Upending
For the past two years, EMPAC has hosted a residency by The OpenEnded Group, an innovative digital arts collective specializing in the creation of 3D digital works. Now audiences can see the result. Upending, a work commissioned by EMPAC and appearing here in its world premiere, is a revelatory stereoscopic theater performance, an actor–less drama of disorientation and reorientation that compels us to rethink our relationship with the material world. Using ordinary flat photographs and processing them with non-photorealistic rendering and stereoscopic HD video, Upending transfigures familiar objects, spaces, and persons in ways that are both beautiful and uncanny. The play of images is accompanied by a gutsy EMPAC-made recording of Morton Feldman's first String Quartet by the FLUX Quartet, which The New Yorker's Alex Ross describes as “legendary for its furiously committed, untiring performances.” The music provides an aural lens that renders the video almost balletic, even as the visuals allow us to hear Feldman as never before. Listen to a short interview on WAMC with Curator Micah Silver and Paul Kaiser of The OpenEnded Group