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.

--

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.

Paper Pianos​ is an evening-length theatrical work co-directed by Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, and South African-American director Nigel Maister. Performed by contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, the work explores the dislocation, longing, and optimism of refugees. Combining the spoken narratives of four refugees and resettlement workers with the intricate hand-drawn animations of Syrian visual artist Kevork Mourad, Paper Pianos vividly depicts the dramatic emotional landscape of displacement and resettlement experienced by refugees throughout the world.

During a time when the media is saturated with sensationalist news images surrounding the refugee crisis, this piece instead highlights four human voices: the Afghan pianist Milad Yousufi, Getachew Bashir (Ethiopia), Hani Ali (Somalia), and Akil Aljaysh (Iraq); creating a space for the audience to experience empathy. Milad Yousufi fled to New York from Kabul, where he lived under the Taliban’s threat for pursuing music. His story of painting piano keys on paper to teach himself to play in silence, thus avoiding life-threatening censure from the authorities, gives the piece its name. Getachew Bashir, a high-ranking judge in Ethiopia, left his country when the judiciary and his independence threatened to become co-opted by the regime. Hani Ali was a child of the refugee experience, born on the run and coming of age as a young girl negotiating the terrors of being stateless in a displacement camp. Akil Aljaysh—from a prominent family—fled Iraq after being tortured, and worked his way through Syria and Lebanon to the US.

Kouyoumdjian’s score uses these recorded testimonies as integral compositional elements, and draws on folk-music and contemporary-music practices. She says: “I come from refugee parents forced to immigrate to the U.S. as a consequence of the Lebanese Civil War. And my parents come from refugee parents forced to escape to Lebanon from Turkey during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Experiences like Milad Yousufi’s resonate with me, and topics of wartime, genocide, and one’s relationship to ‘home’ have played a large role in my music.” Kevork Mourad’s extraordinary hand drawings animate the narrative, evoke the journeys of the participants, and serve as a physical element with which Alarm Will Sound’s musicians interact.

EMPAC has commissioned Alarm Will Sound’s staged performance of Paper Pianos and will provide the artists with multiple production residencies to develop the visual and theatrical elements. The work will premiere here at EMPAC in our 400-seat proscenium theater—a venue that incorporates theatrical technology and capabilities previously found only in the most advanced stage spectacles. As quiet as a recording studio with the infrastructure of an HD video studio, the low stage and superb acoustics allows for tangible proximity between audience and performers.

Paper Pianos​ is a vivid, compelling and evocative contemplation of global issues expressed through individual stories of loss and transcendence. The live performance of narrative, music, theatricality and visual gesture engages audiences viscerally in one of the pressing problems of today’s world, distilled down to the heartfelt immediacy of real-life experience.

Curator Nida Ghouse is in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to adapt and expand the multi-authored ambisonic audio play central to the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place. Previously commissioned and presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the project responds to Umashankar Manthravadi’s practice as a self-taught acoustic archaeologist that proposes possibilities for listening to the past and its absence which remains. The audio play brings together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform not just each other’s work, but also that of many others.

This next iteration of the exhibition will be presented at Concrete in Dubai in March 2022 and is co-produced by EMPAC at Rensselaer and Alserkal Arts Foundation.

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.

EMPAC building tours are offered throughout the fall season. In October, a curatorial tour led by Vic Brooks and a director’s tour with Johannes Goebel; in November, a not-to-miss network/IT tour with network admin Dave Bebb and a video-focused technology tour will be led by video engineer Ryan Jenkins.

Visitors should meet outside in front of the East (campus) entrance at 1:45PM.

OCTOBER 6 at 2PM with Senior Curator Vic Brooks

Join EMPAC's Time-Based Visual Art senior curator Vic Brooks for a behind-the-scenes look at EMPAC’s extraordinary production facilities. From precisely calibrated studios, to a concert hall on springs, the tour will delve into the acoustic and visual potential of EMPAC’s venues for the making of complex artworks, along with their approach to the connection of EMPAC’s artists and audiences.

OCTOBER 20 at 2PM with Director Johannes Goebel

Join EMPAC’s founding director Johannes Goebel for a tour of the building (and overview of the program) that he helped realize and has led through EMPAC’s first 13 years. Goebel will take visitors through the EMPAC building with an eye and an ear to the “human-scale” functions he strove to achieve in taking the project from a lofty vision to one of the world’s most advanced media centers.

NOVEMBER 3 at 2PM with Senior Network Administrator Dave Bebb

Join senior network admin Dave Bebb for a tour offering a look at the center from an information technology perspective. With miles of fiber optic cable linking all four venues as well as the audio and video recording facilities, EMPAC is an environment where physical and digital worlds seamlessly intersect.

