Our new book, Programming EMPAC: The First 4,158 Days, presents a vivid mosaic of all the events, projects, and works developed and presented here at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center from 2014 back to inception. To celebrate what we have achieved and kick off the next 4,158 days of this ongoing experiment, we cordially invite you to join us for this official book launch, which will directly precede the first event in the Fall 2015 Program.

Background

In our first decade, hundreds of people from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines came to create new work—artists, scholars, researchers, and students—all in collaboration with EMPAC’s team. Over 688 pages, Programming EMPAC offers a comprehensive listing of all 413 projects that have taken place, between 2014 to 2004. It begins with EMPAC in its current state, and ends with its first project: the Wooster Group’s THERE IS STILL TIME..BROTHER. Each project entry is a snapshot, with a brief description and vivid images, which combine to form a portrait of EMPAC.

Schedule

• At 5:30PM guests are invited to join us for a reception on the EMPAC Mezzanine. Everyone who arrives before 6 will receive a complimentary copy of the book; after 6, it will be available at the discounted rate of $25.
• Around 6PM, President Shirley Ann Jackson will speak on her founding vision for EMPAC, and reflect on both the center’s first decade as well as its future ambitions.
• Director Johannes Goebel will then speak to his experience building the EMPAC program up to and beyond the first 4,158 days.
• At 7PM, the Fall 2015 Program will formally commence with the first of eight screenings in the On Screen/Sound film series, an evening of cinematic shorts that highlight innovations in sound design, culminating in the 1982 cult classic sci-fi feature Tron.

Most everyone in our society has an ever-increasing amount of digitally encoded documents and data, from selfies and family pictures, videos and music, to scientific and financial data. EMPAC, for one, has hundreds of hours of video and audio documenting performances and events created here on campus. While technology continues to change more rapidly than ever, attempts to standardize digital formats are undermined by an industry that has to meet shareholders’ expectations with new gear, protocols, and ever-new methods for distribution and storage. Obsolescence and incompatibility guarantee rising sales.

An immense effort has been underway for the past decades to cope with this battle between constant change in the name of improvement and the desire to pass “things” on from generation to generation. We like to believe what we are told, that we have conquered eternity by digitizing everything in a “universal code.”

Some fundamental aspects of archiving have been around ever since we started writing our thoughts and preserving “the fruit of our labor” beyond the life-span of an individual: Who has the power to determine what is to be kept? Who has the money to pay for keeping what is to be kept? Whose bits will survive the longest? Some answers can be found by considering clay tablets, pyramids, monks copying manuscripts by hand, the printing press, acid-free paper, acetate film – and the care that is currently taken to destroy cultural artifacts, as in the Islamic world (a non-first and non-last in human history and common to all cultures).

The talk will finally give an overview of present preservation strategies in the digital domain and present the concrete solution we found for EMPAC, which is both cheap and pragmatic. This approach may be of interest to anyone in the scientific world, in industry (where it is being adopted), or at home.

Johannes Goebel has been involved with the archiving and restoration of digitally created music since the mid ’80s, when the issue was already problematic, only 30 years after digital sound entered the world of music. He created and mastered the first audio CD series dedicated to distribute music, created with computers, in a digital form, and established the first international digital archive of electronic music with colleagues from Stanford University and ZKM Germany between 1989 and 1995, at a time when an “all-digital archive” was not seen as worthy of support from big foundations—only 25 years ago. As director of EMPAC, he has been collaborating with the EMPAC team to archive the work done here, resulting in a “video chair,” a 688-page printed book (also available online), and a strategy to back-up video and audio data in a cheap and hopefully longer-lasting way.

The fifth screening in On Screen/Sound grapples with ideas of the real, acted, and reenacted as intertwined in both image and music.

A melting pot of experimental performance and sound, quiet beauty, pop fantasy and social commentary, Hilvarenbeek concocts a surreal post-consumer utopia in the Dutch countryside. Directed and scored by longtime collaborators Jimmy Joe Roche and musician Dan Deacon, the faux documentary follows a heavy-metal cow herder, a gang of thrift-store naturalists who hunt with automatic weapons, and other imagined historical personalities.

