• Specialised Technique (2019)
• By Onyeka Igwe

Specialised Technique is one of a trio of films made with images from the British Colonial Film Unit archives of the Aba Women’s War of 1929, the first major anti-colonial protest to British authority in West Africa, and a struggle led specifically by women. Onyeka Igwe’s own film delves deep into the technique of the Colonial Film Unit’s practice, and draws out how certain actions and gestures, like sequences of West African’s dancing, propagandized a positive image of British rule. A methodical and at times joyful reflection on questions of how, why, and for whom such images are produced, Igwe in turn develops her own filmic language in the reframing of these archival images in direct resistance to the violence of the colonial gaze.

• Tales from Planet Kolkata (1993)
• By Ruchir Joshi

Filmed in 1990s Calcutta, India, Tales from Planet Kolkata is a sharply canny satire on the city’s continued portrayal by the western media as a “black hole” and “the worst place in the world.” As lovingly photographed as it is acutely observed, the film is shot through with references from Godard to Hollywood, opening with Ruchir Joshi’s take on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, as the director leads us on a riotous journey through the city along with a local Patua (a traditional Bengali scroll painter) and an African American video artist. In search of answers to perennial questions of cultural identity and belonging, Tales was originally commissioned by the UK’s Channel 4 television to shift the perspective of the dominant western gaze towards that of the global south.

• Shoot for the Contents (1992)
• By Trinh T. Minh-ha

Shoot for the Contents is a richly layered documentary that hinges on the protests that sparked the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Trinh T. Minh-ha draws out the expansive relationship between images, sounds, and the process of filmmaking itself in order to translate the complex motifs of Chinese allegory through the moving image. Titled after a Chinese guessing game, Shoot for the Contents delicately layers the voices of women artists and philosophers with Chinese music in an intimate meditation on Mao’s iconic phrase: “Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend.” All the while questioning conventions of the documentary format and questions of veracity in terms of political representation, structures of power, and the production of cultural identity.

Refreshments will be served.

Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa documents a jazz-funk recording session at The Church, Columbia Records’ legendary New York studio that was shuttered in 1981. The film telegraphs a group of contemporary musicians back to the 1970s to improvise in a reconstruction of the original Columbia 30th Street Studio, the site of such diverse and seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979), and Glenn Gould’s Bach: The Goldberg Variations (1955).

Luanda-Kinshasa connects the New York music scene of the 1970s with its African roots, moving through funk, jazz, and Afrobeat to produce subtle pancultural connections played by musicians brought together by jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran. At EMPAC, the recording session is projected theatrically and into a concert hall for the first time, reinforcing the real-time durations that exist between production and performance in the film. Edited sequences are cut together in homage to Miles Davis, with loops and repetitions integral as much to the experience of listening to the music as to the temporal flow of the images themselves. The film’s six-hour duration stretches far beyond the usual confines of the cinema and into the time of production, as the camera focuses on the band while technicians, producers, and groupies populate the edges of the frame.

Luanda-Kinshasa is a film by Canadian artist Stan Douglas and features musicians Jason Moran, Kahlil Kwame Bell, Liberty Ellman, Jason Lindner, Abdou Mboup, Nitin Mitta, Antoine Roney, Marvin Sewell, Kimberly Thompson, and Burniss Earl Travis.

Refreshments will be served throughout.

Irish artist Gerard Byrne’s video installation In Our Time unfolds, in real time, the inner workings of a recording studio during the golden era of analog radio. 

On first look, the video has the familiar register of a period piece set in a meticulously recreated control-booth of a radio station of its day. However, the linear timeline of the broadcast—with its repetitions of commercial breaks, the lilt and timbre of the radio host’s voice, the classic pop, and the weather segments—slowly disengages and falls apart. Soon, the songs played are not those that have been announced, the station’s name sounds different, the news events skip from decade to decade, and all the while the band simply continues to tune-up. In this radio booth, where the repetition of broadcast rhythms dictates the consecutive daily events, the image and soundtracks appear to remain resolutely synchronous. But the gradual disconnection between what is seen and what is heard produces a surreal uncertainty around the fixity of time within the temporal monotony of the radio station.

In Our Time brings into focus not only the time of broadcast—its rhythms, in-jokes, and pop riffs—but reinforces the temporal reality in which we all exist, on the sublevel of our daily routine to the looping of political and historical cycles. The record might change, but our cultural and technological concept of time remains constant. 

