The three artworks shift our psychoacoustic perception of spatial volume and depth. The works unfold within the architecture of a proscenium stage and are presented together as a single sequence that begins every hour on the hour, inhabiting the corresponding timescale of theatrical experience.

In the transition between each artwork, the room’s specific features and technical infrastructure are activated to conjure the transformation of image, sound, and space. You are invited to listen as distant landscapes and interconnected rooms are located within the theater in which you are seated. Subterranean frequencies and structure-borne sounds rupture into the open space of the stage and from the illusory depth of the screen.

• Micah Silver
• Weather in a Lagrangian Sky, (2023)
• In collaboration with an audio system constellated by Maryanne Amacher while in residence at EMPAC in 2008/2009, 17 min.
• Loudspeaker array: Maryanne Amacher, 2009/2023
• Commissioned by EMPAC

• Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias
• Fire Dialogues. The Quest for an Impossible Music, (2023)
• HD video with sound, 12 min.

• Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser
• A Slightly Curving Place, (2022)
• Two-channel HD video with sound, 26 min. 40 sec.

The sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left by Beatriz Cortez will be available for public viewing as part of its voyage north onboard the fireboat John J. Harvey.

Members of the public can witness the sculpture at the riverfront Marina on the Hudson River Maritime Museum campus throughout the day on Saturday, October 28.

For those interested in touring the Museum, it is open 11am-5pm on Saturday. Visit hrmm.org for Museum admission and accessibility info.

For the complete itinerary and live broadcasts of the sculpture's travels, please visit the journey's event listing.

The welcoming reception on Friday has reached capacity.

What does it mean to recognize that sculptures, like continents and mountains, are on the move? Beatriz Cortez’s sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left departs Storm King Art Center, the site of its current exhibition, to embark on a three-day performative journey along the Hudson River to EMPAC–Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Onboard the fireboat John J. Harvey, the steel volcano travels north up the tidal estuary via Kingston to Troy to be installed in a concert hall for its second site of exhibition, leaving behind a sculptural footprint in its wake: an absence amidst other artworks on Museum Hill.

The volcano can be witnessed as it sails upriver from various viewing points on both shores and online through a livestream.

Members of the public are also invited to view it at the Hudson River Maritime Museum's riverfront Marina in Kingston on October 28, and to gather in welcoming the volcano when it passes through the Federal Lock and Dam near The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy on October 29.

A month prior to the journey, Cortez charts the conceptual content borne by notions of movement and impermanence for the Parsons Fine Art Visiting Artists Lecture co-organized by the Vera List Center at the New School. 

In making this passage from a sculpture park to a performing arts center, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left proposes a line of questioning: What does it mean to consider sculpture as time-based? And can it become a performance? In (re)enacting a refusal to remain an object transfixed in a landscape, it exposes the fact that sculptures always already carry time, and are the ultimate records of their own making. When we encounter a sculpture as an artwork in an exhibition space, how might we apprehend the histories, geographies, and processes that are latent within it?

With Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, Cortez attends to a popular account of the Tierra Blanca Joven super eruption that took place in the mid-first millennium CE in what is now known as El Salvador. Imperceptible subterranean frequencies sounded before magma and rock were blasted thousands of miles into the stratosphere, reflecting light coming from the sun away from the earth to produce a yearlong winter that affected the ancient Maya civilization and regions beyond. Both geological feature and Indigenous deity, the volcano was dislocated from its site which was transformed into a large depression or caldera that is now the Ilopango Lake. As the volcano exploded into particles that dispersed in all directions, its ash was carried by the atmosphere to fall across the globe, and as far as Antarctica, where it can still be found embedded deep in the ice, a trace in the present or the continuing reverberation of a bygone weather event. 

Centuries later, Cortez’s speculative sculpture performs both a reversal and an extension of this movement. Steel is a symbol of permanence but it is extracted from the earth. In building the volcano, the artist and her collaborators hand-beat out its industrialization, preparing the material for its return to its once organic state. Welded on the hill of Atelier Calder in Saché, France, the sculpture traversed the Atlantic Ocean to the artist’s studio in Los Angeles to be completed before making its way to the Hudson Valley, from where it will journey upriver to Troy and beyond. Cortez describes “the volcano that left” as an act of migration and considers its movements across land and water as a metaphor for the imperceivable yet continuous transformation of the landscape over time.

Its journey to EMPAC will be broadcast live by the presenting partners October 27 & 29. Filmmaker Guillermo Escalón and composer Igor de Gandarias will join the sculpture on its journey, recording the volcano’s passage for a forthcoming film (2024).

