This screening and discussion is for Rensselaer community members only at this time. Registration is required.

Please join artist and poet Anaïs Duplan for a screening, discussion, and book-signing. Following a program experimental documentary works selected by Duplan, there will be a collective discussion on the films and videos that inspire his work. 

Blackspace is an ongoing project that encompasses Duplan’s recent book and his EMPAC-commissioned radio series that follows the artist’s lyrical exploration of the political potential of aesthetic experiences, from everyday sensations to the transformative reckoning with an artwork. These experiences are viewed through the prism of how Black and Indigenous artists and artists of color are working with media technologies on their own terms to seek “liberatory possibility” through specifically aesthetic means. 

The screening features films and videos that Duplan is currently researching. Each in its own way subverts the documentary impulse and expresses the tension between a straightforward documentary form of “telling” and an aesthetic approach that experiments with opacity as a strategy of refusal.

The event will finish with a book-signing by the artist of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). A limited number of copies are available for our campus community for free on a first come first served basis.

Program

• SPLASH (1991)
• Directed By Thomas Allen Harris
• 7 min, color, sound 
• Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016)
• Directed By Sondra Perry
• 9:05 min, color, sound, HD video
• Nor Was This All By Any Means (1978)
• Directed By Anthony Ramos
• 24 min, color, sound
• Off Limits (1988)
• Directed By Rea Tajiri
• 7:30 min, color, sound
• Water Plastic Bag (1973)
• Directed By Anthony Ramos
• 8:45 min, b&w, sound
• Hand Dryer (2012)
• Directed By Maggie Lee
• 00:27 sec, color, sound
• Re Dis Appearing (1977)
• Directed By Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
• 2:30 min, b&w, sound
• Landscapes and Subtitles (2013)
• Directed By C. Spencer Yeh
• 6:16 min, color, sound, HD video
• ART THOUGHTZ with Hennessy Youngman: Relational Aesthetics (2011)
• Directed By Jayson Scott Musson
• 5:27 min, color, sound, HD video

Suspended above the audience seating of the Aula Magna auditorium in Caracas, Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling deploys sculpture as a way of shaping the sonic experience of theatrical space. This conversation will explore a different resonance of Calder’s work: namely, the political and ideological implications of cultural modernity within Venezuela during the twentieth century. Anchored in Lisa Blackmore’s groundbreaking study Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948–1958 (U.P. Pittsburgh, 2017), curator Jennifer Burris and professor Lisa Blackmore will discuss the deployment of architecture and public spectacle as justification for censorship and authoritarianism as well as the tension between progressive aesthetics and repressive politics. Touching upon a broader rethinking of modernism in Latin America—in particular, the shifting nature of modernism as it migrates between places and across geographies—this far-reaching conversation will weave between political and cultural histories as it explores the manifold implications of a single, iconic artwork.

This talk is the third in a series of interdisciplinary conversations with experts from acoustics, art, architecture, and music that will explore the historic and contemporary resonances of the iconic Venezuelan hall.

Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris, will be published in fall 2022 in a collaboration between EMPAC at Rensselaer, the Calder Foundation, and Athénée Press. It is the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling and includes contributions by Dr. Lisa Blackmore, Sylvia Hernández de Lasala, María Fernanda Jaua, Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Rafael Pereira Escalona, Dr. Juan Pérez Hernández, Jonas Braasch, Johannes Goebel, Aimon Mata, Alexander S.C. Rower, Rafael Santana, Gryphon Rue, Ana Navas, and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares.

Cuando los nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were waves) by Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares engages these complex legacies in the production of a new work currently in development in EMPAC’s Concert Hall and created for the Acoustic Ceiling at Aula Magna.

A conversation on the inventive acoustic ceiling designs of the Aula Magna at Central University of Venezuela, Caracas and EMPAC’s Concert Hall at Rensselaer.

In the early 1950s, the American sculptor Alexander Calder collaborated with acoustic engineering team Bolt Beranek & Newman and Venezuelan architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva on the design of an extraordinary new sculptural approach to the acoustic treatment of an auditorium. Villanueva’s iconic Aula Magna in Caracas was thus the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall of this scale to reflect optimal acoustics. Another first shapes the exceptional sound of EMPAC’s Concert Hall: the innovative design of a fabric ceiling that spans the full-length of the hall.

The installation of Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953), locally known as “nubes” (clouds) or “platillos voladores” (flying saucers), produced an acoustic environment that prompted the Aula Magna to be ranked in the top five concert halls in the world by renowned architectural acoustician Leo Beranek (1914–2016), whose professional library was presented to Rensselaer by the engineer himself in 2010.

Jonas Braasch, professor of acoustics in Rensselaer’s School of Architecture and EMPAC’s founding Director Johannes Goebel, who was deeply involved with EMPAC’s acoustic design, will have a conversation about the most important and often least discussed element of a concert hall: the ceiling.

