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objects throughout a white studio

Shifting Center: Studio 2

Julian Abraham “Togar”, Maurice Louca, and Gala Porras-Kim

Multiple temporalities inhabit Studio 2. Sculptural, conceptual, and musical elements coexist in the space of sound: from a year of solar oscillations, to the rhythms of a seaside rock, to the microtonality of a guitar. A disembodied voice reaches up for a more than human world and theatrical time collapses the diurnal cycle into an hour. Stars are stones suspended here like speakers in the sky. Constellations in outer space are notations with which to defy gravity and linear time.

  • Julian Abraham “Togar”
  • Rocker’s Gonna Rock, (2021)
  • Color video with sound, 37 min. 9 sec.
  • Maurice Louca
  • Missing Notes (or, what if stones could sing?, (2023)
  • Omnidirectional sound, 43 min. 11 sec.
  • Commissioned by EMPAC
  • Gala Porras-Kim
  • Proposal for the reconstituting of ritual elements of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, (2019)
  • Polyurethane and acrylic paint, pigments and document 56 ¼ × 15 ¾ × 10 ¼ in.; 100 ¾ × 18 ½ × 11 ¾ in.
  • All Earth Energy Sources Are Known to Come From the Sun, (2019)
  • Brass, sunlight
  • Dimensions variable
  • Ambient sound of a pyramid one year of solar oscillations, (2019)
  • Ambient sound recording, 23 min. 43 sec.

Main Image: Gala Porras-Kim, various works, 2019 (detail). Maurice Louca, Missing Notes (or, what if stones could sing?), 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC.

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a steel volcano sits in the middle of the concert hall on a platform

Shifting Center: Concert Hall

Beatriz Cortez, Nancy Mounir, and Cannupa Hanska Luger

A volcano arrives at the concert hall to settle across the seats and displaces the frontality of the stage. It is an acoustic object that transforms the sonic properties of the space. When a volcano erupts, magma surfaces from beneath to scramble stratigraphic time. Its ash spreads far and wide and settles in other places.

Clay is matter of the earth and becomes medium in our hands—it is among the oldest technologies we have. A small amount can fill a room when shaped into a whistle. When such an instrument is played, it alters our sense of scale. In molding clay, we are holding time itself.

A dirge is a song that holds the loss of time. It carries absence forth as that which remains. A site is always already multiple sites. The earth opens onto an underworld and an afterlife. 

  • Beatriz Cortez
  • Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, (2023)
  • Steel
    Approximately 144 x 234 x 120 in.
  • Co-commissioned by EMPAC, Storm King Art Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.
  • Cannupa Hanska Luger
  • Volume (Fox, Ocelot, Vulture, Armadillo, Turtle), (2023)
  • Globular whistles made from clay, fired three ways: pit-fired, wood-fired, electric kiln-fired, ceramic, sound installation
  • Dimensions vary
  • Commissioned by EMPAC
  • Nancy Mounir
  • Solћ (reconciliation), (2023)
  • Higher Order Ambisonics, sound installation, 15 min. 28 sec.
  • Commissioned by EMPAC

Main Image: Beatriz Cortez, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Shannon K. Johnson/EMPAC.

Media
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a clear tube is inserted in the back of a clay bird flute head

Cannupa Hanska Luger, Volume (Fox, Ocelot, Vulture, Armadillo, Turtle), 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.

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an actuator sits atop a rock

Shifting Center: Studio 1—Goodman

Tania Candiani, Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães, and Clarissa Tossin

The artworks tune in to resonant frequencies from across time and geography. Activated in sequence, the spatial audio installation and the multi-channel video work transpose the acoustical properties of specific architectural and geological sites through a sensory journey of music and performance. Both recorded on-location, the spaces we now perceive in the room with us were acoustically excited by voice, wind instruments, or digital tools. The artists relocate the physical properties of the sites, and thus their potential for sounding, through the process of audio reproduction. These works are joined by sculptures that provide a material connection to their corresponding video or audio work. Each resonates visually through acoustic forms that collapse the space between the instrument and the site in which it can be heard.

  • Tania Candiani
  • Concert One. For the Animals, (2020)
  • Two-channel HD video with sound, 8 min. 2 sec.
  • Clarissa Tossin and Michelle Agnes Magalhães
  • Each Absent Breath, (2023)
  • Wave field synthesis, sound installation, 13 min. 47 sec
  • Tania Candiani
  • Percutor, (2020)
  • Musical instrument, custom sound mixer, solenoid array, dependent amplifier circuit effects, Modular Piezo microphones, Yamaha 6-channel mixer

Main Image: Tania Candiani, Percutor, 2020. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation detail). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.

Media
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mayan flutes of various deitys sit on risers in the darkness of studio 1 at empac

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.

