This spring, we’ll continue our monthly series of EMPAC building tours led by different members of the EMPAC team to highlight the diverse and specialized functions of the space. Each tour will run on the first Saturday of the month at 11AM, unless otherwise specified. Admission is free and open to the public. Visitors should meet for their tour at the EMPAC box office on the 7th floor. 

FEBRUARY 2 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 10 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. 

MARCH 2 with Lead Audio Engineer Todd Vos

From the specialized sound-diffusive panels in Studio 1, to the frequency-calibrated Nomex ceiling fabric in the Concert Hall, and into the miles of fiber optic cable that connect each of EMPAC’s performance spaces to its recording studios, lead audio engineer Todd Vos will take audiophiles on a deep dive into EMPAC’s acoustic design and capabilities. 

MARCH 30 with Senior Curator of Time-Based Visual Art Vic Brooks

Bridging the traditional disciplines of performance, installation, and cinema, Vic Brooks’ curatorial approach has forged new visual creations within the wider context of time-based visual art. This tour will focus on EMPAC’s unique visual production capabilities, ranging from 3D video, green-screen animation, flying cameras, and performances consisting solely of light. 

This event brings together the work of New York-based artists and filmmakers Bahar Behbahani and Jon Wang as part of Short Shadows, an ongoing moving image series at EMPAC curated by Vic Brooks. The evening will engage themes and processes of displacement and longing, as well as narratives of transformation that run through Behbahani and Wang’s work.

Bahar Behbahani's We Were Missing A Present is a meditative study on the social and topographical transformations of the cultural landscape. By exploring the site of the garden as a place of contest, Behbahani seeks an alternative dynamic between power and control. United by her research-based practice, the various components of this project including moving image, brush strokes, body movement, sound, text, and water are utilized by Behbahani to provoke spatial memory while observing the inherent complexities of material resources. We Were Missing A Present re-imagines the historical structure of landscape, botany, migration, and the processes of colonization. Behbahani expresses sincere gratitude to Imani's family for facilitating the garden visits in Shiraz, Iran, and dedicates We Were Missing a Present to the people of Shiraz in the wake of recent flooding this week.

New York-based Iranian artist Bahar Behbahani’s work addresses her long-term conceptual dialogues with memory and loss. Through painting, video, and participatory performance, she revisits Iran’s psychogeographic landscapes. The Persian garden, a contested space marked by colonialism and seductive beauty, is a reoccurring site for reflection and recovery.

John Wang's From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances is comprised of drone footage of Hong Kong’s dragon gates, a series of gaps in modern high-rise buildings constructed to allow mythological dragons to fly from the mountains to the sea. Originally shot for a documentary, the work has since taken on a life of its own. In its different stagings, the footage has masqueraded as a personal screensaver (MUBI), wallpaper in a Chinatown motel (Images Festival), and as a location for a live soap opera taping (Triple Canopy). At EMPAC, a new iteration of Wang’s project will dematerialize into a wall of fog, finally revealing its true form as weather. As they describe, “fog is defined by a lack of visibility, but its opacity forms an image of its own.” The footage was originally developed with the support of Triple Canopy & Charlotte Feng Ford.

Jon Wang generates films, sculptures, and performances that question notions of representation and desire. Wang’s treatments of pace—at times drawing on techniques of voice-over narration, tenants of feng shui, and the day-to-day activities of silk worms—gesture towards the ways in which beings and their surroundings are in states of perpetual transition. In this sense, pace, as a techno-sensual material, both grounds and disrupts their atmospheric videos and installations.

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

• We Were Missing A Present (2019)
• By Bahar Behbahani
• Sound: Maciek Schejbal
• Text: Ghazal Mosadeq
• From its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances (2018)
• Written & Directed by Jon Wang
• Aerial Assistant: Hercules Lau
• Sound: Alex Wang, Yllis Wang, and Aaron Sanchez

New York-based artists and filmmakers Jon Wang and Bahar Behbahani will be in residence in Studio 1 to develop a performance, which will be presented as part of the Short Shadows film series on March 29.

