Boudry / Lorenz present their film Telepathic Improvisation produced at EMPAC in Spring 2017.

Boudry / Lorenz’s film, Telepathic Improvisation, takes as its starting point the late Rensselaer Professor Pauline Oliveros’ 1974 score of the same name. However, the audience for this filmed performance is not only called upon to telepathically communicate with the performers (as is the case with Oliveros’ original score), but also to communicate with the other elements on stage, from the theatrical lights to a group of autonomous white boxes that glide across the stage.

The film is bookended by two monologues: the Oliveros score, and a 1969 text by German revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof that prescribes resistance in the face of global capitalist oppression. Telepathic Improvisation attempts to disrupt historical narratives surrounding agency and action by elevating the technical, non-human actors to the equal status of their human counterparts.

New York-based quartet Yarn/Wire performs an evening of work by contemporary German composer Enno Poppe, including the world premiere of the EMPAC-commissioned piece Feld. The program will also feature Tonband, Poppe’s co-composition with Wolfgang Heiniger.

Enno Poppe describes his music as “dented nature”: While grounded in compositional guidelines taken from the fields of acoustics, biology, and mathematics, his pieces gradually disobey their own rules, contorting and evolving through an almost hallucinatory atmosphere of unexpected sounds. Highly respected as both a composer and a conductor, Poppe has led the Berlin-based ensemble mosaik since 1998, and has presented his orchestral, chamber, and operatic works throughout Europe. In 2015, Poppe’s Speicher received its US premiere at EMPAC, performed by the Talea Ensemble.

Yarn/Wire is a quartet of two percussionists and two pianists: Laura Barger, Ning Yu, Ian Antonio, and Russell Greenberg. The ensemble is known for its flexibility to slip between classical and modern repertoire, and has become a leading group in the new-music world. Yarn/Wire were last at EMPAC in 2014 to premiere and record The Negotiation of Context by Davið Brynjar Franzson.

PROGRAM:

• Enno Poppe Feld (2007/17) World Premiere
• Enno Poppe + Wolfgang Heiniger Tonband (2008/12)

Liveware is an audiovisual duo combining live-coded animation (Shawn Lawson) with musical performance (Michael Century). 

Performance maker Andrew Schneider is back at EMPAC for the world premiere of AFTER, an emotional story about time, bodies, death, and physics.

The sequel to his Obie Award-winning performance YOUARENOWHERE, which challenged audiences with a storyline drawn from quantum physics, AFTER goes a step further, probing the audience to consider where they are and how they got there. Working over the past year in residence at EMPAC, Schneider developed the show’s content in tandem with experiments in new theatrical technology. In an effort to create intimacy and take the audience to the edge of the human condition, AFTER incorporates projection mapping, lighting effects, and sound spatialization technology.

This will be the first time that EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis speaker array has been applied in the theatrical context, allowing sound designer Bobby McElver to precisely place and move sounds through the performance space. Please join us for a Q&A discussion with the curator and artists immediately following performance. This performance uses haze, strobe lighting, and loud sounds.

Andrew Schneider is an Obie Award-wining performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist who creates and performs in original performance works and videos and builds interactive electronic artworks and installations. Schneider was a Wooster Group company member (video/performer) from 2007–14 and has shown his work at 3LD in New York, the Melbourne Arts Festival, LIFT Festival, and in theaters across France, including Maillon, Théâtre de Strausbourg, and Théâtre de Gennevilliers.

Incoming Rensselaer freshman are invited to an electronic dance music mini-festival run by students for students.

As a part of Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond (NRB), MashUP! is the culmination of a two-day workshop where students learn to work with professional-caliber digital audio, video, and lighting technologies. EMPAC’s production team mentors participants to guide them through the process of producing a big-stage EDM event. On the final night, participants stage a full-scale dance party to help welcome the incoming class.

MUSIC/SOUND

A night of outer-orbit house music with Chicago experimentalist Hieroglyphic Being.

You find a vinyl record out in the desert, faded and with no markings. Upon returning home, you place it on the turntable and are enveloped by distorted, raw, rhythmic pulsations. The sound gives you a glimpse into another world, another way of existing. It works its way inside of you, and you begin to subtly move. This is the sound of Hieroglyphic Being. Also known as Jamal Moss, the Chicago-based producer and record-label boss (Mathematics) has spent decades prolifically releasing music into the outer orbits of house culture. Occasionally donning aliases such as Sun God, IAMTHATIAM, and Africans with Mainframes, Moss refers to his sound as “cosmic bebop,” “rhythmic cubism,” and “synth expressionism,” embracing the mystical power of dance music to move bodies and expand minds. In 2015, Moss joined forces with Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen and the J.I.T.U Ahn-Sahm-Buhl for We Are Not the First, an avant-jazz ode to musical ancestry and sonic transcendence.

VIDEO

Mexican artist and composer Laura Luna creates a new multimedia concert performance inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen.

A photographer turned video and film artist, Laura Luna began to experiment with music in 2013. Perceiving sound as a powerful art form for enhancing memories and narratives, she recorded sounds around her that triggered emotions and memory fragments, building them into a rich tonal music. Using field recordings, voice, a modded Atari computer, a Gameboy and various synths, she constructs sounds to describe fantastical scenes and narratives, creating soundtracks for sublimely fogged-in worlds inspired by the sort of science fiction that deals in the eerily heart-rending.

In 2014, she released the experimental album Isolarios inspired by stories about lost cosmonauts, expeditions without return, magical realism, and the works of Italo Calvino. With a passion for machines, generative narratives, and the complexities of memory, Luna has developed audiovisual performances, installations, and interactive works where different materials and technologies coexist.

Luna will perform at EMPAC following a production residency in Studio 2 aimed at creating a new multimedia concert performance inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen.

NOTE: Capacity for this performance will be very limited, as the audience will be within the panoramic screen. Advanced ticket purchase is recommended.

AUDIO