Laurie Anderson worked on electronics and a custom-built software program for her composition Landfall. Inspired by Anderson’s experience of Hurricane Sandy, Landfall is an evocative meditation on transience. The piece combines texts—descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species—and music that juxtaposes electronics and traditional strings. Dense projected texts were triggered musically via software developed for the work. According to Anderson, Landfall comprises “stories with tempos.” The work was Anderson’s first-ever collaboration with the groundbreaking ensemble Kronos Quartet, a celebrated and influential ensemble that has performed thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than 45 recordings of extraordinary breadth, and commissioned more than 750 new works and arrangements for string quartet.

Laurie Anderson, EMPAC’s inaugural distinguished artist-in-residence, presented a series of events focusing on topics unique to her practice as an artist.

The word hyper is derived from the Greek for “above, beyond, or outside.” In mathematics, it is a prefix that denotes four or more dimensions. For her piece HYPER-, Freya Björg Olafsonworked in residence to explore the Internet’s potential for enabling a physical passage to a fourth dimension: a place where past, present, and future become fluid, and the laws of time and space change. Olafson worked on initial tests of materials, lighting, and filming techniques—including UV lights, phosphorescent body paint, and 3D glasses—to shift the relationship of body to the screen, and between 2D and 3D representations of corporeality. HYPER- explored a choreography where virtual bodies, cyber dancers, and a contemporary reinterpretation of everyday gestures converged.

Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, painting, and performance. Her creations have been presented and exhibited internationally.

A visually and sonically driven performance, based on Mary Shelley’s early life and her famous novel, as well as horror movies, the work of Antonin Artaud, and Ardunio open-source electronics. The central design element in this multidisciplinary piece was the heart of Frankenstein—a giant, 20-foot tall, inflatable heart made from thousands of plastic Walmart and Price Chopper shopping bags—constructed by the company during their two-week residency. Software and hardware designers also created infinite interactive Arduino open-source electronics that would eventually influence sound, video, and lighting during the performance—all controlled by performers themselves.

Radiohole is a Brooklyn-based performance collective founded in 1998 by Erin Douglass, Eric Dyer, Maggie Hoffman, and Scott Halvorsen Gillette. At the heart of the company’s ethic is collaboration and play. Their cut-up techniques, rich object-oriented visual sense, amplified, sampled sound, and raw, energetic performance style owe as much to the punk and new wave movements of the 1970s and ’80s as they do to any formal theatrical tradition.

A collaboration between pianist Marilyn Nonken and composer Joshua Fineberg; while Nonken recorded works for solo piano, Fineberg mixed and mastered them in EMPAC’s audio production room. Combining Fineberg’s work in psycho-acoustics and Nonken’s virtuosic command of the modern repertoire, the performance produced Voix Voilées: Spectral Piano Music, featuring the music of Fineberg and an additional composition from Hugues Dufourt. Nonken is a celebrated champion of the modern repertoire who has performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre, the Guggenheim Museum, and (Le) Poisson Rouge. After teaching at Harvard University, where he is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor for the Humanities, Fineberg assumed a professorship in composition and the directorship of the electronic music studios at Boston University. In 2012, he became the founding director of the Boston University Center for New Music.

American filmmaker Brent Green was in residence to record a live performance version of his stop-motion animation film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Originally presented as a touring film with live narration and musical accompaniment, Green wanted to create a DVD document of the project. All the video, audio, and design work took place onsite at EMPAC, with every department at EMPAC collaborating to realize the project. Based on the true tale of Kentucky hardware clerk Leonard Wood, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then uses live action and hand-drawn stop-motion animation to tell an inspiring, poignant, and darkly humorous love story of a man who built a bizarre and sprawling home for his wife by hand in the hope that it would cure her of terminal cancer.

Brent Green is a storyteller, singer, songwriter, and self-taught filmmaker. Green often performs his films with live musicians, improvised sound-tracks, and live narration in venues ranging from rooftops to art institutions such as the Getty Center, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, and MoMA. He lives and works in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania.

Commissioned by EMPAC, this interdisciplinary hybrid combined footage Cohen filmed in Nova Scotia over a decade with live music and texts ranging from poems and folklore to local newspaper fragments to scientific research. An artist who has explored and deplored the disappearance of regional character brought on by corporate-driven homogeneity, Cohen described his discovery of Cape Breton as a revelation for its beauty, but one that remains elusive and deeply itself. Known primarily as an urban filmmaker, this work was a rare foray into engagement with the natural landscape. The EMPAC premiere featured musicians from Fugazi, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dirty Three, and Silver Mt. Zion. EMPAC also screened an earlier work, Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street (Series One and Two). Cohen has made more than 40 films including personal/political city portraits made on travels around the globe, and portraits of friends, artists, and musicians. His works are in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been broadcast by PBS, Arte, and the Sundance Channel.