Filmmaker Guillermo Escalon and composer Igor Gandarias are in residence at EMPAC to record the Hudson River journey of Beatriz Cortez’s sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, for a forthcoming film (2024). The sculpture will sail up the Hudson River by boat from its exhibition at Storm King Art Center to EMPAC for the opening of Shifting Center, where it will be installed for the duration of the exhibition. Shifting Center also features Escalon and Gandarias’ film Rapsodia.

Speakers that Speak To You is a newly-commissioned work by DeForrest Brown Jr., which traces the trajectory of techno’s machine-like aspects and its connection to embodied dance and live music histories. Considering the genre’s origins by activating the spatial qualities of sound, Brown extends his musical and theoretical practice through the advanced sonic infrastructure of EMPAC’s Studio 1—Goodman.

The project opens up to the implicit origins of techno that Brown traced in his book, Assembling a Black Counter-Culture (2021), wherein he has historicized techno as a genre rooted in a powerful political and cultural force that emerged within underground architectures and industrial spaces in Detroit. Brown's exposure to early Afrofuturist and jazz musicians, Black southern marching band compositions, and second-wave techno producers of the 1990s led to the development of his Black radical politics within the techno genre. The project will engage with recordings from the artist’s new album Techxodus, which operates as a musical successor to the ideas in his recent publication. Additionally, Brown plans to spend the next year developing tracks and performances around his notion of a “free-jazz”-inspired take on techno. With this new piece, Brown continues his research by reactivating cultural soundscapes and critically mapping the sounds of techno through the mode of a listening session.

DeForrest Brown Jr. is producing Speakers That Speak To You in residence at EMPAC with curators Katherine Adams, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Fellios, Abel González Fernández, Sidney Pettice, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

A conversation between artist Armando Guadalupe Cortés and curator and artist M. Elijah Sueuga that explores Cortés’ multidisciplinary practice as a lens through which to think about how concepts of dryness might be communicated through performance, sound, and architecture.

Cortés is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist originally from Urequío, a small community in Michoacán, México. His work explores themes of endurance and repetitive labor through object making, storytelling, and performance, which employs forms and methods from his native hometown in México and contrasts them with elements of his life in the United States. M. Elijah Sueuga is a curatorial fellow at EMPAC and graduate student in the History of Art at Williams College, where his research focuses on modern and contemporary sound and music. Sueuga is also an artist and composer and is collaborating with Cortés in La Seca, a performance that converges on their approaches to sound as well as a shared geography, which will be held at MASS MoCA in February, 2023.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves) is an electro-acoustic performance and installation for EMPAC’s Concert Hall by Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navas and Venezuelan composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares. It is performed by American percussionists Taylor Long, Robert Cosgrove, and Clara Warnaar on an array of playful instrument-sculptures by Navas, which fuse iconic motifs of 20th century modernism with traditional boat-building tools and techniques.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas is an expansive work of visual art and music inspired by the Aula Magna, the Central University of Venezuela’s auditorium, and the artworks commissioned for the campus by Venezulan, European, and American modernists by its architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the early 1950s. The Aula Magna houses Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling (1953), known locally as “nubes” (clouds). It is the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall to reflect optimal acoustics. This feature resonates with EMPAC’s Concert Hall, which houses the first fabric ceiling to span the full-length of the hall to shape the sound.

Deeply embedded in the afterlives of iconic modernist artworks, Navas’ sculptures, installations, and performances trace the use and misuse of such works over time as they are circulated as reproductions and appropriated away from the site and context of their original making. For Cuando las nubes eran las olas, Navas’ sculptural instruments, costumes, and scenography and Escalona-Mijares’ multi-layered approach to electro-acoustic composition interweaves the architectural properties of the Aula Magna with its thick social and sonic history in an exploration of the relationship between sculpture, acoustics, and space.

In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s EMPAC-commissioned feature-length film Oriana, a band of feminist militants takes refuge in a thriving Puerto Rican landscape. The film relocates Monique Wittig’s infamous novel Les Guérillères to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, where its protagonists work and cook, dance and rest, and prepare for battle amidst the abundant tropical vegetation.

Suffused with unexplainable encounters, Oriana unfolds across forests, caves, rivers, and the ruins of industry and colonial infrastructure abandoned and fallen into disrepair. Encompassing both delirious choreographic interludes and attention to quiet rituals, the film maps a world of perceptual distortions, obscure gestures, and collective processes, one where quotidian objects transform into arcane weapons and where ancestral spirits and the recently dead alike become phantasmatically present.

