Rensselaer Professor Michael Century is at EMPAC to give a talk celebrating the launch of his new book, Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technology Policy, and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Internet Age, published by MIT Press.

Understanding how experimental art catalyzes technological innovation is often prized yet typically reduced to the magic formula of “creativity.” In Northern Sparks, Century emphasizes the role of policy and institutions by showing how novel art forms and media technologies in Canada emerged during a period of political and social reinvention, starting in the 1960s with the energies unleashed by Expo 67.

Debunking conventional wisdom, Century reclaims innovation from both its present-day devotees and detractors by revealing how experimental artists critically challenge as well as discover and extend the capacities of new technologies. He offers a series of detailed cross-media case studies that illustrate the cross-fertilization of art, technology, and policy. These cases span animation, music, sound art and acoustic ecology, cybernetic cinema, interactive installation art, virtual reality, telecommunications art, software applications, and the emergent metadiscipline of human-computer interaction. They include Norman McLaren's “proto-computational” film animations; projects in which the computer itself became an agent, as in computer-aided musical composition and choreography; an ill-fated government foray into interactive networking, the videotext system Telidon; and the beginnings of virtual reality at the Banff Centre.

Century shows how Canadian artists approached new media technologies as malleable creative materials, while Canada undertook a political reinvention alongside its centennial celebrations. Northern Sparks offers a uniquely nuanced account of innovation in art and technology illuminated by critical policy analysis.

Michael Century, a musician and media arts historian, is Professor of Music and New Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He founded the Media Arts program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Northern Sparks will be available at a signing table hosted by Market Block Books following the lecture.

Conspiracy Influencer is a series of four newly-commissioned plays by Bailey Scieszka. Combining puppetry, clownery, multimedia elements, and live theater, the performance satirizes the ways in which the flow of information on the internet creates an often polarized, contentious political and social culture in the US. Featuring a madcap cast of characters including anthropomorphized consumer products, chaotic circus clowns, and Richard Nixon’s family pet, Conspiracy Influencer transcends its campy facade, inviting the audience to engage in a thoughtful meditation on the current state of collective consciousness in this country.

Scieszka will be in residence at EMPAC between May 2–13, 2022, during which time she will work closely with the EMPAC production team as well as guest curators Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Min Sun Jeon, and Guy Weltchek—all current students at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Utilizing many of the production facilities at EMPAC, Scieszka will develop set and lighting design, paint backdrops, edit sound and video, and rehearse Conspiracy Influencer within the two weeks of her residency, culminating in a performance for a live audience in EMPAC’s Theater.

Conspiracy Influencer will premiere for Rensselaer students, faculty, and staff in the theater on Friday, May 13th at 7PM and online on Thursday, May 26 at 7PM.

Bailey Scieszka’s Conspiracy Influencer is a four-part theatrical extravaganza premiering at EMPAC. This newly commissioned performance combines puppetry, clownery, and drag. It is set in a madcap world populated by characters like anthropomorphic Skittles, Nixon’s dead dog, a talking Comet pizza slice, a mob of Beanie Babies, and a demonic clown named Old Put (Scieszka’s alter ego). The cast of puppets satirize the wacky conspiracy theories that spawn in dark corners of the internet and contribute to the polarized socio-political landscape in the United States. Over the course of the performance follow Old Put’s meteoric rise from humble content creator, who unboxes dolls on Youtube, to celebrity influencer at the center of a disinformation campaign. The performance is the climax of Scieszka’s collaboration with curators from CCS Bard, EMPAC’s production team, and Philadelphia-based composer Joseph Hallman.

The play explores the ways in which history is remembered, resurrected, and sensationalized in America's entertainment-centered culture. The dense, absurdist, and hilarious dialogue in Conspiracy Influencer is steeped in the vocabulary of celebrity gossip, the internet, and social media. The characters reference ideas drawn from 24-hour blog and cable news outlets, cyclically mutated on the subcultural message boards of Reddit, 4chan, and Youtube’s comment sections. Scieszka critically alludes to fabulists who underwrite white American ideology in these forums, humorously and acerbically recasting the iconography of populism via Old Put and their puppet ensemble. Scieszka uses this divisive visual and verbal rhetoric as an emotional counterweight to her otherwise bright and playful imagery in a work that emasculates the trolls of the internet’s echo chambers. Laced with clever pop culture references and outlandish hijinks, this puppet show is a pointed meditation on the current state of collective consciousness in the United States.

Conspiracy Influencer is curated by Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Min Sun Jeon, and Guy Weltchek, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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Please join us for the online premiere of Conspiracy Influencer on May 26 at 7PM. 

Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger presents a work-in-progress screening of his new multi-channel moving image work, followed by a discussion with curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley on the production and themes of the work.  

This work is part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, a project that incorporates artist-made regalia, props, videos, and performance, and explores alternative possible futures for sites of post-industrial extraction, reimaging them anew through speculative oral histories for the future. 