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two persons standing before a pile of rocks that is being amplified by pezio actuators

Tania Candiani, Percutor, 2020. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist. Photo: Ryan Jenkins/EMPAC.

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a man sitting in front of several computer screens looks at a large projection of a volcano

Shifting Center: Theater

Padmini Chettur & Maarten Visser, Guillermo Escalón & Igor de Gandarias, and Micah Silver

The three artworks shift our psychoacoustic perception of spatial volume and depth. The works unfold within the architecture of a proscenium stage and are presented together as a single sequence that begins every hour on the hour, inhabiting the corresponding timescale of theatrical experience.

In the transition between each artwork, the room’s specific features and technical infrastructure are activated to conjure the transformation of image, sound, and space. You are invited to listen as distant landscapes and interconnected rooms are located within the theater in which you are seated. Subterranean frequencies and structure-borne sounds rupture into the open space of the stage and from the illusory depth of the screen.

  • Micah Silver
  • Weather in a Lagrangian Sky, (2023)
  • In collaboration with an audio system constellated by Maryanne Amacher while in residence at EMPAC in 2008/2009, 17 min.
  • Loudspeaker array: Maryanne Amacher, 2009/2023
  • Commissioned by EMPAC
  • Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias
  • Fire Dialogues. The Quest for an Impossible Music, (2023)
  • HD video with sound, 12 min.
  • Padmini Chettur and Maarten Visser
  • A Slightly Curving Place, (2022)
  • Two-channel HD video with sound, 26 min. 40 sec.

Main Image: Video still, Guillermo Escalón and Igor de Gandarias, Rapsodia Telúrica, 2023. HD video, sound. Courtesy the artists.

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Shifting Center

Opening Reception

Shifting Center

Join the curators and artists of Shifting Center to celebrate the opening of the buildingwide exhibition.

Artworks by Julian Abraham “Togar”, Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur & Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón & Igor de Gandarias, Hugo Esquinca, Maurice Louca, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Nancy Mounir, Gala Porras-Kim, Micah Silver, and Clarissa Tossin & Michelle Agnes Magalhães will be presented throughout the concert hall, theater, and studios. The exhibition also engages earlier experiments of deep listening and psychoacoustics by Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) and Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) at EMPAC through new works that approach the building as an instrument in itself.

Refreshments and light snacks will be available. RSVP is appreciated.

Main Image: Video still: Clarissa Tossin, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, 2022.

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a steel volcano sits in the middle of the concert hall on a platform

Shifting Center

Standing on a beach, facing the fierce south seas of Yogyakarta, Julian Abraham “Togar” captures the sound of a rock and films himself in the process. His microphone picks up the wind and the waves as they reflect their rhythm off the stony surface. As the recording is played back in Rocker’s Gonna Rock (2021), a question emerges: can we tune in to the rock or do we only hear the sea?

Drawing its title from a term in the field of acoustics that describes the perceived dislocation in the position of a sound source, Shifting Center stages processes of listening to infrasonic landscapes, acoustic architectures, and unsounded instruments across multiple scales of time. The exhibition poses sculpture as time-based and presents it with moving-image and spatial-audio installations across the concert hall, proscenium stage, and studios at EMPAC.

Research conducted alongside the exhibition by its curators Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse considers two opposing tendencies: dislocation, or how objects, artworks, and cultural belongings are taken from their context and often silenced through museological mechanisms of preservation and display; and location, or how architectural acoustics impact exhibitions as resonant spaces of situated listening. Today, despite attempts to design “flexible” galleries for sound-making artworks as well as for performative or communal projects, contemporary exhibition spaces continue to inherit their sonic inadequacies from the visual priorities of the colonial museum.

Shifting Center engages the unique technical capacities of EMPAC, including its distinct acoustic properties, to address and destabilize some of these conventions. The exhibition plays with theatrical infrastructure and object-based sound technologies, such as higher-order ambisonics and wave field synthesis, to propose alternate techniques and practices to locate and listen to contemporary artworks that are themselves locating and listening to past events in the ever-changing present.

With contributions by Julian Abraham “Togar”, Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur & Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón & Igor de Gandarias, Hugo Esquinca, Maurice Louca, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Nancy Mounir, Gala Porras-Kim, Micah Silver, and Clarissa Tossin & Michelle Agnes Magalhães, Shifting Center is choreographed not just in space but also time. It reaches across the disciplinary boundaries of the visual and performing arts to simultaneously inhabit their attendant temporalities, that is the event-based expectation of performance with the durational scale of an exhibition. It engages earlier experiments of deep listening and psychoacoustics by Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) and Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) at EMPAC through new works that approach the building as an instrument in itself.

