In her writing and research, Marina Vishmidt assesses how art, labor, and value intertwine. In this talk at EMPAC, Vishmidt touches on works that use technology and tautology to indicate the unrepresentability of care & maintenance work–be it on the home, the body, or the self. 

Feminist art from the 1970s onwards, such as Margaret Raspé’s Frautomat films from the early 1970s or Fronza Woods’ 1981 Fannie’s Film (both screened as part of this program), exhibit the entropy of maintenance. These works suggest that the foundation of care work lies not only in concern for what is ongoing, but in a recognition of the tendency of maintenance to unravel over time.

Rather than becoming an object of representation, maintenance more often provides the conditions of representation. Its practices of social reproduction pursue a temporality of ever-sameness, a ‘re-’ of production without product. 

In this vein, Vishmidt’s EMPAC-commissioned talk explores a question of recursion, examining how replication of an initial form at different scales, and in different registers of interpretation, is modified by process. Repetitive processes of housework, as in the early films of Raspé, are changed by their documentation and exploded by the mode this documentation takes. Through recursion, repetition yields difference. 

Quote by Margaret Raspé, from an interview with Magazin Florida, published in Magazin FLORIDA #02, 2016.

Composer-performers Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino’s Susceptible Chambers is an EMPAC-commissioned performance, which draws lines between the worlds of sound art, handcrafts, and experimental theater. It begins with the re-construction of a simple microphone.

Musicians have historically augmented familiar musical instruments with alternative materials to change their, and the audience’s, relationship to that object from a sonic and cultural standpoint. By designing and building specially-crafted objects, and experimenting with instrumental expansion, we can hear these materials interacting with one another—and experience the possibilities of a completely new sonic landscape, which can be discovered by playing with (a) particular combination/s of materials.

Developed during a series of residencies, Antonia and Jessie have laid the groundwork for an audio-visual performance that is both whimsical and rigorously executed. Composed from manifold permutations of “extended” microphones, the composer-performers experiment with different microphone filters and casings as well as speakers, light, and color arrangements.

Susceptible Chambers collects technologies from bygone eras—pulley systems, pianolas, needlepoint, sodium vapor lamps—and places them in conversation with bespoke, handmade and electronic objects. Antonia and Jessie's newest production draws the audience into an unusual, idiosyncratic, and playful sonic and visual world, experimenting with and challenging generally accepted practices of today’s electronic music, and contemporary music more broadly.

Dancer and choreographer Ligia Lewis’s performance A Plot / A Scandal takes up plot in its multiple meanings. Rebellious fantasies become schemes against the limits of narration. Mythical, historical, and political vignettes scandalize landed property’s legacy. Where plot is a scandal, the stage gives itself over to the pleasures of transgression. Here, Lewis explores what it might mean to be caught in the act.

In the artist’s own words, “A plot exposed, a foul deed enacted, invites scandal. In the spirit of revolution or romantic musings, scandals provoke an imagining of the impossible. Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? And how does it expose where society places its limits? If life is a scandal waiting to be plotted, how do we position ourselves within its matrix? Immoral and lacking propriety, scandals are incidents where fantasy and pleasure take center stage.”

Drawing together personae that range from Enlightenment thinker John Locke, 16th-century Santo Domingo slave rebellion leader Maria Olofa (Wolofa), Cuban artist and revolutionary José Aponte, and Lewis’s great-grandmother, Lewis choreographs a “poetics of refusal at the edges of representation.” Scheming against theater’s strict economy of seeing and being seen, the artist outlines a scene “where the excitement for that which does not fit might find its place.”

Theo Cuthand offers a Be The Media! participatory radio workshop workshop at The Sanctuary for Independent Media, to focus on Indigiqueer and ecological issues.

Using improvisational documentary techniques, the Be The Media! workshop participants will create a short radio play with Theo Jean Cuthand, loosely inspired by Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast but based on the colonization of what is now Troy by European Settlers. This workshop will begin with a brief presentation of Cuthand’s work.

Cuthand’s Sanctuary appearance is sponsored by iEAR Presents, the RPI School of Humanities, and the NEA Our Town creative placemaking project Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail, which connects Indigenous legacy with environmental justice (in partnership with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of Mohican Indians).

At EMPAC, Cuthand presents an artist talk and screening that explores his work and process through an Indigiqueer lens. Cuthand makes short experimental videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity, love, and Indigeneity.

An intimate and playful storyteller and performer, the artist often foregrounds autobiographical experience and his home territory of Saskatchewan, where he is a member of Little Pine First Nation, to explore the resonating effects of the ongoing processes of colonization on land and climate, his communities, and the body.

His rangy and irreverent moving image works span experimental documentary and fiction, archival footage and hand-drawn animation, and DIY aesthetics.

EMPAC building tours take visitors behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do. Each one is hosted by EMPAC staff with a different area of expertise–so whether you attend one or all this season, there’s always something new to learn and discover.

BUILDING TOUR WITH JONAS BRAASCH
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 at 11AM

Join Jonas Braasch, associate director for research, for a tour highlighting the center’s architectural acoustics and learn how the EMPAC panorama screen system led to the development of the Rensselaer CRAIVE-Lab (Collaborative Research Augmented Immersive Virtual Environment).

BUILDING TOUR WITH TODD VOS
SATURDAY, APRIL 27 AT 11AM

Join Todd Vos, lead audio engineer, for this deep dive into EMPAC's acoustic design and production systems. Audiophiles and novices will explore the facility's infrastructure and have their questions answered as the tour moves through the building's production and performance spaces and evolving technologies.

BUILDING TOUR WITH AMADEUS JULIAN REGUCERA
SATURDAY, MAY 11 at 11AM

Each of EMPAC’s performance spaces were designed as a blank canvas, endlessly customizable according to the needs of its diverse productions. In this tour, Music Curator Amadeus Julian Regucera discusses the acoustic and visual potential of each venue for the making of complex artworks, with stories from recent productions with Antonia Barnett-McIntosh and Jessie Marino, Ellen Fullman, M. Lamar, and The Living Earth Show.

Please join us for a series of two events by Plains Cree and Scots artist Theo Jean Cuthand.

At EMPAC, Cuthand presents an artist talk and screening that explores his work and process through an Indigiqueer lens.

At the Sanctuary, Cuthand will offer a Be The Media workshop followed by a talk and screening with an emphasis on his methods of film and game production with a particular focus on Indigiqueer and ecological issues.

Shen Xin and Ali Van are in a remote residency, working on spatializing audio as well as improvisational approaches of engaging audiences for their presentation of a new live program as AX Archive, inspired by Shen Xin’s film Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in.

Onye Ozuzu, Joshua Gabriel, Ben Lamar Gay, and Simon Rouby are in residence at EMPAC to develop Ozuzu’s new dance performance Space Carcasses. The project will involve the creation of a composite digital space and sound dancer from audiovisual data of three architectural sites.

Jlin and Florence To will be in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to workshop and develop the visual language for Jlin’s upcoming tour for the new album Akoma.