Ezekiel Dixon-Román’s research on computation is influenced by Black radical anti-colonial thought, as well as cybernetics and critical philosophies of technology. His work focuses partly on how algorithms may reflect and become haunting forces as they pursue certain patterns of data, reproducing the ways in which racial logics and forces of power have historically been embedded in technological systems.
Dixon-Román’s writing explores the implications of computational ideas of recursion, indeterminacy, and technology’s possibility for self-reflexivity. His work, additionally, re-reads ideas of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment period and from the human’s formation within technology and science.
At EMPAC, Dixon-Román’s talk addresses some of his newest research. He also discusses examples of contemporary artworks that demonstrate the ghostly specters at work in colonial logics, and that push AI away from mechanisms of control.
Main Image: Courtesy the speaker.
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Main Image: Marina Rosenfeld, The Agonists, 2023. Mixed media and sound, installation detail, Museum Art Plus, for Donaueschinger Musiktage, 2023.
In this talk, artist Marina Rosenfeld will present an overview of her practice. The program also includes an informal introduction to her new project µ (mu), to be developed while in residence at EMPAC.
A 48-hour piano performance inspired by abandoned Bell Labs research on environmental recording. Photographic panels that double as the physical contours for a live sound work. These are just two examples from Marina Rosenfeld’s body of work, which merges approaches from composition, sound installation, and the visual arts. Rosenfeld’s work often seems to inject physical structures with sonic forms. Her installations explore the sculptural substrata and (in the artist’s words) “material instabilities” that underlie composed works and sound performance. Inspired by musical minimalism yet critical of its histories, Rosenfeld’s works rearticulate sound as a relational field.
While in residence at EMPAC, Rosenfeld will embark on a new project titled µ (mu) that emerges from her longstanding work with dubplates. Unlike vinyl records, dubplates are one-off and hand-cut. For this project, Rosenfeld imagines the dub plate’s surface as a distinct audiovisual realm, independent of the audio it embeds. She looks at the ways in which analog agents–a stylus or a hand–modify the sonic and visual content of the plates. The artist asks what might happen if one were to focus not on the overt sound within the dubplate but on incidental phenomena along its surface. Rosenfeld’s residency is a visual and sonic inquiry into the topography of the dubplate’s (material) grooves.
Media
Marina Rosenfeld live @sonicprotesfestival // 24 mars 2023. Mains d'Œuvres, Saint-Ouen.
Scholar André Lepecki’s work focuses on what he terms choreopolitics. This term signifies dance and choreographic practices that enable freedom in the social realm. Choreopolitics resists the policing of movement. Its politics is much more than policy in a formal sense. It resists enforced forms of physical circulation, and it extends dancers’ capacity to move against choreography’s disciplinary rules. Lepecki considers how time may be a technology for policing movement, and looks at performances and works that challenge it.
As the speaker writes: “In this talk, movement and time will be addressed as fundamental political substances through which a whole system of dominance over bodies, their actions, and their non-actions has been erected under different names—such as ‘liberal modernity,’ or ‘progress,’ or ‘global capitalism.’ With the help of some recent choreographies and performances—particularly by the Brazilian duo Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira, and by the Berlin-based duo Pauline Brody & Renate Lorenz—we will see how current disputes over who owns movement, who has the right to movement, and when should movement take place, may help us rethink (together with the critical theory of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Michelle Wright, and Sylvia Wynter) the very foundations of what we still insist on calling ‘time.’ In short, another title for this talk could simply be: The continuous struggle: towards a choreopolitics without time.” –André Lepecki
All are invited to stay for the public reception following the talk.
Main Image: Video still from speakers 2015 talkIn the dark.
Film screening and discussion with the director of Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn
In collaboration with campus-wide strategic partners, the Rensselaer Office of Multicultural Programs presents a screening of Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn. The documentary is directed by Muta’Ali '01 and takes a closer look at the murder of Yusuf Hawkins in 1989. The film features interviews with Hawkins’ family and friends as they reflect on the events and the loss of a loved one. Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn was released by HBO in 2020.
This event features a Q&A with the filmmaker and is followed by a reception in Evelyn's Café.
In partnership with the non-partisan League of Women Voters of Rensselaer County, Rensselaer will host a City of Troy Mayoral Candidate Forum featuring the Democratic nominee and current Rensselaer County Legislator, Nina Nichols, and the Republican nominee and current President of the Troy City Council, Carmella Mantello.
The one-hour debate is open to the entire RPI campus community and the public.
Join us for a reception immediately following the debate.
In September, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School presented a talk with artist Beatriz Cortez on Ilopango, the Volcano that Left and her research around the project.
