Working with domestic surveillance systems that claim to “tell a person from a thing,” artist Corin Sworn is in residence at EMPAC with two dancers to research the algorithms that purport to recognize “suspect” movement and gesture.

Using movement in order to test the “black-box” of the surveillance camera system, Sworn will choreograph a performance-installation that deliberately glitches the technology to reveal the system design. Through experimentation with frame-rate, speed, lighting conditions, and gesture, the artist utilizes the language of rehearsal to produce an aesthetic encounter that frames how these apparatus codify what is deemed neutral or natural.

Canadian artist Corin Sworn is based in Glasgow, Scotland, and works predominantly with moving image and performance.

This work-in-progress presentation will introduce artist Clarissa Tossin’s research into pre-Columbian wind instruments. Tossin is in residence with Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta and Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães to develop the score for a new EMPAC-commissioned moving image artwork. Working with 3D-printed versions of these traditional instruments, which are held in US and Guatemalan museum collections, Tossin will discuss and demonstrate the prototypes she has produced in collaboration with anthropologist/archaeologist Jared Katz, the Mayer Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow for Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Museum.

Tossin’s Chu Mayaa (2018) was screened at EMPAC as part of the Spring 2019 season. In the artist’s first moving image work to explore the appropriation of Mayan motifs in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, she collaborated with choreographer and dancer Crystal Sepúlveda, who moves in and out of the shadows cast by the pastiche of indigenous motifs at the architect’s famous Hollyhock House.

This new work not only explores the sonic potential of traditional Mayan forms to resituate Mayan Revival buildings in the context of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architectural lineage, but also reveals the ways in which this lineage is continuous in the cultural hybridity of contemporary Mayan communities in Los Angeles.

Work-in-Progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.

Sound artist, vocalist, and composer Ken Ueno has the ability to completely transform the nature of spaces with sound. Loudspeakers become ceremonial objects. Megaphones become musical instruments that shape feedback in the room and amplify its natural resonance. Ueno’s breath is woven into the electronic parts, slowly introduced so they become a complex background texture upon which he layers live vocalizations. Instead of treating feedback and white noise as sounds found in a city to be ignored or eliminated, Ueno places them around the room in such a way that they can be heard as individual colors, encouraging the listener to open their ears to hear not only this music, but also hear their own daily environments as musical. At times Ueno’s incredible ability to control his breathing makes it sound as though he is channeling a radio transmission from another galaxy. In the artist’s own words, “My art practice organically floats between architecture and sound and improvisation and written music and classical, experimental noise.”

Ueno’s intense performances reveal the acoustic power and complexity of the different audio ecosystems surrounding us every day from all directions. His music asks: How do we open our ears to the sounds of our cityscapes? In our efforts to control the spaces around us, do we lose our humanity? In exposing the rawness of our humanity do we alienate others? How do we stay open in a time when technology allows us more and more to be isolated and closed off?

The title of this screening is named after German thinker Walter Benjamin’s “thought-figures,” as he described the format of his 1929 essay collections Short Shadows. Like Benjamin’s thought-figures, each film entangles political narrative, aesthetic form, and technical subjectivity in an attempt to capture the essence of a place and time. In Gede Vizyon, a Haitian goat circles a labyrinthine Port-au-Prince graveyard, and a wayward drone strays from its intended path in Meridian, while a series of sculptures are lovingly captured by a ghostly lens in The Maid.

Calum Walter’s Meridian follows the last unit in a fleet of autonomous machines sent to deliver an emergency vaccine. The film shows footage transmitted by the machine before its disappearance, tracing a path that seems to stray further and further from its objective. Meridian is inspired by a real event that occurred in Washington, D.C. on July 17, 2017, where an automated security robot from the company Knightscope was found floating in a fountain at the building it patrolled. It had plunged into the water while on a routine patrol, spurring speculation about whether the machine had chosen to end its life or if this was just a glitch in an otherwise reliable new technology.

Titled after novelist Robert Walser’s short story that follows a maid as she searches for her lost charge, then dies of joy upon finding her, Carissa Rodriguez’s The Maid captures the places that house American artist Sherrie Levine’s Newborn sculptures. From storage crates to the glassy tables of art collectors, and from plinths to auction rooms, the intimate portraits of the artworks lay bare the architectural, social, and financial infrastructure that has taken care of them since they left the artist’s studio. Made from either crystal or sandblasted glass, they were each cast from the mold of Constantin Brancusi’s canonical egg-shaped sculpture Le Nouveau-Né, which was produced in 1915 in marble and subsequently in bronze. In producing these new versions, the artist not only takes authorship of an artwork from a celebrated male Modernist, but also imposes a shared parental position. Rodriguez’s film traces yet another transition by capturing the sculptures in their new homes.

