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. 

This online event presents artist Clarissa Tossin in conversation with poet, artist, and activist Rosa Chávez and artist Tohil Fidel Brito. The conversation is moderated by curator and writer Mariana Fernández and features poetry by Chávez as well as Brito’s work with classical Maya glyphs. 

Traversing their intersecting references, interests, and modes of inquiry, the three artists discuss the potential of art and poetry to articulate suppressed narratives and histories. The conversation foregrounds the importance of Indigenous ancestral knowledge and cultural practice for Maya artists in order to counteract the systemic erasure of their culture. In particular, Chávez and Brito trace the ways in which K’iche’ (the widely spoken Maya language of Guatemala) and other Mayan languages are central to their approach towards artmaking. 

Chávez and Brito are collaborating with Tossin on her forthcoming EMPAC-commissioned moving image work Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the volcanoes sing. The strategies of linguistic and temporal decolonization explored in this conversation, and common to all of the artists’ work, are similarly reflected in Tossin’s collaborative approach to the production of her new film, which seeks to perform a gesture of repair for the trauma of cultural erasure and appropriation. 

Currently in production, Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los volcanes canten / Before the volcanoes sing takes a sonic approach to reclaiming the Indigenous cultural motifs borrowed by Western architects in the 1920s Mayan Revival style through the study and performance of 3D printed replicas of Maya wind instruments from pre-Columbian collections held in US and Guatemalan museums. Principally filmed at Sowden House in Los Angeles, it animates the Mayan iconography that was co-opted and transformed into the building’s architecture through sound, performance, and poetry. These actions generate a kind of healing ritual that seeks to bring the appropriated Mayan motifs back into conversation with the contemporary Maya cultures that thrive in Los Angeles, where Tossin lives. 

This conversation is presented in Spanish with English subtitles. Translation by Mariana Fernández. It includes poetry by Rosa Chávez spoken in K’iche’.

Which tools are more useful: hammers or paintbrushes? Robots or glitter? This talk will share a notion of duality between function and expression that challenges the traditional answers to these questions, highlighting how expression supports function (and vice versa) and pointing to ways that traditional value models can create counter-productive imbalance, especially in movement design. Collaborations between artists and engineers, such as the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Bauhaus School, and Apple, often reach legendary status, seeming impossible or impractical to emulate. However, the talk will offer solutions to the real, pragmatic challenges of working across these disciplines, providing examples of work by artist-engineer teams that have contributed to research in robotics: designing styles of artificial gait for bipeds; translating movement between natural and artificial bodies; and building installations that give the public creative experiences with robots. Thus, the talk motivates constructing balance between art and engineering through collaborative work — work that reveals the practical value of play, the utility of dance, the urgent importance of glitter.

This event is a co-production with Rensselaer's departments of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering and Industrial and Systems Engineering. 

Amy LaViers is the director of the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her choreography and machine designs have been presented internationally, including at Merce Cunningham’s studios, the Ferst Center for the Arts, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and the Performance Arcade. Her writing has appeared in Nature, American Scientist, and Aeon. She is a co-founder of three startup companies: AE Machines, an award-winning automation software company; caali, an embodied media company; and, most recently, Soma Measure, a wearable device company. Her teaching has been recognized on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)’s list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, with Outstanding distinction. She is a recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award (YFA) and Director’s Fellowship (2015-2018). She has held positions as an assistant professor in mechanical science and engineering at UIUC and in systems and information engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA). She completed a two-year Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA) in 2016 at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) and her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech in 2013. Her research began with her undergraduate thesis at Princeton University where she earned a certificate in dance and a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering in 2009. From 2002-2005 she toured internationally as a member of the Tennessee Children’s Dance Ensemble (TCDE).

With this work, Vanessa Goodman and Caroline Shaw offer many pleasures, but two are of special note. Firstly, there is the chance to see a visual and sonic album emerge before one’s eyes: what these two artists make will live on, and this live-streamed genesis is, among other things, a powerful display of the creative process.

The second pleasure is a unique, revelatory melding of movement and sound. In Graveyards and Gardens, what is heard and what is seen do not merely complement each other, as they might in a more conventional dance performance; instead, they are fused in such a way as to make their effects seem indistinguishable.

The performance takes place among 400 feet of orange sound cables and an arrangement of plants—nature and technology being another synthesis the artists explore. Things begin with a long passage featuring an array of sounds—some come from tape decks, some from a record player, some from old Edison wax recordings.

This auditory wash slowly diminishes until only one part is left; the energy then shifts, and dance mixes with music until they become one. Entrancing, enveloping, and ultimately liberating in its innovations, this is experiential art at its best.

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa. 

In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

The film will be released on EMPAC’s website on Thursday, February 4 at 5PM (EST) followed by a conversation between Amanda Turner Pohan and curator Marisa Espe. This project is accompanied by a text version of the project’s script. 

