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.
Main Image: Jon Wang, From it's Mouth Came a River of High-end Residential Appliances (2018). Courtesy the artist.
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.
Main Image: Eye of Nga, still from Sanctuary, Carlos Casas, Chris Watson, Tony Myatt. Courtesy of the artists.
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).
Main Image: Chris Watson, courtesy of the artist
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.
Main Image: Mel Y. Chen.
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 8th 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 18th-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.
Main Image: Lucrecia Martel, Zama (2018). Courtesy Strand Releasing.
Trailer for Zama, by Lucrecia Martel
Clarissa Tossin Ch'u Mayaa (2017). Courtesy the artist.
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Sangre Seca (2018). Courtesy the artists.
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 21st 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.
Main Image: Expo 1958 Philips Pavilion, designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis for a multi-media environment with Edgar Varese’s Poème électronique. Edgar Varese composed Poème électronique for the Philips Pavilion, designed by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis, for the Expo 1958 in Brussles. Photo: Wouter Hagnes / Wikipedia.
Hans Tutschku in Studio 1 during 36 Loudspeakers for 2 Ears, March 2019. Photo: Vic Brooks/EMPAC.
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.
An EMPAC Salon: Johannes Goebel. February, 2019.
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.
Main Image: Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. Photo: Erik Carter
The title for this episode of the Short Shadows series, “A life that is only circulations,” is borrowed from Bay Area poet Juliana Spahr’s Transitory, Momentary, a poem about loss shot through with reflections on the power of words, songs, and stanzas, set against the backdrop of the Occupy movement and the global circulation of oil and capital. Alongside a reading by Spahr, the program features two films made almost five decades apart, Joyce Wieland’s Sailboat (1965) and The Otolith Group’s I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012). Both films operate at the boundary between language and image, framed by the sea as a visual, poetic, and structural metaphor for exile, longing, and global circulatory connection.
An intimate portrait of artist and poet Etel Adnan as she reads from her book Sea and Fog in her apartment, I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another explores the experiential gap between the act of reading and that of being read to. The camera intimately captures Adnan, closely framed and at oblique angles, allowing space for the poetry and poet to comingle. In comparison, Wieland’s lens focuses on a distant boat. The word “Sailboat” fills the sky, naming the film’s dialogic structure in a Godardian intersection of image and language. Like I See Infinite Distance, the film is at once intimate and distanced, technical and poetic, intertwining the lived experience at the moment of capture with a universal nostalgia for what has passed across the water.
Theorist Svetlana Boym has succinctly described such nostalgia visible in cinema as “a double exposure or superimposition of two images” that can form a durational map of geographical displacement, an ability to “revisit time like space.” Both films expand spatial displacements through words and images (each artist has experienced geographical dislocation across oceans at different moments of their lives). Thus, a sense of dislocated simultaneity is present in the structure of the films, each deliberately juxtaposing ways of communicating—image versus language or listening versus reading—to produce alternate time-scales that act together in a single image.
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.
Main Image: The Otolith Group I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another (2012). Courtesy the artist and LUX, London.
Shadows are intrinsically linked to the history of cinema, both technically (images are produced quite literally by light and shadow) and also in terms of its basic metaphors: from Plato’s Cave to the shadow plays and phantasmagoria of early proto- cinematic experiments. Our yearlong film series, Short Shadows, not only refers to the magic of cinema but also suggests the disruption of cinematic illusion, a strategy fundamental to artists’ moving image and experimental film practices. Short Shadows alludes to the communal experience of an onscreen shadow cast by the late-arriving audience member, and revels in the artists’ deliberate disruption of cinematic phantasm.
The artists presented in the series are concerned with unexpected historical interconnections and they advocate for a practice capable of attending to the political importance of such convergences. Mostly produced within the last decade, their films, videos, poems, and performances shine a light on cultural and historical events that may otherwise remain in shadow, and, whether anchored in real or fictional scenarios, each work stretches beyond a singular moment or place.
The first season of Short Shadows included such varied films as Lucrecia Martel’s restaging of a 1950s novel set in an 18th-century South American colony, Clarissa Tossin’s reflection of Mayan influence on California Modernism, Deimantas Narkevičius’s underground staging of Jesus Christ Superstar in early 1970s Vilnius, Dora Garcia’s fragmented reenactment of Buenos Aires happenings during the psychosis of the 1960s disappearances, and Basir Mahmood’s gestures of contemporary “Lollywood” cinema. In this second season, we move between Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s intimate Cuban revolutionary cinema and Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon’s traversal of a Port-au-Prince graveyard, to the sleek homes of American art collectors in Carissa Rodriguez’s The Maid. The dramaturgy of the series entangles cultural and political histories. In so doing, it aims to articulate the inseparability of aesthetic, social, political, linguistic, territorial, and technological conditions, yet attempts to resist treating that inseparability as simply a set of straightforward themes or plot lines.
Main Image: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). Film still courtesy Janus Films.