The camera in Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon’s Gede Vizyon is guided at riotous pace by one of the inhabitants of the Grand Cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Gede Vizyon is part documentary portrait and part magical realism. It entwines local folklore and Haitian Vodou culture with a portrait of a place whose  architecture  bears  traces of both the living and the dead. The “goat’s-eye” view carries us on a low, jagged path through a visual history of the site, charting the damage wrought by the 2010 earthquake, and the people, animals, plants, and traditions that continue to inhabit it. Gede Vizyon is narrated through poetry written in response to the images by Ougan (priest) Jean-Daniel Lafontant, his words entangled into a soundtrack of religious songs performed by Mambo (priestess) Jacqueline.

Please join us following the screening for a Q&A with curator Vic Brooks, filmmaker Marcos Serafim, and filmmaker / Rensselaer Arts faculty Zé (Jefferson) Kielwagen. 

Program

• The Maid (2018)
• Carissa Rodriguez
• Meridian (2019)
• Calum Walter
• Gede Vizyon (2018)
• Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon

A double-bill of iconic films produced in 1960s Havana. Salud les Cubains (1963) by Agnès Varda and Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea both take a documentary approach in capturing Havana and its inhabitants, while producing starkly divergent fictions. The first is a joyful journalistic photo-montage shot through the lens of a master of the French experimental tradition, and the second is a feature film that firmly takes its cues from a Cuban revolutionary tactic of “imperfect cinema.”

Invited by Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (of which Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was a key member) to visit Havana in 1962, Varda left her bulky 16mm film camera behind, favoring the portability of a stills camera in order to capture the Cuban political climate. The resulting photo-montage Salud les Cubains is a lively portrait of post-revolutionary Cuba indebted in its narration to Chris Marker’s legendary work of experimental cinema La Jetée that was produced the year prior. Although a staunchly political film in its intention, it is marked by the exoticizing cultural aesthetic of European Left political cinema. Animated with over 1500 stills and edited to the tempo of Cuban music, Varda weaves recordings of Fidel Castro with an impressionistic voice-over narrated by herself and actor Michel Piccoli in a film described by the artist as “socialism and cha-cha-cha.”

Released five years after Varda’s film, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s recently restored Memories of Underdevelopment, based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes, is a touchstone of Cuban revolutionary cinema. Alea incorporated footage shot on location and found documentary materials into his fictionalized story of the bourgeois dilettante, Sergio, who stays behind in Havana after his family has fled the revolution. In Alea’s words, “photographs, direct documentation, fragments of newsreels, recorded speeches, [and] filming on the street with a hidden camera on some occasions, were resources we could count on and needed to develop to the fullest.” The striking black and white cinematography of this cautionary tale is an iconic example of Cuba’s “imperfect cinema”—Latin American movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s that emphasized deep cultural and social engagement.

Program

• Salud les Cubains (1963)
• Agnès Varda
• Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
• Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Choreographer Sydney Skybetter will present his research on the intersections of gesture, dance history, computer science, and homeland security. With case studies of the Snowden leaks, Facebook’s Oculus platform, the film Minority Report, and early motion capture research conducted with choreographers Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones, Skybetter will sketch a vision of the evolution of contemporary surveillance technologies undergirded by dance theory and choreographic method.

Sydney Skybetter is a choreographer, dance scholar, and founder of the Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI), a convening of performing artists, arts professionals, ethnographers, anthropologists, and speculative designers. As lecturer at Brown University, Skybetter’s research explores the choreographics of human-computer interfaces and mixed reality systems. He has lectured at Harvard University, Saatchi, and MIT, among other institutions, across the subjects of dance and dance history to cultural futurism and computer-human interfaces.

Oslo based British composer Natasha Barrett’s Innermost is a collaboration with US digital artist Marc Downie (OpenEndedGroup). Following their previous collaboration at the Pompidou Centre, Paris last year, Innermost fuses ambisonics, 3D sound and stereoscopic projection. Points of light and sound are animated around the sound system in patterns that each possess their own characteristic ‘gait’ – a unique way of moving and behaving.

Innermost will be premiered this coming September at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway and performed at EMPAC in Spring 2020.

Remove the visible and be touched by sound. Experience a transformation of the world, the way it behaves, and the traces that it leaves behind in this unique electroacoustic music concert unfolding inside EMPAC's high-density loudspeaker arrays, featuring hundreds of loudspeakers.

Natasha Barrett will perform this public concert as part of the Spatial Audio Summer Seminar, which takes place at EMPAC July 18-20, gathering audio experts, musicians, and composers for an intensive exploration of sound in space. Works will include one of Barrett’s latest compositions in high-resolution Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, as well as recreations of works not previously heard in full 3D.