Alexa Echoes is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

In this streamed online talk, performance scholar Paige Morgan Johnson discusses her decade-long research on contemporary Indonesian performance practice, queer cabaret scene, and waria (an Indonesian term for transgender women). Johnson will describe the function of genre within contemporary Indonesian performance practices as a means of showing how queer and transgender bodies in Indonesia shape, and are shaped by, performance.

The aesthetic conventions of drag, for example, offer waria ways to perform the complex relationship between local understandings of Trans*-ness and global, predominantly Western, iterations of nonbinary embodiment. Of special interest are the ways waria entertainers perform the racialized femininity of Black pop stars—a practice that enables movement across affective, cultural, and geographic borders.

Johnson’s talk will feature Indonesian choreographer Otniel Talsman’s work. As a part of the event, Johnson will screen a 30-minute excerpt of Talsman’s Amongster: Voyage of Lengger. Please see program notes for more information. 

Paige Morgan Johnson is Assistant Professor of Performance & Race in the Department of Theater at Barnard College/ Columbia University.

Theater-maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness with respect to the feeling and understanding of “rest” in our modern world.

Saunders, along with Wild Up, O'Halloran, Andrew Schneider, and additional collaborators were in remote residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online version of Rest. The commission provided the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material and whether Rest might have a digital life; an iteration for audience members to experience on their own on a mobile device.

On January 25, the artists will premiere the proof-of-concept film that came out of this residency time, created collaboratively with the EMPAC team, with concept and direction by Annie Saunders, composition by Emma O'Halloran, visual concept creation, direction of photography and editing by Andrew Schneider, music direction by Christopher Rountree, dramaturgy by Adah Parris, Rita Williams, and Rachel Joy Victor, and creative consultation from Jackie Zhou, Mike Merchant, James Okumura and Brian Hashimoto, as well as over twenty thinkers and experts who were interviewed about sensory experience and the nature of consciousness. The music is played by members of Wild Up, Jiji, Jodie Landau, Allen Fogle, and Archie Carey, with mixing by Lewis Pesacov.

The work is featured in the Sounding Darkness Festival as presented by collaborator Wild Up.

Light, shadow, and sound help to sculpt a “performance" environment that you will experience in this proof-of-concept. The work includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Source materials included conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. You will be able to access the Rest proof-of-concept here on January 25 at 8PM.

Read an interview with Annie Saunders and her collaborator on the moving-image content of this work, Andrew Schneider.

Additionally, please join us on the Wild Up Instagram for a series of live conversations with the artists from 2:30-3:30PM EDT on January 25.

Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navas will be in conversation with curator Vic Brooks to introduce Navas’ work and the historical, artistic, and architectural backdrop to her forthcoming performance and moving image work Cuando las nubes eran las olas / When the clouds were waves. Featuring a new score by composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares, Navas’ artwork is currently in its early stages of development. 

Cuando las nubes eran las olas responds to Alexander Calder’s Acoustic Ceiling (1953), which was conceived for architect Carlos Raúl Villenueva’s iconic auditorium, the Aula Magna, at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas and produced in consultation with the American acoustic engineering team Bolt Beranek & Newman.  Locally known as Calder’s “Nubes” (clouds) or “Platillos voladores” (flying saucers), the Acoustic Ceiling was the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall of this scale. The artwork’s production history and integration into the architecture is key to tracing complex cultural exchanges unique to this period of Venezuelan modernism under military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who commissioned the Aula Magna in order to host the 10th Inter-American Conference in 1954. 

Similar in approach to the acoustic innovation of the construction of the Aula Magna six decades before it, the architects and acousticians of EMPAC’s building also designed a concert hall that combines outstanding acoustics and refined materials, but with the flexibility and technology of the twenty-first century. In particular, the EMPAC Concert Hall’s ground-breaking fabric ceiling—under which Ana Navas and Escalona-Mijares will be working in residence next year—resonates across time and space with the aesthetic and acoustical concept of the Aula Magna’s clouds. 

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

Sound artist, composer, and performer Miya Masaoka will create an hour-long work for solo artist (Masaoka herself) for solo performer and electronics. Miya Masaoka is an American composer and sound artist. Her work explores bodily perception of vibration, movement and time while foregrounding complex timbre relationships. In 2018 she joined the Columbia University Visual Arts Department as an Associate Professor, where she is the director of the Sound Art Program, a joint program with the Computer Music Center. A 2019 Studio Artist for the Park Avenue Armory, Masaoka has also received the Doris Duke Artist Award in 2013, a Fulbright Fellowship to Japan in 2016, and an Alpert Award in 2003. Her work has been presented at the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the Park Avenue Armory. She has been commissioned by and collaborated with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Glasgow Choir, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Bang on a Can, Jack Quartet, Del Sol, Momenta and the S.E.M. Ensemble. She has a 2019 commission for an outdoor installation at the Caramoor, Katonah, New York.