Theorist Abigail De Kosnik discusses her concept of the "media crease" within both traditional and digital media.

Unlike paperback novels that show their use in folded pages and creased spines, or the grooves in vinyl records that deepen as a song is played and replayed, digital media offer no physical trace to document their owner’s use and reuse patterns. Considering both hard and soft media and the different ways that copies are created of each, theorist Abigail De Kosnik will chart how “the media crease” can be observed within digital culture. From common acts like reblogging, retweeting, playback, and reviewing to unintended effects like glitches and erasures De Kosnik will examine different traces and patterns within the digital landscape.

On the final night of her installation, Los Angeles-based artist Martine Syms will screen her new feature-length video, Incense, Sweaters, and Ice.

Incense, Sweaters, and Ice follows three protagonists, Mrs. Queen Esther Bernetta White, Girl, and WB (“whiteboy”). Through Hollywood film tropes as well as the visual language of social media video platforms like Vine and Instagram, Syms follows in a long cinematic history of using camera motion to create the illusion of subjectivity. Intertwining technique and narrative, the video drives at the tension between surveillance and self-promotion that pervades our many avenues of self-documentation and broadcast.

Shot in locations that reflect the route of the Great Migration (Los Angeles, Chicago, and Clarksdale, Miss.), the video employs distinct camera techniques to foreground the camera itself as a central character. Each scene marks a shift of viewpoint in relationship to the action, illustrating the impossibility for the camera’s gaze to be neutral. We watch as Girl gets ready, waits, kills time, and flirts. In each instance, the camera switches personas and performs a different role: as the boyfriend, the audience, the surveillance camera, the documentary maker, the director.

The camera is recast again as Girl relaxes reading in the apartment. A wide, fixed frame transports us to the family dinner and surveils her hotel room as she gets ready. Text messages periodically disrupt the onscreen action to reveal her digital interactions with another screen, her smartphone.

Although shot primarily on-location, Incense, Sweaters, and Ice includes interludes by Queen White, which were filmed at EMPAC and woven into the episodic structure of the film. This screening will mark the closing of Syms’ related installation An Evening with Queen White, presented at EMPAC Aug. 21—Sept. 6, 2017.

New York artist A.K. Burns experimented with light, haze, sound, and video, as well as filming the infrastructure above Studio 1 and the Theater with performer Shannon Funchess for the first in a series of residencies.

The artist’s second residency comprised a series of audio recordings with Funchess and a film shoot that took place on the catwalks above the Concert Hall’s cloth ceiling, using the buildings infrastructure as a set.

A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Laure Prouvost’s performance collaboration with artist Sam Belinfante and choreographer Pierre Droulers. While she had until then worked primarily in the context of visual art, this new work marked Prouvost’s first major commission for the stage.

In this 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.

French artist Etienne Chambaud was in residence in the theater to use an automated, motion- controlled camera rig to film a complex series of sets and scenarios for his moving image work, INCOMPLT.

The footage was incorporated into a feature- length film shot on-location in New York and Mexico.

A five-day intensive workshop on the technical, theoretical, and practical issues surrounding spatial audio platforms, particularly focused on Wave Field Synthesis and High-Order Ambisonics. Hosted by EMPAC at Rensselaer along with IRCAM (the Paris-based Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and HUSEAC (Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition), this workshop will give participants the opportunity to experience large-scale, complex audio setups in pristine acoustic environments.

Information on EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis system.

A force within Latinx culture and the rising genderqueer electronic aesthetic (alongside Arca, Lotic, Rabit, etc.), Elysia Crampton has described her style as “severo,” a word suggestive of the raw textures and violent juxtapositions she creates with source material ranging from American pop to cumbia, hip-hop, ratchet, and South American metal. A descendent of the Aymara people indigenous to Bolivia, Crampton made waves with last year’s. A sister piece to the theatrical production Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Timeslide into the Future, the album was written in the style of an epic poem, taking inspiration from the story of the Aymara revolutionary Bartolina Sisa, whose severed limbs were paraded through the Andes after her execution at the hands of Spanish colonists.

Conjuring history, myth, and dream while deftly collaging the sonic trappings of a world in flux, Crampton’s electronic compositions are ranging emotional narratives that seek reconstitution and sovereignty.

Opening the show was Oakland-based synth artist and techno producer Russell E.L. Butler. Exploring themes of transplantation, evolution, and healing, Butler dedicated their recent EP I’m Dropping Out of Life to the “black, brown, trans, queer, and gay folks of Oakland,” especially those who tragically died in the December 2016 Ghost Ship art collective fire. 

Jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire comes to EMPAC with his celebrated quartet. Signed to the legendary label Blue Note Records, Akinmusire is a rising star in American Jazz. At 19, he began touring professionally with saxophonist Steve Colemen, before studying with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terrence Blanchard at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.

In 2007, he won both the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition. Akinmusire has since worked with jazz icons from Vijay Iyer and Aaron Parks to Esperanza Spalding and Jason Moran, recording two albums as a bandleader, including 2014’s The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint. In 2015, he contributed to rapper Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-nominated album To Pimp a Butterfly.

Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet

Sam Harris — Piano
Harish Raghavan — Bass
Jeremy Dutton — Drums

Performer, writer, and interactive-electronics artist Andrew Schneider presents his Obie Award-winning show YOUARENOWHERE. This rapid-fire and witty theater performance cycles through expressions of laughter, surprise, and angst. Its dialogue traverses quantum mechanics and parallel universes, missed connections and YouTube videos in an existential meditation on time and presence. The New York Times lauds the show as “A chaotic mix of personal revelation and relativity theory, enhanced by some alarming and splendid visual effects...”

Andrew Schneider has been working in residence at EMPAC to create the follow-up to YOUARENOWHERE, which will receive its World Premiere at EMPAC this September. NOTE: YOUARENOWHERE uses haze, strobe lighting, and loud sounds.

VIDEO

Choreographer Trajal Harrell was in residence to develop the stage environment for Calm House Terrace, an evening-length contemporary dance solo. The work ritualistically resurrects Japanese butoh artist Tatsumi Hijikata’s Quiet House (1973).