Natasha Barrett is a composer and performer of acousmatic and live electroacoustic concert works, sound and multi-media installations, and interactive music. She is a leading voice in the new wave of artists working with Ambisonics, 3D sound, and its contemporary musical context. Her work is commissioned, performed, and broadcast throughout the world by festivals, organizations, and individuals, and includes a regular schedule of portrait concerts and featured programs.

Her inspiration comes from the immediate sounding matter of the world around us, as well as the way it behaves, the way it is generated, and by systems and the traces that those systems reveal. These interests have led her into the worlds of cutting-edge audio technologies, geoscience, sonification, motion tracking, and some exciting collaborations  involving solo performers and chamber ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for new music and the way it can touch the listener.

Barrett will spend two weeks before the concert as artist in residence at EMPAC, where she will collaborate with the digital artist and filmmaker Mark Downie on the new work Innermost, which will be premiered this coming September at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway. Innermost will be performed at EMPAC in Spring 2020.

The final Short Shadows program of the season presents three moving-image works with narrative structures that orbit around performances from the past in order to make hidden histories visible. 

Deimantas Narkevičius’s Stains and Scratches focuses on found footage of an underground performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in Vilnius, Lithuania during the 1970s. The show was performed by students at the Vilnius Academy of Art from a score re-written by ear from an unsanctioned double LP. Narkevičius further dislocates the documentation by layering and doubling the film onto a scratched black celluloid background, the soft-montage composition highlighted and rendered sculptural in Stereoscopic 3D. 

One of a series of films produced during Basir Mahmood’s research into “Lollywood” (Pakistan’s center for cinema production in Lahore) history, the script for all voices are mine was derived from recollections of actors, filmmakers, and writers. The film is structured around reenactments of their scenes from previous films and is performed without dialogue, a dramaturgical approach that produces a film that is at once unfamiliar and recognizable. This collage technique produces an uncanny sense of a film that we have all seen, albeit one that is rehearsed only in memory. 

Spanish artist Dora Garcia’s first feature, Segunda Vez (Second Time Around), pivots around avant-garde theorist Oscar Masotta’s ideas concerning psychoanalysis, politics, and art in 1960s Buenos Aires. Structured by a series of interconnected re-enactments, re-stagings, and social experiments, the film shifts between documentary-style interpretations of past “happenings” and the fictional psychodrama of novelist Julio Cortázar. Segunda Vez weaves a complex narrative within the climate of surveillance and disappearances in Argentina, producing an acute sense of paranoia for what might happen the second time around. 

Whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each artwork presented in the Short Shadows series stretches beyond a singular moment or place to foreground the political importance of unexpected historical interconnections. Mostly produced within the last decade, the artists’ films, videos, poetry, and performances presented here shine a light on cultural and historical events that may otherwise remain in shadow. 

Program

• all voices are mine (2018)
• Basir Mahmood
• 4K digital video
• Courtesy the artist
• Stains and Scratches (2018)
• Deimantas Narkevičius
• 3D digital video
• Courtesy the artist and LUX
• Segunda Vez (2018)
• Dora Garcia
• 4K digital video
• Courtesy the artist and August Orts

Artist James Richards presents a sound installation and video works as part of a free event initializing his new EMPAC commission scheduled to premiere here in Spring 2020. Curator Vic Brooks will lead a conversation with Richards exploring his past works and approach to working in different curatorial contexts. The evening will include Migratory Motor Complex, a multichannel sound work exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

Richards’ new commission takes as its starting point an essay that accompanied his exhibition Music for the Gift for the Welsh Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Produced in collaboration with Chris McCormack, the text moves back and forth between the first and third person and the experiential and the scientific, shifting registers to evoke the experience of the voice breaking during adolescence. Richards’ approaches the development of his artworks with a period of research and experimentation in order to grapple with material languages of image and sound production. At EMPAC, he will start by working with theatrical lighting in order to explore its affective, environmental, and performative potential in practice. 

James Richards’ artworks reveal connections between people, practices, and private, hidden, or suppressed histories through archival and online research. Working with a vast array of media materials, often generated during long-term exchanges with other artists, such as American media artist Steve Reinke and filmmaker Leslie Thornton, Richards produces sound and video installations that invite the audience into an intimate encounter with private worlds and queer communities. 

Program

• I am (for the birds) text by Ian white.
• Live reading
• Migratory Motor Complex (2017)
• Six-channel audio
• Rosebud (2013)
• Digital video
• Not blacking out, Just turning the lights off (2011)
• Digital video
• Radio at night (2015)
• Digital video
• All works courtesy the artist