After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of his kind, and Sanra, his mahout, embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. A story of discovery and mourning in which the spectator becomes the protagonist, the film follows the duo as they are stalked closely by a group of poachers, who begin to die one after another under mysterious circumstances. 

Carlos Casas’s Sanctuary offers a mesmerizing sonic and visual cinematic environment that immerses the audience in the sounds, textures, and hues of the jungle. Projected on the mega-screen in EMPAC’s Concert Hall, and featuring live Ambisonics, Wavefield Synthesis, and infrasound to induce a deep sense of physical closeness with the elephant, Sanctuary presents a unique sensorial experience that collapses the boundaries between art, nature documentary, and adventure film.

Chris Watson collaborated with the bioacoustician and elephant communication expert Joyce Poole to record the acoustic sphere of elephants. Tony Myatt developed the infrasound speaker and implemented the spatial audio. Both will perform live on the speaker systems installed throughout the hall. This is the US premiere of the project, which was previously presented at the Fondation Cartier, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels.

Okeanos takes the audience on an auditory underwater journey around the globe. Years of recordings from pole to pole will be performed with three audio systems in the Concert Hall: a dome of 64 loudspeakers used to project sounds around the audience in an Ambisonic environment, a Wave Field Synthesis array, consisting of hundreds of small speakers placed above the audience, and a custom-built infrasound speaker used to create the lowest frequencies, which can be more felt than heard. The composition will include songs, signals, and vibrations from the smallest crustaceans to the loudest and largest animals ever to have existed.

Chris Watson and Tony Myatt will perform a version of the work specifically developed for EMPAC’s Concert Hall and its audio systems. This new version will also integrate sound materials recorded on the Northeastern coast of the US and humpback whale recordings from the Silver Banks (Dominican Republic).

While conversations about posthumanism in the ‘90s and early aughts circled images of cyborgs and artificial intelligence, more recent thinking around the term has brought the conversation into the field of animal studies, examining the political, social, and ecological implications of the relationships between human and non-human animals. Mel Y. Chen‘s book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect explores animate and inanimate, human and inhuman life in relation to disability, race, gender, and sexuality. Chen is at EMPAC to give a talk on their current research, which follows on the concerns of Animacies. This work explores the concepts of slowness and agitation in relation to what Chen calls “intoxication,” a term that invokes various forms of toxicity in our contemporary world. 

Chen comes to EMPAC while visiting Williams College as the Robert Sterling Clark Professor during the 2018-2019 academic year, and is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at University of California, Berkeley where they are affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender and the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences. Animacies won the Alan Bray Award from Modern Language Association’s GL/Q Caucus.

The second Short Shadows program brings together three moving image works that employ the surface of architecture, celluloid, and the body to make visible material traces of multiple temporalities erased by colonization and misogyny. 

María Rivera recites her poem Oscuro over the red flickering texture of degraded 16mm film stock used by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos to capture the protest on March 8, 2017 against patriarchy and misogyny in Mexico City. Sangre Seca (Dried Blood), is exemplary of the collective’s material approach to filmmaking. By exposing political struggle onto the surface of the celluloid that, while mechanically reproduced, degrades over time, the artists mark the repetition of violence and protest across multiple timescales: Oscuro was written in 2012 in response to atrocities against women in Salvador de Atenco in 2006, the March 8^th protest takes place every year, and we watch the film together in the present moment. 

Clarissa Tossin’s Ch’u Mayaa meanwhile reveals the pervasive Mayan influence on iconic proto-Modernist American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. Negating Walter Benjamin’s claim that Modernist architects, “with their glass and steel… created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces,” choreographer and dancer Crystal Sepúlveda moves in and out of the shadows cast by the pastiche of indigenous motifs appropriated by Wright. Choreographically based on figures ubiquitous in ancient Mayan pottery and murals, Tossin at times superimposes multiple versions of the dancer across the frame, one of many acts of “re-signification” that restores the building into the Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architectural lineage.

Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s interpretation of the 1956 novel Zama by Antonio di Benedetto imagines an 18^th-century South American colonial outpost. Focused on the spiraling despair of a subject desperate to prove his power within the hierarchy of Spanish colonial governance, Martel’s camera lingers with characteristic attention to detail across the architecture and landscape that increasingly imprisons Zama in a psychedelic vision of subjugation. 

Whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each artwork presented in the Short Shadows series stretches beyond a singular moment or place, foregrounding 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

• Sangre Seca (2018)
• Colectivo Los Ingrávidos
• Ch’u Mayaa (2017)
• Clarissa Tossin
• Zama (2018)
• Lucrecia Martel

The concert this evening will inaugurate a 36-channel “Ambisonic” loudspeaker installation in EMPAC’s large Studio 1. The program will feature a selection of electronic compositions written specifically to reach listeners from all spatial directions. Electronic music composed for loudspeaker systems built around and above the audience has been pursued for over 60 years; since its inception, EMPAC has been creating listening and production environments for sound to move freely through space beyond the confines of traditional stereo or surround-sound systems. 

The pieces played during this concert are mostly only available to the public in reduced stereo versions, since there are not many concert halls and performance venues where they can be experienced in full multi-channel sound projection. This concert offers a rare opportunity to listen to this music as it is meant to be heard. The program will include Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge from the mid 1950s, as well as Edgar Varese’s Poème électronique, which was famously performed in 1958 at the Brussels Worlds Fair over hundreds of loudspeakers in a pavilion designed by the architect Le Corbusier. The very first computer-music work created with “the simulation of moving sound sources,” Turenas by John Chowning (1972), will also be presented, along with newer works from the 21^st century offering a wide variety of different musical styles that use loudspeakers as “ensemble.”

The pieces will be performed by Hans Tutschku (Harvard University), who is a composer, performer and teacher of music created for two ears and many loudspeakers. 

Johannes Goebel will present some of his work from the time before he came to Rensselaer to become EMPAC’s founding director. The perspectives and positions shining through his personal music, texts, and projects may shed some light on foundational aspects of EMPAC’s building and program.

When he became responsible for setting up and programming large environments for artistic production, Johannes Goebel stopped his own artistic practice. The power over facilities and production means granted to him as director appeared as a conflict of interest with his own artistic work. Between 1990 and 2002, he was the founding director of the Institute for Music and Acoustics at the Center for Art and Media ZKM Karlsruhe; the Institute became the largest studio and production environment in Germany for contemporary music and technology, including intermedia and interactive works, as well as scientific and engineering research. Coming to Rensselaer, he was involved in the design, specification, and construction of the EMPAC building, as well as establishing the curatorial and production teams, the artist-in-residence program, event programming, and research. This event may serve to consider his work and experience before he became “institutionalized” and the role it has played in his approach to creating opportunities for others to create new works.

The program of the evening will be a collage of widely varying projects ranging from computer-generated music and music for custom-built instruments to the recitation of non-scientific reflections on computers, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. It will include examples from his years in the field of “free improvisation with non-traditional instruments” to projects realized with dancers, architects, and visual artists.

Drinks and snacks will be served.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko is a performance artist and poet who works with dance, media, and sound on stage and in museums. He is in residence at EMPAC to develop a new work, Chameleon, which will have its premiere at New York Live Arts in 2020.

Chameleon is a multimedia project that uses performance to explore the role of media archives in American Black diasporic communities. Archives of protest and collaborative action take the form of documentary film, popular music and television, and cell phone footage of an event captured by a witness on the street. Chameleon uses theatrical technologies to reveal the subversive impact that these archives have on the systemic oppression and erasure of minoritarian communities.

For his EMPAC residency, Kosoko and a team of AV collaborators will conceive and develop their own archive of sound and visual material that will become central to Chameleon. They will then collaborate with the EMPAC team to create elements of a stage performance that moves fluidly between body, image, sound, and text. Kosoko will return to EMPAC in November 2019 to continue this research toward a film installation, podcast series, and live performance event at New York Live Arts in 2020.

The work-in-progress showing for this event will include a conversation with the artist during an early-stage technical residency, so its structure and form will be determined by the artist’s creative process. 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.