FILM/VIDEO

Framed by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s Otros usos, the work from which the Other Uses film series takes its name, this screening presents moving-image works by the artist that pay characteristic attention to the geometry, composition, and cinematic potential of everyday, neglected landscapes. By training the lens on abandoned architectures, these films find counter histories and other uses for the troubled landscapes of military and political upheaval.

PROGRAM

• Other Uses (2014) Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
• Post-Military Cinema (2014) Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Mexican artist and composer Laura Luna creates a new multimedia concert performance inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen.

A photographer turned video and film artist, Laura Luna began to experiment with music in 2013. Perceiving sound as a powerful art form for enhancing memories and narratives, she recorded sounds around her that triggered emotions and memory fragments, building them into a rich tonal music. Using field recordings, voice, a modded Atari computer, a Gameboy and various synths, she constructs sounds to describe fantastical scenes and narratives, creating soundtracks for sublimely fogged-in worlds inspired by the sort of science fiction that deals in the eerily heart-rending.

In 2014, she released the experimental album Isolarios inspired by stories about lost cosmonauts, expeditions without return, magical realism, and the works of Italo Calvino. With a passion for machines, generative narratives, and the complexities of memory, Luna has developed audiovisual performances, installations, and interactive works where different materials and technologies coexist.

Luna will perform at EMPAC following a production residency in Studio 2 aimed at creating a new multimedia concert performance inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen.

NOTE: Capacity for this performance will be very limited, as the audience will be within the panoramic screen. Advanced ticket purchase is recommended.

AUDIO

A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Laure Prouvost’s new performance, a collaboration with artist Sam Belinfante and choreographer Pierre Droulers, which will premiere in spring 2018. While she has until now worked primarily in the context of visual art, this new work marks Prouvost’s first major commission for the stage.

In this new performance, theatrical and cinematic technologies—projection, light, and haze—interact with dancers, musicians, objects, and the audience in a characteristically surreal and perceptually disorientating performance. Prouvost is known for her films and installations, characterized by richly layered stories, acts of mis-translation, and surreal moments. Engaged in an ongoing conversation with the history of art and literature, Prouvost often makes use of humor and the fantastical to explore the boundaries between fiction and reality and to unhinge commonplace and expected connections between language, image, and perception.

October 31, 2017 — Due to visa processing delays stemming from current federal immigration policy, Ali Moini will not be able to enter the US for his performance on November 9th. To honor his absence, the set of My Paradoxical Knives will be installed in the EMPAC lobby on Nov. 9. Please join us at 7:30PM for a Skype conversation with Moini and collaborator Fred Rodriguez.

Drawing on Persian cultural tradition, Ali Moini's My Paradoxical Knives includes poetry by the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi and movements reminiscent of the Sufi whirling dervish. Diverging from this tradition, Moini performs in a costume made of straps that connect metal knives to his body like appendages or prostheses. As Moini spins and sings, the knives ascend and point toward the audience as if to ask: What happens when poems are cut loose and become dangerous? What is a safe distance between the audience and the performer? How close can you get to someone who comes from a different culture?

Dialogue and reception with collaborator Frederick Rodriguez and curator Ashley Ferro-Murray.

Microsoft’s HoloLens is the world’s first fully untethered, self-contained holographic computer. Wearing the headset, users scan their physical surroundings and use gestures to place and manipulate digital 3D objects.

Distinct from virtual-reality environments, the HoloLens creates a “mixed reality” where computer-generated elements are integrated into the human world. From the classroom to the operating room and into the performing arts, applications for the system are just starting to be explored.

Following a daylong open demo of the HoloLens on the EMPAC Mezzanine, Microsoft’s Kayla Kinnunen will present a talk on the future of human-computer interaction within mixed-reality environments. Kinnunen leads a production team building HoloLens and Mixed Reality applications. She and her team generate content for the platform meant to reach a wide range of audiences and spur creativity and innovation in the new medium. This event will be an opportunity for audience members to help imagine the impact of devices like the HoloLens and provide feedback on their experience working in mixed reality.

