Co-presented by the Rensselaer Department of Arts and the curatorial program EMPAC, Reembodied Sound 2024 brings together composers, sound artists, scholars, researchers, engineers, and audiences to investigate issues of aesthetics, ethnography, technical design, compositional techniques, and pedagogy. The symposium and festival of transducer-based music and sound art aims to share practical information, inspire artists with new tools and possibilities, and lay a foundation for scholarly discourse and technological investigation in this burgeoning field through presentations, sound art installations, and a final concert.

In simplest terms, a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another form. In the wake of composer John Cage’s work, everyday items, anything from household appliances to industrial detritus, became ripe for musical exploration. In 1973, Cage’s colleague and collaborator David Tudor created Rainforest IV, which used surface speakers—an electric transducer—to excite the sonic possibilities of such objects. 50 years later, music which utilizes speaker transducers has become more ubiquitous, able to unlock the musical potential of the world around us.

Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit is a work-in-progress music performance by composer and vocalist M. Lamar with the experimental music duo The Living Earth Show. Drawing from the Black Futurist philosophy of revolutionary musician and thinker Sun Ra, M. Lamar’s work imagines the birth of new technologies that address the various failings of contemporary society. Like Sun Ra, M. Lamar looks to the mystical traditions and astrophysical conceptions of the past as a way to transcend our current societal landscape and provide a path towards liberation. For M. Lamar, this transcendence comes through music, a process he seeks to awaken within the listener.

Here and in his large-scale work, Lamar’s tools are primarily sonic—drawing from psychedelic rock, noise music, opera, and doom metal. His musical, theatrical, and visual approaches exist in an environment of improvisational possibility. Visually, the piece aims to evoke fantasy and memory of ancient Egypt, pre-Atlantic Christianity, and outer space as visualized in 1970s mass media and in the 2020s photography of the James Webb telescope. In sound and image, Machines contrasts, magnifies, merges, and transmutes some of the most distinctive elements of M. Lamar’s and Sun Ra’s bodies of work.

Machines continues and expands Lamar’s musical collaboration with San Francisco duo The Living Earth Show, as a follow-up to 2019’s Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of The Negro Superman which premiered at the Met Cloisters and exists as an audio recording available on all streaming platforms.

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Using the unique production capabilities of Studio 1-Goodman, composer M. Lamar and the EMPAC production team create video for his work Machines and other intergalactic technologies of the spirit, which previews at EMPAC with experimental music duo The Living Earth Show in May 2024.

Space Carcasses is a new work-in-progress dance performance by Onye Ozuzu that explores how architectures haunt the body and impart their histories to us as physical effects. Throughout their EMPAC residency, Ozuzu and her collaborators will develop a virtual space that blends digital residues of different sites along the historical transatlantic slave trade (from Savannah, Georgia; Reunion Island in France; and Northern Nigeria). Drawing from movement scores and data Ozuzu developed on location, the residency will explore how the work’s “space carcasses” enable the body to extend itself into these complex and emotionally intense environments. Space Carcasses combines its virtual set with audiovisual traces, which were recorded from performers’ dancing bodies as they interfaced with present-day buildings in the research sites. As skin, container, exoskeleton, or mask, Space Carcasses’s layered scenes forge a composite site that can both record and re-contextualize Afrodiasporic relationships to place.

Ozuzu’s Space Carcasses is inspired by Africanist, circular conceptions of time and expands on these traditions to enable connections to a communal self and to ancestors. Ozuzu situates the body as a technology with the power to access different moments across collective experience. Space Carcasses is performed in an architectural corner created within EMPAC’s Studio 1, which also functions as a projection surface. Large-scale video projections will trail and replay live dancer’s movements in real-time, and a sound dancer will be created from EMPAC’s spatialization sound technology.

Work-in-progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.

Scholar Peli Grietzer’s research asks what machine learning can tell us about the structures of ambient aesthetics–moods, vibes, and other qualities that give us the sense of an artwork’s (or art world’s) formal unity. In a noted 2017 essay A Theory of Vibe, Grietzer had addressed these artistic structures through the framework of autoencoders—neural networks trained to develop visual representation algorithms for digital media. He argued that the aesthetic organization of artworks is functionally parallel to how AI technologies construct a coherent body of information.

For this engagement at EMPAC, Grietzer considers what is unique about the structures of meaning within art and poetic thought, through articulating the worldmaking properties of AI’s mathematical systems. The talk draws on his recent research connecting poetic form, art and aesthetic philosophies of the Romantic movement, and the architectures of artificial intelligence. For Grietzer, machine learning’s computational structures illustrate art’s power to effect meaning through a unique material force.

Ezekiel Dixon-Román’s research on computation is influenced by Black radical anti-colonial thought, as well as cybernetics and critical philosophies of technology. His work focuses partly on how algorithms may reflect and become haunting forces as they pursue certain patterns of data, reproducing the ways in which racial logics and forces of power have historically been embedded in technological systems.