This talk is the second in a series of interdisciplinary conversations with experts from acoustics, art, architecture, and music that will explore the historic and contemporary resonances of the iconic Venezuelan hall. EMPAC’s Senior Curator for time-based visual art, Vic Brooks, is working on a major research, commissioning, and publication project on Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling at the Aula Magna, which creates interdisciplinary connections between the visual and the auditory, between art, science, and engineering.

Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris, will be published in fall 2022 in a collaboration between EMPAC at Rensselaer, the Calder Foundation, and Athénée Press. It is the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling and includes contributions by Dr. Lisa Blackmore, Sylvia Hernández de Lasala, María Fernanda Jaua, Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Rafael Pereira Escalona, Dr. Juan Pérez Hernández, Jonas Braasch, Johannes Goebel, Aimon Mata, Alexander S.C. Rower, Rafael Santana, Gryphon Rue, Ana Navas, and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares.

Cuando los nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were waves) by Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares engages these complex legacies in the production of a new work currently in development in EMPAC’s Concert Hall and created for the Acoustic Ceiling at Aula Magna.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for Rensselaer faculty, staff, and students and streamed online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Augmented and virtual reality have become commonplace. The Augmented Senses: Feminist Queer Augmented/Virtual Reality virtual symposium highlights experimental and creative approaches to enhanced immersive experiences. Focusing on gender, trans, and feminist themes around the body, desire, biological art, and our microbial environment, three contemporary artists will present their work: micha cárdenas, Eva Davidova, and Amy M. Youngs. 

micha cárdenas, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Art & Design: Games + Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Critical Realities Studio. Cárdenas is writing a new algorithm for gender, race, and technology. Her book Poetic Operations, Duke University Press, proposes algorithmic analysis to develop a trans of color poetics. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She is first-generation Colombian American. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, AI & Society, Scholar & Feminist Online, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, among others. 

Eva Davidova is an interdisciplinary artist with focus on new media(s), information, and their socio-political implications. The issues of her work—ecological disaster, interdependence, and manipulation of information emerge as paradoxes rather than assumptions, in an almost fairy-tale fashion. Davidova has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, the UVP at Everson Museum, the Albright Knox Museum, MACBA Barcelona, CAAC Sevilla, Instituto Cervantes Sofia, La Regenta, and Circulo de Bellas Artes Madrid among others. Her most recent exhibitions are Global Mode at ISSUE Project Room (online), The Sound of One Computer Thinking at the IMPAKT festival (Utrecht, Netherlands) and Intentions>Transfer and Disappearance II, or: Who Owns Our Emotions? at the EdgeCut series. She was a fellow of Residency Unlimited, Harvestworks TIP program, Alfred IEA, and is currently a member of NEW INC, the New Museum Incubator.

Amy M. Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures, and digital media works that explore interdependencies between technology, plants, and animals. Her practice-based research involves entanglements with the non-human, constructing ecosystems, and seeing through the eyes of machines. She has created installations that amplify the sounds and movements of living worms, indoor ecosystems that grow edible plants, a multi-channel interactive video sculpture for a science museum, and community-based, participatory video, social media, and public webcam projects.

This symposium will be available both as a livestream and on Zoom for those who wish to be more participatory. Register and we will send you all the info when it is available.

Please join us for a presentation by American artist Tony Cokes. 

Through a rigorous analysis of images and language, Tony Cokes dissects the often-obscured power dynamics at work in the cultural and political representation of histories of Blackness, class, and the war on terror. 

Cokes’ distinctive artworks and installations center on videos that foreground textual statements, often overlaid onto colorful monochromatic backgrounds with pop, punk, and electronic music soundtracks. Quoting language from across the political spectrum—from philosophical statements to news, art criticism, advertising, and song lyrics—Cokes mixes linguistic, visual, and sonic oppositions in a pared back approach that refuses the easy desire for a spectacular image. Shot through with wry humor and the aesthetics and upbeat music of popular culture, the videos project unstable meanings that deconstruct how we receive and read images.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Please join us for this online event featuring the artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka in conversation with curator Mariana Fernández. 

Over the past decade, Hopinka’s videos and films have been animated by an exploration of language as a way to formulate questions of identity and belonging. Hopinka’s filmmaking career began around the same time he started learning Chinuk Wawa, an almost extinct creole trade-language spoken in the Pacific Northwest, and Hočąk, the endangered, Indigenous language of the Ho-Chunk peoples. His works often overlay English, Chinuk Wawa, and Hočąk to move beyond static ideas about language and cultural identity. 

As the third in EMPAC’s Decolonizing Language series of conversations seeking to destabilize linguistic hierarchies and present strategies of Indigenous language revitalization, Hopinka will discuss his use of language in crafting alternative understandings of place, community, and knowledge transmission.