Paul Schrader’s 1985 film Mishima was called by Roger Ebert the “most unconventional biopic I've ever seen, and one of the best.” Framing the life and ritual suicide of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima with interwoven dramatizations of his novels, the film establishes a visual and sonic palate for each element. The film score by Philip Glass—one of his earliest—musically parallels the narrative elements and is regarded as one of his finest.

PROGRAM:

• Hilvarenbeek (2011) Jimmy Joe Roche and Dan Deacon
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) Paul Schrader / Music: Philip Glass

The sixth screening in the series On Screen/Sound features two works composed exclusively using light: Lis Rhodes' Light Music and Henning Lohner and John Cage's One¹¹ and 103.

With two opposing 16mm projectors illuminating the room, Lis Rhodes' Light Music shakes its audience from passive observer into active participant. Composed by printing black and white patterns onto celluloid film, which are then read by the projector as both audio and image tracks, Light Music flickers this "score" directly onto the audience as their shadows merge with the oscillating images. The sputtering of the projectors themselves blend with the audio to immerse the audience and make them feel at once as the projectionist, audience, and star.

The only feature-length film by the iconoclastic artist John Cage, One¹¹ was completed in 1992, the year of his death. A 96-minute contemplation on the movement of light, accompanied by sounds that just happen to occur at the same time (Cage's orchestral work 103), One¹¹ is not a normal film. As Cage says "One¹¹ is a film without subject. There is light but no persons, no things, no ideas about repetition and variation. It is meaningless activity, which is nonetheless communicative, like light itself, escaping our attention as communication because it has no content to restrict its transforming and informing power."

PROGRAM

• Light Music (1975–77) Lis Rhodes Studio 1
• One¹¹ and 103 (1992) Henning Lohner / John Cage Concert Hall

This event is FREE in celebration of the launch of Programming EMPAC, The First 4,158 Days

The first screening of the new series On Screen/Sound focuses on analog and synthetic experiments by US-based artists who pioneered new approaches to the correlation of a film's sound and image tracks.

Presenting films and videos from a 15-year period of intense experimentation with electronic synthesis, animation, and editing techniques across all media, this program begins with Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart's Mosaic, in which the artists composed the soundtrack by engraving it directly onto the filmstrip. McLaren followed this in 1971 with Synchromy, taking this approach further by photographing sound-card patterns on the soundtrack and reproducing them on the celluloid's image track in order to directly visualize the sound.

Built from the manipulation, distortion, and looping of found footage and televisual images, both Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut's Video Tape Study No. 3 and Dara Birnbaum's iconic Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman are videos structured by the original sound as well as its image.

These experimental shorts, which combine animated and live-action techniques and materials, are followed on an industrial scale by Steven Lisberger's acclaimed 1982 feature film Tron, with a soundtrack scored to combine both synthesizer and orchestra by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos.

PROGRAM:

• Mosaic (1965) Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren / Sound mix: Ron Alexander
• Synchromy (1971) Norman McLaren
• Video Tape Study No. 3 (1967–69) Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut / Sound: David Behrman and Ken Werner
• Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) Dara Birnbaum
• Tron (1982) Steven Lisberger / Music: Wendy Carlos

Introduced by London-based artist Cally Spooner, the final fall event for the On Screen/Sound series presents an evening exploring the specificities of transforming the musical from theater to screen.

Cally Spooner's EMPAC-produced musical And You Were Wonderful, On Stage is a picture that appropriates the choreography of different performance genres, such as the Broadway musical, the television commercial, and the political speech. Spooner considers how dematerialized, indeterminate, unmediated performance can sit within the extreme visibility of entertainment and today's attention economies.

Nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound Recording, the iconic Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical Gold Diggers of 1933 was based on the play by Avery Hopwood and translated to screen by director Mervyn Le Roy. Including expansive overhead shots that follow classic Berkeley set-pieces, the musical is set to songs by Harry Warren and Al Dubin.

PROGRAM:

• And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2015) Cally Spooner
• Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) Mervyn Le Roy

Footsteps, the screech of car tires, a gunshot—these events, devoid of their identifiable sounds, would render their image nearly powerless. It is the unity of these elements that binds them together and gives them visceral effect. The seventh screening in the On Screen/Sound series examines the influence of Foley and sound effects on moving image.

Creeping tension is defused by the banality of production in Deborah Stratman’s Hacked Circuit, while the hyperactive, fantastical sounds of magic highlight the otherworldliness of an episode of Kou Matsuo's Japanese anime Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta.