All aspects of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s installation have been produced in residence at EMPAC with Ginger Dunnill, their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa, and project curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Curator-in-residence Nida Ghouse is collaborating with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks on research towards their forthcoming exhibition Shifting Center, for which they are recipients of a Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Shifting Center will be presented at EMPAC in fall 2023 and considers the often-overlooked acoustic practices in contemporary art and exhibition-making as they relate to cultural memory, colonial history, and decolonial processes. More specifically, this curatorial research and the subsequent exhibition investigates the politics of sound by considering two opposing tendencies at play within contemporary art exhibitions and colonial museums: dislocation (objects, artworks, and cultural belongings taken from their original context and silenced through the mechanisms of museological preservation and display); and location (how architecture and acoustics impact the experience of exhibitions as resonant spaces of sited and situated listening). 

Curatorial research in preparation for the exhibition will span two years and will comprise international travel for studio and site visits, interviews, and archival research. The curators will meet with artists and specialists where they work as well as convene at EMPAC for discussions about acoustic display and spatial audio technology. This period of research is itself an exercise in listening to and learning from others, an essentially communal and temporal practice that is not only rooted in the present but looks for how past ways of knowing and practices of listening can inform an exhibition today. 

Cannupa Hanska Luger will be in residence at EMPAC to work on the post-production and installation design of a new multi-channel moving image work. Cannupa Hanska Luger is in residence with Ginger Dunhill, their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa, and curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley. 

This residency follows the principal filming of this new work in various public locations around Troy, NY that took place in September 2021. This footage will subsequently be combined with footage recently shot in collaboration with Gabe Fermin in the White Sands desert.

Part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, this project incorporates artist-made regalia, props, videos, and performance, and explores alternative possible futures for sites of post-industrial extraction, reimaging them anew through speculative oral histories for the future. 

A work-in-progress presentation of the installation and a conversation between Cannupa Haska Luger and curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley will take place at EMPAC on April 7, 2022. 

The project is curated by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. 

Future Ancestral Technologies

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a science fiction. Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and help to imagine the future on a global scale. Future Ancestral Technologies does this from an Indigenous lens; it articulates a future narrative in which migration of humans is essential for survival on and with the land and water and people of color are the primary characters. As the future of our planet is threatened by capitalism’s continued devastation, new strategies of survivance are needed. With global instability, widespread financial crisis and unaffordable housing, our lifestyles must change. Future Ancestral Technologies is an ongoing investigation of our past in order to move forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking. This work prepares us for a highly adaptable lifestyle that lives with the land, not off the land. Future Ancestral Technologies prototypes designs for objects and their use, tests ritual and conducts ceremony. Future Ancestral Technologies is a deep time space of futuristic vision in which societies live true reverence and acknowledgement of land, beyond the trappings of cultural production, to dream and test a culture of fundamental coexistence.

Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, videos, and performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity. 

This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by unique objects, futuristic narratives, ancient myths, new paradigms and symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates a future in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests a radical approach to materials and their use. 

Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for imagining the distant future and dreaming sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and skill sets to create futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future. Future Ancestral Technologies is disseminated through art and internet venues to influence global collective consciousness. Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy, ritual, and resourcefulness in epochs to come.

Laurie Anderson with artistic and technical collaborators Jason Stern, Amy Koshbin, Jim Cass, and Bob Currie, were in residence recreating the virtual reality work Chalkroom into a human-scale video installation for the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC.

Mariam Ghani was in residence to work on the post-production audio and video for her film What We Left Unfinished, based on the history of the Afghan Film Archive, the state film institute based in Kabul, Afghanistan. The film gestures toward the possibility of reconstructing hidden and parallel narratives from both images of state propaganda and the day-to-day lived experience of the Afghan Film Archive’s management, film directors, and governmental players during the period of Afghan Communism.

Only Breath, Words is a theatrical production about language, identity, and intimacy by Anna Craycroft that has been in development at EMPAC since 2018 and will premiere in September 2022. 

Artist Clarissa Tossin is back in residence in the Concert Hall with composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães to work on the sound design, dramaturgy, and realization of her installation Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing.

The moving image work utilizes a higher-order Ambisonic spatial audio system. Ambisonics is a specific audio format developed to record, mix, and playback audio in a scalable immersive three-dimensional soundfield. The listeners in the Concert Hall are surrounded by 64 loudspeakers distributed across the wall and ceiling surfaces, each contributing to the soundfield with their own audio channel.

Over the last several years, the principal photography for Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’/ Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing was filmed by Tossin and cinematographer Jeremy Glaholt in the Concert Hall and Theater at EMPAC with flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta; at Sowden House and the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles with Lozano Birrueta and artist Tohil Fidel Brito; and in Guatemala with poet and artist Rosa Chávez.

Los Angeles-based artist Clarissa Tossin’s Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing is scored by Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães and performed by Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta, Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito, and K’iche ’Kaqchiquel Maya poet Rosa Chávez. The film takes a sonic approach to the articulation of architectural borrowings by Western architects of indigenous cultural motifs, utilizing 3D-printed replicas of Maya wind instruments from Pre-Columbian collections held in US and Guatemalan museums.

In this video Tossin and some of her collaborators, including the director of photography Jeremy Glaholt, discuss the production of the flutes, the composition of the score, and approaches to the film’s cinematography. These 3D scanned and playable replica instruments were created by anthropologist/archaeologist Jared Katz, the Mayer Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow for Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Art Museum.