NOVEMBER 17 at 2PM with Video Engineer Ryan Jenkins

From 3D film productions to green-screen animations, flying cameras, and panoramic projection environments, EMPAC is a lush visual world, and video engineer Ryan Jenkins is at the center of it on a daily basis. This tour focuses on EMPAC as a film production facility and high-resolution screening venue.

All Tours are at 2PM.

Note: Tours have a VERY LIMITED capacity and are for campus faculty, staff, and students only at this time. If you are interested in bringing a class or scheduling a specific tour for your campus group, please contact the box office and we will get you sorted. 

Poet, curator, and artist Anaïs Duplan is in residence to produce Blackspace, a new series of radio broadcasts commissioned by EMPAC to be presented in collaboration with WRPI and Montez Press Radio in November 2021. 

Each episode narrated by Duplan is inspired by music and artworks that seek to “pursue liberatory possibility” and entwine lyric poetry, criticism, music, and field recordings. Based on his recent book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, the broadcasts similarly employ vivid description of the action of artworks—or ekphrastic technique—to explore the aesthetic strategies employed by artists of color working with digital technologies since the 1960s.

Cannupa Hanska Luger will be in residence at EMPAC to work on the post-production and installation design of a new multi-channel moving image work. Cannupa Hanska Luger is in residence with Ginger Dunhill, their two children 'Io Kahoku and Tsesa, and curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley. 

This residency follows the principal filming of this new work in various public locations around Troy, NY that took place in September 2021. This footage will subsequently be combined with footage recently shot in collaboration with Gabe Fermin in the White Sands desert.

Part of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, this project incorporates artist-made regalia, props, videos, and performance, and explores alternative possible futures for sites of post-industrial extraction, reimaging them anew through speculative oral histories for the future. 

A work-in-progress presentation of the installation and a conversation between Cannupa Haska Luger and curators Paulina Ascencio Fuentes and Gee Wesley will take place at EMPAC on April 7, 2022. 

The project is curated by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes, Yihsuan Chiu, Christine Nyce, and Gee Wesley, second year graduate students from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. 

Future Ancestral Technologies

Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a science fiction. Science fiction has the power to shape collective thinking and help to imagine the future on a global scale. Future Ancestral Technologies does this from an Indigenous lens; it articulates a future narrative in which migration of humans is essential for survival on and with the land and water and people of color are the primary characters. As the future of our planet is threatened by capitalism’s continued devastation, new strategies of survivance are needed. With global instability, widespread financial crisis and unaffordable housing, our lifestyles must change. Future Ancestral Technologies is an ongoing investigation of our past in order to move forward, advancing new materials and new modes of thinking. This work prepares us for a highly adaptable lifestyle that lives with the land, not off the land. Future Ancestral Technologies prototypes designs for objects and their use, tests ritual and conducts ceremony. Future Ancestral Technologies is a deep time space of futuristic vision in which societies live true reverence and acknowledgement of land, beyond the trappings of cultural production, to dream and test a culture of fundamental coexistence.

Future Ancestral Technologies is an approach to making art objects, videos, and performance with the intent to influence global consciousness. This Indigenous-centered science fiction uses creative storytelling to radically reimagine the future. Moving sci-fi theory into practice, this methodology conjures innovative life-based solutions that promote a thriving Indigeneity. 

This Indigenous science fiction is characterized by unique objects, futuristic narratives, ancient myths, new paradigms and symbiotic landscapes. The ongoing narrative developed by installation and land based work articulates a future in which Indigenous people harness technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies is a methodology, a practice, a way of futurism, that suggests a radical approach to materials and their use. 

Using art practice to adopt science fiction, Future Ancestral Technologies is a context for imagining the distant future and dreaming sustainable approaches to the lived experiences of the generations to come. Using traditional craft and skill sets to create futuristic potential, the process imagines, enacts and prototypes experiences and technologies that promote Indigenous cultures to thrive into the future. Future Ancestral Technologies is disseminated through art and internet venues to influence global collective consciousness. Future Ancestral Technologies challenges and empowers humans—from individuals to industries—to visualize an Indigenous future and to practice empathy, ritual, and resourcefulness in epochs to come.

From August 12–16, three EMPAC commissions made for Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) premiered at the 2021 TIME:SPANS Festival in NYC where EMPAC audio staff were on hand for engineering and technical support. The Wave Field Synthesis system allows the artists to place sounds in space in a unique way for both composers and listeners.

The following compositions premiered at the 2021 TIME:SPANS Festival:

Miya Masaoka
Seeking a Sense of Somethingness (Out of Nothingness), 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Bora Yoon
SPKR SPRKL, 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Nina C. Young
New Work, 2021
Commissioned by The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust

Pamela Z
SONANT TOPOGRAPHY, 2021
Commissioned by EMPAC

Concert duration: 70 min

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.

—

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.