Taking into account robotics technologies’ increasing presence in our lives, labors, and wars, scholar Jennifer Rhee visits EMPAC to present the following questions: How is the human defined in these robotic visions and technological relations? What are the histories of erasures and exclusions that brought this definition of human into being? Whose lives and labors are excluded from these considerations of the human? This talk draws on Rhee’s book, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human & the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which argues that robotic and AI systems reflect historical gendered and racial devaluations around labor.

Rhee’s talk will begin by briefly plotting how labor devaluations are proliferated by AI assistants, vacuum-cleaning robots, and emotion-recognition AIs. She will then focus specifically on U.S. military drone warfare, which requires the racialized dehumanization of drone-strike victims. In conversation with contemporary artistic responses drone warfare, she will connect this to the U.S.’s history and continued present of racialized state violence.

The Robotic Imaginary will be available at a signing table hosted by Market Block Books following the lecture.

Jennifer Rhee is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In dance, gravity is often associated with ascension and descension. Taiwanese choreographer and new-media artist Su Wen-Chi is collaborating with physicist Diego Blas to more accurately embody the principle of gravity in dance.

Su Wen-Chi is well versed at working with interactive media in live performance. Her large-scale solo WAVE (2011/2014), for example, included an 81-channel audio installation of individually motorized LED light boxes that were choreographed in concert with the dancer’s movements. Su is founder of YiLab, which is a group of artists integrating technology with the performing arts to expand their palette of performance.

She is in residence at EMPAC during the prototyping stages of the new work. The artist and three collaborators will explore how live interaction between a dancer, EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, and light might open possibilities for illustrating the effects of gravity as floating and suspension in outer space. Along with her team from Taiwan, Su will work in the studio with local Hudson, NY–based choreographer Adam Weinert and will then present a work-in-progress event at the end of her residency. 

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.

This residency has been postponed to follow University policies that have been put in place in light of new developments related to the coronavirus.

EMPAC will host a retreat for the four pairs of artists and writers awarded the UNDO FELLOWSHIP, an initiative by UnionDocs: A Center for Documentary Art to expand radical filmmaking practices and research new languages of documentary cinema. The fellowship recipients include scholar Erika Balsom with filmmaker Eric Baudelaire, essayist and artist Steve Reinke with collaborative artists Dani and Sheilah ReStack, film scholar and programmer Nzingha Kendall with filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and writer and editor Matthew Shen Goodman with filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins.

Amanda Turner Pohan is in residence at EMPAC with performer Katy Pinke to film Alexa Echoes. 

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker and choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates. The first iteration in a series of three, 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 for Alexa, also named Echo. Produced after travel restrictions and social distancing measures were implemented at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the film combines footage shot in the newly empty spaces of EMPAC with recordings from the collaborators’ homes and remote studios.

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. Using choreographed movement, spoken word, and song set to an orchestral score, Alexa Echoes abstracts the gendered decisions that go into framing new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

This residency 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 light of COVID-19, Heartbeat Opera took its LADY M rehearsals and performances online. Rather than cancel its production, the company launched a 10-day remote residency (April 20–May 1) with their artists rehearsing at home, followed by a series of intimate Virtual Soirées through Zoom video conferencing from May 11–20. The full production arrives in Spring 2021.

This New York opera company was scheduled to come to EMPAC at the end of our spring season to develop a new reordered and reorchestrated version of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, here renamed Lady M. The company was to use their time at EMPAC to collaborate with sound artist and RPI alumna Senem Pirler, creating the supernatural sound of the witches—manipulating their voices through electronic processing. In light of COVID-19, this collaboration happened online.

--

All current EMPAC residencies are being hosted remotely with support from EMPAC curatorial, administrative, and production staff and resources. While no artists are on site in Troy, our staff is continuing to collaborate with artists toward the development of new works.

Lesley Flanigan is in residence in Studio 2 to produce a new EMPAC-commissioned performance-installation that continues her exploration into the sculptural potential of sound.

Developing a performance for voice, speakers, electronic tone, and the resonance between, this residency follows from her visit in early 2020 in which she explored the acoustic environment of EMPAC’s concert hall with sine-wave oscillators that generate low-frequency tones, her signature speaker sculpture instruments, and pitches from her own voice. 

Continuing her work here at EMPAC with spatial audio and in particular, EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis Array, Nina C. Young will develop her acoustic brass quintet into a multimedia work for live musicians, spatial audio, and live video processing based on geometric forms and Renaissance music. The residency culminates in the premiere of the new evening-length work on March 19th in the Theater.