Break @ut is a symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing, and filmmaking initiated during THE UNDO FELLOWSHIP and presented by our partners UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art. Four ambitious research topics will be explored through a set of online screenings, study groups, and public dialogues. We are excited to share the ideas resulting from the inaugural year of this endeavor. 

Five artists — all extremely different in their curiosities, aesthetics, methods, and personalities, but more or less aligned in their efforts to break out of the patterns and preconceptions that dominate the documentary form — paired up with four intellectually adventurous writers. Together they proposed a research topic inspired by the artist’s practice. Having stewed on these thorny questions in regular dialogue with the whole group of brilliant fellows, their drafts now seek readers.

So, Break @ut with UnionDocs! Choose a single thread of inquiry, or weave connections between them all. Tune into the stream to watch and listen in, or sign up for an UNDO STUDY GROUP to get the reader and join a rigorous and creative discussion.

Please join us for a talk by the director Lisa Rovner and producer Marcus Werner Hed of Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines, an award-winning documentary that maps the history of twentieth century women experimental music pioneers. 

Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors features the work of visionary composer and Rensselaer professor Pauline Oliveros alongside Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, EMPAC-alum Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel. Through rigorous research, interviews, and archival footage, the film follows the electronic music composers’ radical experimentations with machines that redefined the boundaries of contemporary music.

The talk will include an educational screening of the film in Zoom. Students, staff, and faculty at Rensselaer were able to access the film throughout the semester. 

Sisters with Transistors opened at Metrograph on April 23, 2021.

Join us for a series of lunch hour conversations with EMPAC-commissioned composers Bora Yoon, Lesley Flanigan, and Miya Masaoka facilitated by Curator of music Dr. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti.

Korean-American composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Bora Yoon is an interdisciplinary artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice and found objects and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries—to formulate an audiovisual storytelling through music, movement and sound. Using sensory gloves to embody the sonic landscape of her compositions, she will create a work that explores the intimacy and delicacy of the human voice. Yoon will create an hour-long solo work for singer and electronics that explores the intimacy and delicacy of the human voice, using sensory gloves to embody the sonic landscape of her compositions, activating the Wave Field Synthesis Array through movement.

Lesley Flanigan is an experimental electronic musician living in New York City. Inspired by the physicality of sound, she builds her own instruments using minimal electronics, microphones and speakers. Performing these instruments alongside traditional instrumentation that often includes her own voice, she creates a kind of physical electronic music that embraces both the transparency and residue of process—sculpting sound from a palette of noise and subtle imperfections. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals internationally, including The Red Bull Music Festival at Saint John the Divine (New York), De Doelen (Rotterdam), Sonar (Barcelona), The Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (Chicago), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Kitchen (New York), The Broad Museum (Los Angeles), ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn), TransitioMX (Mexico City), CMKY Festival (Boulder), the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Flangian's new commissioned work for EMPAC will further explore these themes within the unique acoustics of our Concert Hall.

Miya Masaoka is a composer, sound artist and musician based in New York City. Classically trained, her work operates at the intersection of spatialized sound, frequency and perception, performance, social and historical references. Whether recording inside physical objects or the human body, within architecturally resonant spaces or outdoor resonant canyons, American composer Miya Masaoka creates incongruencies that feed the paradox of the contemporary condition. Her new solo work for Wave Field Synthesis Array and solo performer will connect the artistic practices of notated composition, alternative personas, and hybrid acoustic-electronic performance on Japanese traditional string instruments such as the koto and ichigenkin.

This online event features historian and Stockbridge-Munsee Community Director of Cultural Affairs Heather Bruegl in conversation with Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) composer and EMPAC curator Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. 

EMPAC is located on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people who are the Indigenous peoples of this land. Despite tremendous hardship in being forced from here, today their community resides in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. This conversation traces cultural strategies for the revitalization of Indigenous languages and frames the ways in which language shapes both our perception and environment.

Bruegl and Lanzilotti will discuss how “first voices” are central to their respective cultural work by introducing their intersecting approaches to decolonizing language, as well as the potential of such practices to reveal long-suppressed ecological, social, and artistic perspectives. Starting with an introduction by Bruegl of her cultural advocacy for, and historical inquiry into, the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, Lanzilotti will present examples of how she seeks to challenge inherited notions of the hierarchy of language in her work as both a curator and a composer. 

Lanzilotti’s recent composition hānau ka ua, for example, explores the hundreds of words for rain in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. This astonishingly complex vocabulary is able to reflect the time of day, color, intensity and sound of a rainfall. Through taking the instruments, sounds, and language of her own kanaka maoli heritage as a starting point, she reveals the perceptual role language has in Native Hawaiian culture in its relationship with the natural world.