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.

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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.

It is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we are learning, speaking and gathering 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. We pay honor and respect to their ancestors past and present as we commit to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all.

Decolonizing Language is an ongoing series of conversations with artists and cultural practitioners whose works center Indigenous languages and seek to destabilize linguistic hierarchies.

The series approaches questions around Indigenous language revitalization and the potential of art, poetry, film, performance, and music to articulate suppressed narratives and histories from ecological, social, and artistic perspectives. 

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.

Please join us for a screening of Spaceship Earth by award-winning documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf. The film brings a fresh perspective to the famed 1991 habitation experiment in which eight volunteers lived within a biosphere that replicated the earths ecosystem at the earth system science facility in Oracle, Arizona. By asking why these people wanted to embark on such a self-imposed quarantine in a closed-sustained environment, Spaceship Earth reminds us of the utopian promise and environmental ambition of Biosphere 2, the “brainchild of this countercultural group called the Synergists.” 

The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with Wolf on the history and production behind the project on Zoom.