Commissioned, developed and produced through the EMPAC artist-in-residence program ESKASIZER is a collection of takes focusing on four women of various ages, heritage, and shape. Using the latest high-speed video equipment, the film captures vibrating flesh as the source of movement. Zooming in to the point of abstraction, the result is a dance of the flesh.


As the viewer watches, attempts to identify the body parts blur into the pure abstraction of moving flesh. They become immersed in a pool of moving flesh.

Developed and produced through the EMPAC artist-in-residence program Chainreaction is a collision of dance, animation, and sound that juxtaposes the movements of live performers with the motion of animated projections, in a continuous, interactive evolution of action and reaction.

Curator Dieter Roelstraete will discuss wide-ranging practices invested in the notion of craft, and the relationship of these practices to issues such as time and materiality. Roelstraete’s recent exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, entitled The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, traced the interest in history, archaeology, and archival research through the art production of the last decade. It also considered art and archaeology’s shared approaches to issues such as material, time, process, performance, and liveness.

Dieter Roelstraete is Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he recently organized Goshka Macuga: Exhibit, A (2012), The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2013), and Simon Starling: Metamorphology (2014).

Eve Sussman, an award-winning film director and visual artist and Simon Lee, a film director and installation artist, along with their full creative team, engaged in research and development for this EMPAC commission. During a three-week film production residency, the team installed a large structural set, prepared all the props, costumes, lighting setup, as well as camera testing, leading up to a week-long filming period that transformed EMPAC’s Theater stage into a full-scale soundstage.

Eve Sussman creates work that incorporates film, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. In 2003 she began working in collaboration with The Rufus Corporation—an international ad hoc ensemble of performers, artists, and musicians—producing motion picture and video art pieces including 89 Seconds at Alcázar (2004) and The Rape of the Sabine Women (2007). With humble materials and straightforward means—found snapshots, plastic toys, pinhole cameras, and projectors—Simon Lee creates evocative, dream-like videos, projections, and photographs.

Four new EMPAC-commissioned works will be performed on Saturday, October 4, showcasing diverse achievements from the artist-in-residence program spanning art installation, musical performance, and a dramatic trip through the countryside in a bus.

In Anthony Marcellini’s Obsolescere: The Thing is Falling, a number of objects will be presented in a lush visual environment capturing their relative obsolescence, from a Ford Taurus to an encyclopedia. Marcellini’s work captures the obsolete object in a state of historical flux, not quite a dead end but a condition that allows new properties to emerge once a thing is freed from the narrow presumptions of their no-longer necessary uses.

Empathy School is a bold twist on narrative performance that takes its audience on a bus ride through the post-industrial landscape of Troy and its surrounding countryside, while theatrical stories about the community and its history are told. Created in collaboration between artists Aaron Landsman and Brent Green, Empathy School seeks to merge participatory performance with long-term community engagement in a thrillingly unconventional setting.

Celebrated guitarist and composer Mick Barr will perform solo electric guitar works. Barr has played with the experimental metal groups Orthrelm and and Crom Tech and collaborated with Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler. He will bring his virtuosity and adventurous avant-jazz to EMPAC in a rousing performance from a daring 21st Century musician.

For the truly adventurous the theatrical group Temporary Distortion will present My Voice Has An Echo In It, a six-hour performance that combines live music, text and video. The performers will be enclosed in a capsule of two-way mirrors, through which the audience can see them but the players can only see themselves, reflected infinitely backward in all directions. A slight audio delay ensures the sounds produced by the performers are heard by the audience two-seconds after they’ve been produced, challenging the nature of both performance and spectation.

The Mivos Quartet was in residence at EMPAC to develop and perform a new work for string quartet and electronics by American composer Eric Wubbels. Titled being time, the work explores the psychological experience of time through aural effects. Using a ring of eight loudspeakers specifically positioned in the room, the piece builds on Maryanne Amacher’s pioneering work with otoacoustic sound, deploying high sine waves to create vivid psychoacoustic illusions. These electronic sounds blend with the acoustic sounds of the string quartet, fusing them together into a tangled, sonically complex knot. The Mivos Quartet is devoted to performing the works of contemporary composers and presenting new music to diverse audiences, appearing at such venues as the Guggenheim Museum, Kennedy Center, Zankel Hall, MoMA, the Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette. Eric Wubbels is a composer, pianist, and executive director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a New York collective devoted to creating, promoting, and organizing adventurous contemporary music.

Obsolescere: The Thing is Falling was a performance that captures objects at the moment their usefulness becomes uncertain. The title is drawn from the Latin obsolescere—“falling into disuse”—the idea that when an object falls out of use over the course of time it shows that obsolescence is not a fixed point, but instead is an active and fluctuating state. Over the course of 25 minutes, a house cat, a Ford Taurus, seven fluorescent light bulbs, a goldfish, several cornstalks, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a rusted portrait bust spoke about their conditions, narrating perspectives on utility, breakdown, and contradiction.

Anthony Marcellini is an artist and writer whose practice examines the social relationships of seemingly disparate objects, artworks, individuals, historical events, and natural phenomena. His work has been exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, and art institutions, including Galerie Michael Janssen, Singapore (2014); Witte De With, Rotterdam (2013, 2014); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2013); The Gothenburg Konsthall (2013); and Wilkinson Gallery, London (2012-13), among others.

A six-hour performance—combining live music, text, and video—where the performers were confined in a freestanding 24' x 6' soundproof box. Free to come and go, the audience was able to see the inside, stationed at windows, and listen to the performance through headphones whenever they chose. But the performers could only see their reflections in the two-way mirrors, stretching off infinitely in both directions. This EMPAC-commissioned work called into question the very nature of live events. All sounds created by the performers were captured, processed, and stored by a computer before being played back for the listener after a few seconds delay. The audience experienced the performance both as a live spectacle and a disembodied record of what had just been presented.

Temporary Distortion pushes the boundaries of theater with unsettling and meditative acts staged in claustrophobic, boxlike structures. In New York City its work has been shown at Anthology Film Archives, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, Museum of the Moving Image, The New School, and displayed internationally.

Surface Tension was a film series where image trumps the narrative: special effects, intense lighting, extreme image resolution, and hyper-real sound heighten the subject of the film through the tension between surface-level sensuality and the narrative. As a result, the intuition of the senses has more interpretive power than what words can hold. 

Steve Goodman, otherwise known as electronic musician Kode9, presented a rare talk on his investigations into the weaponization of sound. How can sound produce discomfort, become threatening, or create an ambiance of fear? Goodman mapped the many different ways vibrations in air can be transformed into force, combining philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture. Taking examples from police and military research into acoustic crowd control, corporate uses of sonic branding, and intense works of sound art and music culture, Goodman revealed a startling new dimension of sound in society. 

Steve Goodman is a lecturer in music culture at the School of Sciences, Media, and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), and the founder of the record label Hyperdub.