Performed by a cast of Santiago Muñoz’s collaborators who come from music, performance, art, and poetry, Oriana was filmed on location in Puerto Rico and at EMPAC, where the Center’s theater itself becomes a site of temporary shelter and respite from a struggle that remains at once omnipresent and unspecified. Nevertheless, against this backdrop of exhaustion and threat, the film strives to visualize the ecstatic and unsettling potential of new social forms, languages, and ways of living in the aftermath of a slow exit from long legacies of colonization and patriarchy.

Only Breath, Words is a theatrical production about language and intimacy by Anna Craycroft, commissioned and produced by EMPAC.

Only Breath, Words is a performance without actors in which the voice is delivered by the theater itself, as its air-handling system “exhales” through flue pipe sculptures created by the artist. These instruments create coos, whirrs, hums, and moans while words and fragments of phrases flash and glow on grids of lights that are moved across the stage. Pushing at the limit of language’s capacity to transmit emotion and to articulate nuanced thoughts, these fragmentary idioms, instructions, and vernacular phrases suggest an elusive author, one whose meaning teeters between legibility and opacity.

The score for this first iteration of Only Breath, Words is composed by Sarah Hennies to generate a chorus of sounds. Hennies’ approach is informed by the dynamic nature of Craycroft’s instruments, in which each pipe can be played to produce a multitude of drones and noises, whose loudness, timbre, pitch, and quality are necessarily designed to react to the ever-changing flow of air produced by theater's ventilation system as it conditions the temperature and humidity of the space. Hennies' score results in a sequence of slow but incremental changes as the players attend as much to the movements of the instruments' unique components as to the tone the vibration produces.

The performance gives agency to the theater’s constitutive parts: its architectural features and technical infrastructure, the people necessary to operate it, and the very air that circulates through it. It dwells in the physical act of production. In this way, Only Breath, Words conjures theatrical allusions through the exchange of light, sound, and space and points back to the fundamental processes by which we, through the construct of the theater, seek to communicate.

Conceived as a performance and installation that activates and extends the specific architectural infrastructure of the theater, Only Breath, Words continues Craycroft’s ongoing dramaturgical approach to interdisciplinary collaboration. Craycroft's work frequently engages with and supports works by other artists, composers, writers, and performers through her sculptural installations and protocols for research and participation.

Commissioned and produced by EMPAC, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing undertakes a richly sensory journey across moments, languages, and music, roaming through architectural spaces that are variously imagined and real, cosmological and colonized. The film centers on the capacity of Maya cultural belongings, and wind instruments in particular, to give voice to Indigenous systems of knowledge. Grappling with the history of Western architects using Indigenous motifs without significant reference to or engagement with their source, the film works to restore these absent sounds, utilizing 3D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments held behind glass in Pre-Columbian museum collections.

Told through the personal histories of its Maya protagonists, K’iche ’Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez leads us through her Guatemalan community’s vernacular architectures. Through poetry and conversation, she traces a densely interwoven set of practices that have long articulated and preserved systematic understandings of time, language, and cosmology across cultural forms, ranging from ancient temples to systems of healing, and from weaving techniques whose patterns encode complex information to the physical structure of the traditional ‘temazcal’ steam room. As if in echo, the film follows Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal inside the “Mayan Revival” Sowden House in Los Angeles, as he works on his rigorously researched drafts of ancient Maya glyphs and calendars while surrounded by sculptural copies of the same motifs appropriated by the architect Lloyd Wright.

The poetry and artwork of Chávez and Brito Bernal is interwoven by spirited performances of the instruments by Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta. From tiny bird ocarinas to flutes that sculpturally represent monkey, jaguar, and other deities of Maya mythology, each breath activates layers of music that expand the slippery temporalities of the film’s themes and which are heightened further through the film’s kaleidoscopic visual effects. Premiering in EMPAC’s Concert Hall, where several of Birrueta’s performances were recorded, Before the Volcanoes Sing seeks to reclaim space for Indigenous traditions in the present. Projected onto the undulating surface of the acoustically ornamented curtain wall, the film’s score and sound design by composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães is dramatized through an immersive Ambisonic* array of 64-loudspeakers that surround the audience.

*The moving image work utilizes a "higher-order Ambisonic" spatial audio system that EMPAC has implemented in its venues. Ambisonics is an audio format developed to record, mix, and playback immersive audio that surrounds the audience in a much more precise way than traditional “surround sound.” The listeners in the Concert Hall are surrounded by more than 60 loudspeakers distributed across the wall and ceiling surfaces, each contributing to the soundfield with their own audio channel.