently transforms both sound and image tracks.

Loretta Fahrenholz creates a similarly precise and repetitive effect in her collaboration with the Ringmaster Crew, whose constrained and tight gestures appear to punch out every sound. Both Hassan Khan and Charles Atlas, however, use the joyful intensity of dance to project the energy of the music.

Meanwhile in Akram Zaatari's Endnote, the movement is transmitted in the choreography of lights, while the protagonists sit oblivious in the foreground.

PROGRAM

• My Name is Oona (1969) Gunvor Nelson
• Passage a l'acte (1993) Martin Arnold
• Ditch Plains (2013) Loretta Fahrenholz Sound design: Steffen Martin
• Jewel (2010) Hassan Khan
• Jump (Hysterique Bourreé) (1984) Charles Atlas in collaboration with Philippe Decoufle Music: Joseph Biscuit
• Twenty Eight Nights: Endnote (2014) Akram Zaatari

The fourth screening in On Screen/Sound brings together painting, architecture, fashion, dance, and music for an evening of modernist and surreal cinema.

In Robert Nelson's 1963 short film Plastic Haircut, two actors perform absurd actions in sets composed of geometric shapes, followed by two experts who attempt to explain what it all means. The audio track features sound by American composer Steve Reich, his earliest complete electronic piece.

The 1924 ultramodernist masterpiece L'Inhumaine ("the inhuman woman") was considered by its director, Marcel L'Herbier, to be "a fairy story of modern decorative art." Using "experimental" camera techniques and hallucinatory imagery, with sets by Fernand Léger, and costumes by Paul Poiret, L'Inhumaine tells the story of the life, death, and rebirth of a cold-hearted opera singer who learns to love. The musical score, originally by French composer Darius Milhaud, was lost to time—but has been reimagined by Aidje Tafial. Recently restored in its original tints by the French Cinémathèque and Lobster Films, this new print and soundtrack was premiered this year at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

PROGRAM

• Plastic Haircut (1963) Robert Nelson
• L'inhumaine (1924) Marcel L'Herbier / Original Music (lost): Darius Milhaud / New Score: Tafial Aidje

The third screening in the series On Screen/Sound is introduced by Brooklyn-based filmmaker and archivist Andrew Lampert.

Exploring the power of the soundtrack in our reading of, and response to, moving images, Andrew Lampert's film All Magic Sands (Chappaqua) challenges the intentionality of combining sound and image on film by juxtaposing found film footage with a rejected movie soundtrack.

Lampert assembled reels of found footage from the unfinished Christian children's movie All Magic Sands, and synched it with Ornette Coleman's rejected soundtrack from Conrad Rook's feature film Chappaqua, which was recorded in 1965 at approximately the same time and with an almost identical duration.

Cory Arcangel's Beach Boys/Geto Boys is a "mash-up" of two music videos based only on the similarity of the two bands names. Arcangel juxtaposes live performance footage of the Beach Boys with a music video by Geto Boys. As the soundtracks are overlaid to produce hybrid pop, the images retain their clear political, racial, and historical specificity.

PROGRAM

• Beach Boys/Geto Boys (2004) Cory Arcangel
• All Magic Sands (Chappaqua) (1965/2011) Andrew Lampert

As part of a series of academic activities on campus, Italian media-art collective Flatform present dotQuantum, a multimedia event that manipulates moving image, programmed light, and objects to "see through" a static understanding of the world around us.

Founded in 2006 and based in Milan and Berlin, Flatform use an array of visual effects to play with temporal perception. dotQuantum constructs what initially appear as "real" images—landscapes, architecture, and people—before rendering them malleable objects that betray their means of production and expose the processes that build digital worlds. Defining their work as "spectral landscape," the artists combine on-location footage with digitally created environmental effects (wind, rain, and rapid cuts between day and night) to produce optical illusions and temporal ambiguity that call into question our understanding of chronological time.

Following the intermission, Flatform will present a selection of their short videos from the past five years and will participate in a Q&A at the end of the evening.

PROGRAM

• dotQUANTUM (2014/15)
• — INTERMISSION with complementary light refreshments —
• 57.600 seconds of invisible night and light (2009)
• Movements of an impossible time (2011)
• Trento Symphonia (2014)
• 90 minutes including intermission

Artist-in-residence Jennifer West presents an evening on the "remembered movie" with Los Angeles-based writer and curator Michael Ned Holte. In a conversation of personal cinematic histories, each will perform memory (and movies) by capturing and reconnecting the places, spaces, and languages born from the movie-going experience.