The feature film of the evening, Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, a sonic response to Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic Blowup, finds a movie sound-effects engineer (John Travolta) in the wrong place at the wrong time as he unwittingly records the sound of a murder and is drawn into a web of intrigue. Hacked Circuit will be introduced by Chicago-based filmmaker Deborah Stratman.

PROGRAM:

• Hacked Circuit (2012)
• Deborah Stratman
• Yozakura Quartet: Hana no Uta - No. 7 (2013)
• Kou Matsuo
• Blow Out (1981)
• Brian de Palma

The second program of On Screen/Sound presents a series of shorts from the past five decades that use human movement to embody the connection between image and sound.

Inspired by the repetitive looping structure of Steve Reich's musical compositions, Gunvor Nelson edited footage of her daughter to the increasingly abstracted and overlaid repetition of her voice. This tactility of the body, as a cypher through which sound and image can create a new psychological space, is reversed by Martin Arnold, who distorts the frame-by-frame flow of a short excerpt from To Kill A Mockingbird, deliberately stuttering the bodily gesture and creating a new film that violently transforms both sound and image tracks.

Loretta Fahrenholz creates a similarly precise and repetitive effect in her collaboration with the Ringmaster Crew, whose constrained and tight gestures appear to punch out every sound. Both Hassan Khan and Charles Atlas, however, use the joyful intensity of dance to project the energy of the music.

Meanwhile in Akram Zaatari's Endnote, the movement is transmitted in the choreography of lights, while the protagonists sit oblivious in the foreground.

PROGRAM

• My Name is Oona (1969) Gunvor Nelson
• Passage a l'acte (1993) Martin Arnold
• Ditch Plains (2013) Loretta Fahrenholz Sound design: Steffen Martin
• Jewel (2010) Hassan Khan
• Jump (Hysterique Bourreé) (1984) Charles Atlas in collaboration with Philippe Decoufle Music: Joseph Biscuit
• Twenty Eight Nights: Endnote (2014) Akram Zaatari

The fourth screening in On Screen/Sound brings together painting, architecture, fashion, dance, and music for an evening of modernist and surreal cinema.

In Robert Nelson's 1963 short film Plastic Haircut, two actors perform absurd actions in sets composed of geometric shapes, followed by two experts who attempt to explain what it all means. The audio track features sound by American composer Steve Reich, his earliest complete electronic piece.

The 1924 ultramodernist masterpiece L'Inhumaine ("the inhuman woman") was considered by its director, Marcel L'Herbier, to be "a fairy story of modern decorative art." Using "experimental" camera techniques and hallucinatory imagery, with sets by Fernand Léger, and costumes by Paul Poiret, L'Inhumaine tells the story of the life, death, and rebirth of a cold-hearted opera singer who learns to love. The musical score, originally by French composer Darius Milhaud, was lost to time—but has been reimagined by Aidje Tafial. Recently restored in its original tints by the French Cinémathèque and Lobster Films, this new print and soundtrack was premiered this year at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.

PROGRAM

• Plastic Haircut (1963) Robert Nelson
• L'inhumaine (1924) Marcel L'Herbier / Original Music (lost): Darius Milhaud / New Score: Tafial Aidje

The third screening in the series On Screen/Sound is introduced by Brooklyn-based filmmaker and archivist Andrew Lampert.

Exploring the power of the soundtrack in our reading of, and response to, moving images, Andrew Lampert's film All Magic Sands (Chappaqua) challenges the intentionality of combining sound and image on film by juxtaposing found film footage with a rejected movie soundtrack.

Lampert assembled reels of found footage from the unfinished Christian children's movie All Magic Sands, and synched it with Ornette Coleman's rejected soundtrack from Conrad Rook's feature film Chappaqua, which was recorded in 1965 at approximately the same time and with an almost identical duration.

Cory Arcangel's Beach Boys/Geto Boys is a "mash-up" of two music videos based only on the similarity of the two bands names. Arcangel juxtaposes live performance footage of the Beach Boys with a music video by Geto Boys. As the soundtracks are overlaid to produce hybrid pop, the images retain their clear political, racial, and historical specificity.

PROGRAM

• Beach Boys/Geto Boys (2004) Cory Arcangel
• All Magic Sands (Chappaqua) (1965/2011) Andrew Lampert