The viola and bassoon are not typically brandished in the pursuit of free improvisation and noise, but the duo Architeuthis Walks on Land brings fierceness and energy to these typically “orchestral” instruments. By way of extended techniques, bass amplification, and rich textures, Amy Cimini and Katherine Young create a space where composition, indeterminacy, and immediacy intersect. Contrasting—yet complementing—the duo with a fluid elegance and grace, violinist Miranda Cuckson presented a set of complex and microtonal works for solo violin. Cuckson, a well-known performer in the new music scene, has built her reputation on technical refinement and beautiful tone. She presented music by Xenakis, Ferneyhough, and Haas. 

Amy Cimini and Katherine Young have been performing together as Architeuthis Walks on Land since 2003. The duo developed their approach to improvisation in the rich experimental music communities of Chicago and New York City, and have collaborated with artists such as Anthony Braxton and the Tri-Centric Orchestra, Peter Evans, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Jessica Pavone, and Hans Joachim Irmler from Faust. Violinist and violist Miranda Cuckson is acclaimed for her performances of a wide range of repertoire, from early eras to the most current creations. She studied at the Juilliard School, where she received her BM, MM, and DMA degrees and won the Presser and Richard F. French awards. She is in demand as a soloist and chamber musician, appearing in major concert halls, as well as at universities, galleries, and informal spaces, and is on the violin faculty at Mannes College the New School for Music.

Program

Miranda Cuckson, violin

Iannis Xenakis - Mikka S (1976)

Georg Friedrich Haas - de terrae fine (2001)

Brian Ferneyhough - Intermedio alla Ciaccona (1986)

~interval~

Architeuthis Walks on Land

Amy Cimini, Viola + Katherine Young, Bassoon +

from The Surveyors (2014)

The Speculators 84°03′N 174°51′W

The Assayers 82°06′S 54°58′E

The Surveyors

An evening of films and discussion with New York media-dance pioneer Charles Atlas. Atlas was in residence at EMPAC to produce a newly commissioned theatrical production (Tesseract) that premiered in EMPAC’s Theater in fall 2017. Intertwining dance, live and pre-recorded 3D video, the performance was choreographed in collaboration with Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener.

Atlas has created numerous works for stage, screen, museum, and television, consistently pioneering the synthesis of technology and performance. A key figure in the development of “media-dance,” in which performance is created directly for the camera, Atlas was videographer-in-residence with Merce Cunningham Dance Company for a decade, and continues to collaborate extensively with choreographers, dancers, and performers, including Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Diamanda Galas, and Mika Tajima/New Humans, among many others.

CANCELLED

In this talk, architectural theorist and Ohio State University professor Jeffrey Kipnis will discuss the production of knowledge in the realms of science and the arts, asserting that artists, composers, magicians, healers, writers, politicians, generals, and everyday artisans have accumulated and mobilized far more actual scientific facts through culture than modern science has discovered or come close to explaining.

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.