![a group of black persons in bondage gear standing in a room lit with grass green light](/sites/default/files/styles/convert_to_webp/public/2024-07/holloway_2024.jpg.webp?itok=Bn7adeV1)
Investigating Trigger Mechanisms, Machine Learning, and Bodily Gesture
As part of the Ephemeral Organ series, new media artist SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY culminates her EMPAC residency with an artist talk exploring her overall practice and demonstrating interactive cuing technology she is developing for her latest multimedia performance projects. In this event, HOLLOWAY investigates the mutual possibilities of technology and the body to track, mediate, and generate elements of a theatrical experience.
Known for her experiments with noisy, electronic sculpture and her unique approach to expanded cinema, HOLLOWAY shapes the grammars of computer programming and sadomasochism into tools for exposing structures and narratives of power. Her two current projects in development reimagine familiar narratives through a Black queer lens, and an aesthetic approach driven by the digital age. [WALLED GARDENS ] _or_ return(ing) "a love in disguise as forever.” is based on the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale; and THEY LAID DOWN THEIR HAMMERS AND CRIED is based on the John Henry folk tale.
Both projects use technologies that allow the performers’ gestures to generate and interface with lights, sound synthesis, sculptural elements, and video. These responsive, interactive designs are inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg’s piece, Open Score (1966), which stages a game of tennis that uses reactive engineering to choreograph light and sound through physical motion. HOLLOWAY presents a similar live interaction between technology, theatrical staging, and bodily action. Here, she applies machine learning algorithms as decision-making mechanisms to produce the landscape of each piece in the moment
Main Image: SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, DEWCLAW, Institute for Contemporary Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2022. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Keshia Eugene.
Dates + Tickets
EMPAC Fall 2024
Season
EMPAC 2024 FALL is made possible by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. EMPAC’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.