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

Tuning Calder’s Clouds is a series of interdisciplinary conversations with experts from acoustics, art, architecture, and music that explores the historic and contemporary resonances of the Aula Magna—the iconic hall at the heart of the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas—in which Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953) is suspended. 

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.

Artist and poet Anaïs Duplan presents a series of five radio shows broadcast weekly on Rensselaer’s WRPI Troy 91.5FM and produced at EMPAC. Based on his recent book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture  (Black Ocean, 2020), the broadcasts entwine histories of liberation movements, labor struggles, criticism, and poetry with music, soundtracks, field recordings, and Foley sound. 

Duplan takes us on a journey that follows his lyrical exploration of the political potential of aesthetic experiences, spanning from the quotidian encounter of a bakery’s smell to the transformative reckoning with an artwork. These experiences are viewed through the prism of how other artists of color are working with media technologies on their own terms to seek “liberatory possibility” through specifically aesthetic means. 

Guided by Duplan’s voice, each broadcast employs “ekphrastic” methods—vivid verbal descriptions of the actions of artworks—as well as the sensory potential of Foley sound to produce a richly evocative auditory experience. The dialogue is interwoven with audio samples from films and videos by artists such as Ephraim Asili, Deanna Bowen, Tony Cokes, Leah Franklin Gilliam, Ulysses Jenkins, and Sondra Perry, TV and movie soundtracks, and an extensive range of music from Liz Mputu, Juliana Huxtable, Perfume Genius, Actress, Mal Devisa, and Hieroglyphic Being and more. 

Blackspace will be broadcast on New York's Montez Press Radio in 2022. 

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.

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.