ON-SITE PROGRAMS
The exhibition includes an after-hours installation and closing-day event by Hugo Esquinca, who will be presenting a work that probes the negative space and time of Shifting Center. Amplifying EMPAC’s sound systems throughout the building during the exhibition’s off-hours, the piece will explore sound at the margin of perceptibility, mediated through the Center’s architecture.
SATURDAY EXHIBITION TOURS WITH CURATORS VIC BROOKS, NIDA GHOUSE, and KATHERINE C.M. ADAMS
Three public tours with the Shifting Center curators offer insights into how EMPAC’s unique building is used to stage the exhibition. Shifting Center uses EMPAC’s performing arts and media production venues as exhibition spaces. In doing so, the exhibition sonically activates the building as though it were an instrument. The tour introduces the Center’s unique acoustic and theatrical architectures in the course of exploring the exhibition’s featured artworks.
Main Image: Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães, Each Absent Breath, 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artists and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.
To mark the release of his portrait album Wake Up the Dead (New Focus Recordings, 2023), composer-performer Christopher Fisher-Lochhead presents a lecture demonstration featuring the music on the album. A lecturer in the Rensselaer Arts Department, Fisher-Lochhead discusses his approaches to notation, instrumental technique, form, harmony, and collaboration. The demonstration will include musical examples from the album itself plus a full performance of grandFather played by the acclaimed bassoonist and long-time collaborator Ben Roidl-Ward. A question-and-answer session and reception will follow.
Wake Up the Dead showcases Christopher Fisher-Lochhead’s notated music and features performances by the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Ben Roidl-Ward, and Quince Ensemble. By turns raucous and tender, frenetic and still, the music on the album documents two fundamental pillars of Fisher-Lochhead's compositional process: intense and long-term collaboration with performers, and a thoroughgoing reimagining of musical materials and organization.
Main Image: Christopher Fisher-Lochhead. Photo: Meghan Shalapin.
How can media technologies and live presence help us to think about embodied disabled and mad gestures in and out of the archive? What is an eco soma approach to engaging site, the elements, and time?
The Crip/Mad Archive Dances is a lecture by scholar and artist Petra Kuppers that draws on her prolific research integrating performance and disability studies to address disabled and mad presences in dance archives. The talk at EMPAC is rooted in Kuppers’s book Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, open access), parsing what she calls eco soma methods and finding dis/comfort within participatory performances grounded in disability culture. Kuppers discusses the strategies and insights of the performance and archive project Crip/Mad Archive Dances, including a poetic documentary-in-progress.
Content note: some film clips focus on medical incarceration but offer survivor testimonies of artful and agency-full reclamation.
This presentation will include in-person live ASL interpretation. This event will be livestreamed, with live ASL interpretation visible on-screen.
For visitors with mobility concerns, please email John Cook or call 518-276-2822 (voice only) to see how we can best accommodate you in your EMPAC experience.
This is the first of three events with Petra Kuppers, and is followed by two workshops, including a wheelchair procession, to take place on October 12 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media.
Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Kuppers grounds herself in disability culture methods, and uses somatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. In addition to Kuppers’s scholarly and performance work, she has published three poetry collections including her latest, Gut Botany (Wayne State University Press, 2020).
Kuppers is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2022 Dance/USA Fellow. She is artistic director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and co-creates Turtle Disco, a somatic writing studio, with Stephanie Heit. Kuppers is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor of Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Main Image: Petra Kuppers, Starship Somatics, video still, 2022-2023. Pictured: Petra Kuppers. Courtesy the artist. Image by The Olimpias.
This talk and conversation will delve into Alexis Blake’s approach to choreography. Experimentation with olfactory, sonic, and tactile materials figures prominently within Blake’s recent works. Working across the visual arts, performance, and dance, the artist’s choreographic practice plays with movement languages that have been sedimented by social structures and cultural precedents. Her works combine research into historically codified styles and gestures with responsive choreography that attends to dancers’ embodied physicality, building on individual movement languages to develop new pieces.
rock to jolt [ ] stagger to ash, awarded the Netherlands’ 2021 Prix de Rome prize, involves the gradual release of a smell of decay, realized in collaboration with the smell artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas. Blake’s recent project Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve develops from work with the bodily impact of resonance and low-frequency sound. In this new work, resonance stimulates forms of physical breaking: of both a glass scenography in the work, and of dance styles that draw from “breaking” in hip-hop. Like other works by Blake, Crack Nerve Boogie Swerve also takes a feminist approach to dance, using choreography to explore ways to fracture rigid models of gender.
Learn more about Blake and her projects on her website.
Main Image: Alexis Blake, Conditions of an Ideal, 2015. British Museum, London, UK. Block Universe Festival. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Arron Leppard.