Quote Unquote was an interdisciplinary series presenting work by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for time-based works including installation, film, and performance.

Susan Sgorbati’s original work in emergent improvisation in dance led to her concept of “emergent structuring” for collaborative, applied problem solving for political, social, and environmental issues. A key feature of this work has been dialogue with scientists on how complex systems dynamics in brain research and biological systems are reflected in improvisational ensembles in dance and music. For this six-week creative research residency, she brought together multiple perspectives on how groups can create collective meaning to enable structures that will solve complex problems. Sgorbati is a professional mediator and the Barbara and Lewis Jones Chair of Social Activism at Bennington College, where she develops and supervises the curriculum in conflict resolution; she also mediates for the Vermont Human Rights Commission.

TALK: May 9, 2012: Mirror Neurons and Our Capacity for Empathy, Marco Iacoboni and Susan Sgorbati. Iacoboni is a neurologist and neuroscientist who pioneered research on mirror neurons, the “smart cells” in our brain that are thought to illuminate our ability to interpret the feelings and intentions of others. Sgorbati joined Iacoboni after the talk to explore the role of empathy in any emergent collaborative process of creation, whether in dance or conflict resolution.

WORKSHOP: April 14, 2012: Emergent Improvisation, Susan Sgorbati. Visitors observed Sgorbati’s work with emergent improvisation; an ensemble of six dancers demonstrated Sgorbati’s concept of the emergent process and how patterns naturally emerge through improvisation in dance and music.

TALK: April 11, 2012: Biomimicry, Tim McGee and Susan Sgorbati. Through examples and stories, biologist Tim McGee shared where biological wisdom is changing the way we work, think, and create, and where increasingly our technologies have more in common with 3.8 billion years of evolution. McGee is a biologist who spends his time integrating the fields of biology, design, engineering, and business to create regenerative systems, products, and services that revitalize our relationship to the living world. "

The New York City-based contemporary music group Talea Ensemble was in residence to perform and record the music of Fausto Romitelli, the Italian composer who died in 2004 just as his music was beginning to gain notoriety. This album marks the world premiere recordings of several chamber ensemble works from the composer, described as one of the most promising of his generation. Romitelli took the power of psychedelic rock and the sonic-analysis techniques of the French Spectral school and twisted them together to create a deformed, artificial sound world.

The Talea Ensemble has given many important world premieres of new works by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Jason Eckardt, Pierluigi Billone, Stefano Gervasoni, and Marco Stroppa, in addition to Fausto Romitelli.

This work for six dancers combined butoh (a Japanese dance form that embraces shadows and darkness) with traditional African dance and contemporary movement, exploring similarities between these forms. Dancers from Senegal and Ethiopia joined Japanese butoh dancers and US contemporary performers to create a scenario in which lightless vision ignites the imagination, conjuring illusion and upturning the ordinary between the shadows. Within a set designed following principles found in the traditional Japanese house, bodies emerge, float, and then disappear into the shadows of a dimly lit architecture. In (glowing), Kota Yamazaki draws inspiration from the great modern writer Jun’ichir Tanizaki’s essay In’ei Raisan (In Praise of Shadows), which plumbs the unique Japanese aesthetics of shadows and darkness.

Quote Unquote was an interdisciplinary series presenting work by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for time-based works including installation, film, and performance.

A collaboration between American Peter Edwards and South African Sabisha Friedberg, The Hant Variance was an exploration of audio composition driven by an audience’s movement through space. The score was inspired by the writings of Vic Tandy and other scientific and metaphysical sources that suggest certain sonic equations yield supernatural experiences. Performing from the center of the room, and using analog and digital sound interfaces, Edwards and Friedberg distributed the sound in real-time through a site-specific arrangement of loudspeakers and subwoofers. After the performance, The Hant Variance was recorded, edited, and mastered for release on vinyl record.

Friedberg’s composition, performance, and installation work draws on the phenomenological and phantasmagorical, exploring perceptual delineation of space through sound, and low-end experiential thresholds; she has performed and presented installations widely in western and eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, and the US. Edwards is an American artist and musician living in Holland, best known for his DIY experimental electronics website casperelectronics. His work has been presented internationally at venues including the MIT Media Lab, Transmediale, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, and New York Electronic Arts Festival, among others.