A night of unabashed film love that delves into the darkened make-out corners of cult and midnight movie theaters, celebrates the circulation of VHS bootlegs, and tracks through the video rental houses, multi-screen drive-ins, discount multiplexes, art house theaters, lecture halls, and museums of film culture, ending up in today's tangled web of digital file sharing and online-streaming platforms. An elegy to our ever-changing cinematic contexts and their continued transition to the virtual world, the event reaches beyond the frame to reveal how our experience of celluloid and its circuits of distribution function both as a catalyst for personal memory and as a tool to trace unconsidered histories.

Jennifer West is in residence to develop Film Memory—a feature-length film and multichannel installation exploring the moving image as material memory. Constructed as a "personal historical survey" of cinema, it captures and reconnects the places, spaces, languages, and memories that are born from the cinematic experience. West and Holte met in graduate school in 2002 at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, where they shared film memories and post-movie parking-lot discussions.

Rosa Barba’s two-part EMPAC commission was produced in collaboration with Rensselaer’s Hirsch Observatory and was presented on four consecutive Saturday evenings throughout March 2015. While transforming EMPAC’s 8th Street façade into an outdoor cinema that uses the solar system as source material for a speculative film, a site-specific artwork for the Hirsch Observatory connected the two buildings across campus.

The Color out of Space

A large-scale projection covering the building’s 8th Street façade was viewable from downtown Troy and beyond, and the accompanying sound composition was broadcast via audio stream and on Rensselaer campus radio station WRPI 91.5 FM. Using voices collaged by composer Jan St Werner from interviews, fictions, and readings by artists and astronomers from around the world, including Ingrid Wiener, Georgia Horn, Emma Hedditch, Barbara Hammer, Laetitia Sadier, Evan Calder Williams, Jimmy Robert, Jean-Pierre Luminet, Colin Attwood, Daphne Beal, Heidi Newberg, Matthew Newby, and Oswald Wiener, the piece hovered at the speculative intersection of astronomy and art.

White Museum

A concurrent 70mm film installation at the Hirsch Observatory projected out of the dome and into the sky. Located on the roof of the Jonsson-Rowland Science Center, the observatory was built in 1942 to house a 12” equatorial reflector telescope that was designed and constructed at Rensselaer. Juxtaposed against the current 16” Boller & Chivens dome telescope from the 1960s, the film projector traces the reciprocal relationship of astronomy and cinema.

DIRECTIONS FROM EMPAC TO THE HIRSCH OBSERVATORY

From the EMPAC lobby, walk east approximately three minutes, following the paved sidewalk onto the Rensselaer campus. The south entrance to the Jonsson-Rowland science center will be on your left. An usher will escort you inside.

Rosa Barba’s publications, sculpture, and installation work are rooted in the material of cinema. In 2010, she won the Nam June Paik Award for Coro Spezzato, The Future Lasts One Day (2009). She was a resident artist at Artpace in San Antonio in 2014, Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 2013 and the Dia Art Foundation in 2008. Her work has been presented in exhibitions worldwide, including Time as Perspective (2013) at the Bergen Kunsthall; Auto Kino! (2010) at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin; Making Worlds at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009; and Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968–2008 (2008–09) at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Jan St Werner is a composer and musician based in Berlin, Germany. Aliases include Mouse on Mars (with Andi Toma), Microstoria (with Markus Popp), Von Südenfed (with Andi Toma and Mark E Smith), Lithops, Neuter River, Noisemashinetapes. He has produced numerous recordings both solo and collaboratively, including The Fiepblatter Catalogue on Thrill Jockey Records and the Mouse on Mars 21 AGAIN Project on Monkeytown Records. St Werner co-runs Sonig, an independent music label for experimental, electronic and non-genre-specific music. He has composed orchestral works for musikFabrik, Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. St Werner’s work has recently been featured at the ICA, London; Radialsystem V, Berlin; Kunsthaus Muerz, Austria; Kunstverein Munich, and Cornerhouse Manchester.

The culmination of several years of research, Tales of Love and Fear is a site-specific artwork for the Concert Hall. A regular artist-in-residence since fall 2013, Lucy Raven has focused her research on the history and evolution of 3D-film technologies and animation techniques. Investigating the fluid cultural perception of spatial depth though an art-historical lens, she explores the mechanisms of industrial cinema production through analysis of the transnational circulation of labor and materials. 

Developed in collaboration with our production team, Tales of Love and Fear is comprised of a custom-built rig of counter-rotating platforms. A single stereoscopic photograph, taken by the artist during her research in India, is split by the two projectors into the left and right eye perspective. Conceived as a cinema for a single image, this piece expands and unifies our perception of the cinematic beyond the screen. 

Using field recordings taken during a screening of a Bollywood horror movie in Mumbai, the surround soundtrack, designed by Paul Corley, transports the viewer back into this cinematic environment. By translating and overlaying this specific auditory experience onto the Concert Hall, Tales of Love and Fear creates a composite architecture. Cones of light slowly revolve through the volume of the hall connecting the photographic image to the projection apparatus.