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Please visit https://varsityvocals.com/events/ for more information on this event.

Amanda Turner Pohan is in residence at EMPAC with performer Katy Pinke to film Alexa Echoes. 

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker and choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates. The first iteration in a series of three, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant for Alexa, also named Echo. Produced after travel restrictions and social distancing measures were implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film combines footage shot in the newly empty spaces of EMPAC with recordings from the collaborators’ homes and remote studios.

In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Using choreographed movement, spoken word, and song set to an orchestral score, Alexa Echoes abstracts the gendered decisions that go into framing new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

This residency is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

Sondra Perry makes videos, performances, and installations that foreground digital tools as a way to critically reflect on new technologies of representation and remobilize their potential.

Perry’s engagement with consumer image-making technologies produces artworks that reveal the calibration, protocols, and algorithms inherent in these devices. She repurposes exercise machines, video games, chroma studios, and computer graphics in multidisciplinary artworks that together form a corrective against the unreflective naturalization of technology. Her works examine how images are produced in order to reveal the way photographic representations are captured and recirculated.

On Saturday, November 23rd, in the EMPAC Concert Hall, the Rensselaer Orchestra will present a concert of dance music, ranging from the 17th century ballets of Jean-Baptiste Lully to the raucous 20th century music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. No matter the era, this concert will keep you tapping your feet!

The complete program for the concert is:

• Jean-Baptiste Lully (Arr. Felix Mottl), Dance Suite
• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Petite Suite de Concert
• Franz Schubert, Symphony No. 7 Unfinished
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Polonaise from Eugene Onegin

This concert is free and open to the public.

Please visit the event announcement for more information about this campus event.

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