FILM/VIDEO

The third program in the Other Uses series turns the lens on unseen processes, people, and objects. The motion we see in the works—whether produced through montage, camera movement, or distortion of the recorded image—directly connects the action on screen to the hand of the artist.

PROGRAM

• Solidarity (1973) Joyce Wieland
• Beau Geste (2010) Yto Barrada
• Ha Terra! (2016) Ana Vaz
• April 2nd (1994) Shelly Silver
• Vertical Roll (1972) Joan Jonas
• Hysterical Choir of the Frightened (2014) Doa Aly

Mary Armentrout Dance Theater is in residence developing a new EMPAC commission, Listening Creates an Opening, to premiere in fall 2018.

This work-in-progress showing will include a performance of choreography as well as footage from a year-long video time lapse taken onsite at EMPAC. The central focus of this new work is how our relationship to technology changes when we are conscious of our physical movements with and around it. Leading the audience between different performance sites, Listening Creates an Opening will also explore what types of histories and contexts reveal themselves from this consciously embodied perspective. This work-in-progress showing will take the audience from a turn-of-the-century Rensselaer classroom to the contemporary EMPAC building, while the final piece will extend this journey to various performance sites on Rensselaer’s campus and in downtown Troy.

This is a promenading performance with the audience standing and moving, sometimes long distances, between venues. Please wear comfortable footwear, dress for the outdoors, and let our box office know if you need assistance. We will have accessibility accommodations for those unable to walk long distances or stand for extended periods.

Bringing together Swedish upstart Toxe with British veteran Actress, this evening promises hard-edged beats tinged with mystery and mayhem.

One of the most stylistically elusive figures in UK electronic music, Darren Jordan Cunningham has been releasing music under the name Actress since 2004. Mixing club-ready techno with dark ambient and experimental sensibilities, Actress has built a catalog of iconic and genre-defying albums on Ninja Tune and Warp while headlining shows at the world’s dance-music proving grounds, such as the Barbican Center and Berghain Berlin. In April he released AZD, which Cunningham describes as “Non dance based civilian mind groove, mapped to an external soul beyond the collapsing black hole…Music is chaos R.I.P Music.” Part of the AZD project is an expanded live show that aims to integrate various MIDI and synthesizer technologies into one intelligent musical instrument that Cunningham calls “the music vitamin of the Metropolis.”

Opening the show is Toxe—AKA Tove Agélii—the Swedish producer who arrives at EMPAC for her first American performance. The Stockholm-based DJ is quickly becoming known for her aggressive beats and anything-goes mixes.

Choreographer/performer Elena Demyanenko and filmmaker Erika Mijlin offer a work-in-progress performance of their new collaboration, Echo/Archive, an EMPAC-commission currently being developed in residence.

For this performance, the artists will share their work thus far and describe the trajectory of the project. Echo/Archive will receive its world premiere at EMPAC on March 2, 2018. Echo/Archive explores the notion of bodily heritage—how one’s sense and memory of their body may be felt and communicated over generations. Within dance, this is the process that carries movement invention and somatic perspectives from artist to artist. The piece also explores the role of the mediated image - live or recorded - as an intervention and a partner in the creative investigation of past and present. Incorporating lighting, audio, and video, Demyankenko and Mijlin are working with performers Dana Reitz, Eva Karczag and Jodi Melnick, as well as video designer Ray Sun. Karczag and Melnick, like Demyanenko, both worked with the late American choreographer Trisha Brown. This work-in-progress is free and open to the public but capacity is limited. Please arrive early and check in at the box office to ensure your participation.

The films and videos presented in the second program of the Other Uses series complicate the relationship between still and moving images. They foreground how images are produced in order to reveal obscured narratives and the way that photographic representations are captured and circulated.

PROGRAM

• Production Stills (1970) Morgan Fisher
• Have You Ever Killed a Bear? or Becoming Jamila (2013–14) Marwa Arsanios
• November (2004) Hito Steyerl
• 20 July 2015 (2016) Deimantas Narkevičius
• The Rain After (2014) Mohammad Fauzi