The artworks in Shifting Center engage in the speculative construction of premodern and Indigenous instruments and repertoires, as well as the reconsideration of both geological formations and built architecture as actual sources of sounding. They listen to the material traces of not just cultural belongings but also tectonic and meteorological events. If the museum withdraws objects from their social uses and freezes them in time and place, the works follow such traces across multiple sites and extended temporal frames, moving between the seismic and the musical, the archeological and the cosmic.

Whether or not we can tune into the rock through the sounds of the sea, or to what degree we can listen to the histories carried by an object, the exhibition nonetheless attends to this acoustic potential. As Cannupa Hanska Luger puts it, a handful of clay can fill an entire room when modeled into a whistle, and as Igor de Gandarias’ transformation of subterranean infrasounds into an orchestral composition reminds us, the volcano performs for us every day as an instrument of the earth.

Shifting Center is curated by Nida Ghouse (curator-in-residence) and Vic Brooks (associate director of arts and senior curator of time-based visual art) with Katherine C. M. Adams (assistant curator) and M. Elijah Sueuga (curatorial fellow).

Main Image: Beatriz Cortez, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, 2023. Pictured in Shifting Center, EMPAC / Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer, Troy, NY, 2023 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Shannon K. Johnson/EMPAC.

Media
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a triangle shaped sculture agains a cloudy sky.

Shifting Center

Exhibition preview

Standing on a beach, facing the fierce south seas of Yogyakarta, Julian Abraham “Togar” captures the sound of a rock and films himself in the process. His microphone picks up the wind and the waves as they reflect their rhythm off the stony surface. As the recording is played back in Rocker’s Gonna Rock (2021), a question emerges: can we tune in to the rock or do we only hear the sea?

Drawing its title from a term in the field of acoustics that describes the perceived dislocation in the position of a sound source, Shifting Center stages processes of listening to infrasonic landscapes, acoustic architectures, and unsounded instruments across multiple scales of time. The exhibition poses sculpture as time-based and presents it with moving-image and spatial-audio installations across the concert hall, proscenium stage, and studios at EMPAC.

Research conducted alongside the exhibition by its curators Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse considers two opposing tendencies: dislocation, or how objects, artworks, and cultural belongings are taken from their context and often silenced through museological mechanisms of preservation and display; and location, or how architectural acoustics impact exhibitions as resonant spaces of situated listening. Today, despite attempts to design “flexible” galleries for sound-making artworks as well as for performative or communal projects, contemporary exhibition spaces continue to inherit their sonic inadequacies from the visual priorities of the colonial museum.

Shifting Center engages the unique technical capacities of EMPAC, including its distinct acoustic properties, to address and destabilize some of these conventions. The exhibition plays with theatrical infrastructure and object-based sound technologies, such as higher-order ambisonics and wave field synthesis, to propose alternate techniques and practices to locate and listen to contemporary artworks that are themselves locating and listening to past events in the ever-changing present.

With contributions by Julian Abraham “Togar”, Tania Candiani, Padmini Chettur & Maarten Visser, Beatriz Cortez, Guillermo Escalón & Igor de Gandarias, Hugo Esquinca, Maurice Louca, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Nancy Mounir, Gala Porras-Kim, Micah Silver, and Clarissa Tossin & Michelle Agnes Magalhães, Shifting Center is choreographed not just in space but also time. It reaches across the disciplinary boundaries of the visual and performing arts to simultaneously inhabit their attendant temporalities, that is the event-based expectation of performance with the durational scale of an exhibition. It engages earlier experiments of deep listening and psychoacoustics by Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) and Maryanne Amacher (1932-2016) at EMPAC through new works that approach the building as an instrument in itself.

The artworks in Shifting Center engage in the speculative construction of premodern and Indigenous instruments and repertoires, as well as the reconsideration of both geological formations and built architecture as actual sources of sounding. They listen to the material traces of not just cultural belongings but also tectonic and meteorological events. If the museum withdraws objects from their social uses and freezes them in time and place, the works follow such traces across multiple sites and extended temporal frames, moving between the seismic and the musical, the archeological and the cosmic.

Whether or not we can tune into the rock through the sounds of the sea, or to what degree we can listen to the histories carried by an object, the exhibition nonetheless attends to this acoustic potential. As Cannupa Hanska Luger puts it, a handful of clay can fill an entire room when modeled into a whistle, and as Igor de Gandarias’ transformation of subterranean infrasounds into an orchestral composition reminds us, the volcano performs for us every day as an instrument of the earth.

Shifting Center is curated by Nida Ghouse (curator-in-residence) and Vic Brooks (associate director of arts and senior curator of time-based visual art) with Katherine C. M. Adams (assistant curator) and M. Elijah Sueuga (curatorial fellow).

Main Image: Beatriz Cortez, Study for Ilopango, The Volcano that Left, 2023. Composite Image. Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Phillip Bryne.