Dixon-Román’s writing explores the implications of computational ideas of recursion, indeterminacy, and technology’s possibility for self-reflexivity. His work, additionally, re-reads ideas of the human that we inherit from the Enlightenment period and from the human’s formation within technology and science.

At EMPAC, Dixon-Román’s talk addresses some of his newest research. He also discusses examples of contemporary artworks that demonstrate the ghostly specters at work in colonial logics, and that push AI away from mechanisms of control.

Join music curator Amadeus Julian Regucera for a pre-concert conversation with artists Jlin and Florence To in Studio 2. Café open after the pre-show, and during the preview concert.

Akoma is the latest project and album by acclaimed electronic musician Jlin. In close collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Florence To, she will be in residence at EMPAC to develop and present a work-in-progress performance. Akoma incites a dynamic and rhythmic conversation in which sound and light can create a resonance that absorbs and emanates energy into a shared space.

Influenced by “footwork,” a genre of post-house music from Chicago and typified by an athletic and hyperactive rhythmic drive, Jlin developed her complex and personal style of music in her hometown of Gary, Indiana. Exemplified on past albums such as Perspective, Black Origami, and her acclaimed 2015 debut Dark Energy, Jlin’s compositional style combines the physicality of footwork with tectonic, polyrhythmic textures and excitedly unpredictable sound worlds.

For this project, To will develop an interactive landscape that responds to Jlin’s music, utilizing various tools for outputting video and lighting design onto a variety of projection surfaces and lighting rigs. Performing together onstage In EMPAC’s Studio 1, Jlin and To will experiment with digital visual surfaces for displaying To’s highly interactive visual work alongside Jlin’s singular compositions.

Akoma album cover. Artwork: Florence To.

Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in is a program organized around a new film of the same name by artist Shen Xin. Much of Shen’s recent work explores the ways language weaves together the world. The artist activates translation and live improvisation within their production process to address the discrepancies between what is stated in words and what is conveyed through affect, and to allow multiple voices to access shared histories and spaces of belonging.

This program features Shen and performer Ali Van’s first public project as the collaborative AX Archive.

Shen’s new film–from the ongoing series Grounds of Coherence–probes cultural adjacencies and emergent solidarities by dramatizing linguistic patterns alongside footage from different regions. Myths are recited in English between two lovers; words for stories are named in Arabic; protesters chant in regional Mandarin. Shen follows the spillages from sound and script into images. Overlapping forms of storytelling bring together scenes from a dense forest, a wood cabin, and a public demonstration. The result is a reflection on the power of language to forge commonalities, perhaps even before we become conscious of them.

The event unfolds around a screening of Grounds of Coherence #1 / but this is the language we met in (2023). Together as AX Archive, Ali Van and Shen Xin open the event with a spatialized audio performance that mirrors the narrative style in the film, including recordings from their work as AX Archive.

Following the screening of the title film, the program concludes with a workshop designed and facilitated by curator Katherine C.M. Adams, at the invitation of Shen and Van. It explores how origin myths might create their own sonic, linguistic, and social archipelagos. The workshop is a live session that the audience is welcome to observe or actively to participate in with their own projects. Writing materials will be provided.

In this talk, artist Marina Rosenfeld will present an overview of her practice. The program also includes an informal introduction to her new project µ (mu), to be developed while in residence at EMPAC.

A 48-hour piano performance inspired by abandoned Bell Labs research on environmental recording. Photographic panels that double as the physical contours for a live sound work. These are just two examples from Marina Rosenfeld’s body of work, which merges approaches from composition, sound installation, and the visual arts. Rosenfeld’s work often seems to inject physical structures with sonic forms. Her installations explore the sculptural substrata and (in the artist’s words) “material instabilities” that underlie composed works and sound performance. Inspired by musical minimalism yet critical of its histories, Rosenfeld’s works rearticulate sound as a relational field.

While in residence at EMPAC, Rosenfeld will embark on a new project titled µ (mu) that emerges from her longstanding work with dubplates. Unlike vinyl records, dubplates are one-off and hand-cut. For this project, Rosenfeld imagines the dub plate’s surface as a distinct audiovisual realm, independent of the audio it embeds. She looks at the ways in which analog agents–a stylus or a hand–modify the sonic and visual content of the plates. The artist asks what might happen if one were to focus not on the overt sound within the dubplate but on incidental phenomena along its surface. Rosenfeld’s residency is a visual and sonic inquiry into the topography of the dubplate’s (material) grooves.

In a new program inspired by the themes of poetry and fairy tale, trailblazing pianist and composer Conrad Tao combines repertoire from the Western canon as well as provocative contemporary works which showcases his sensitive artistry and performative dynamism in the EMPAC Concert Hall.

Bernadette Mayers contemplates the idea of poetry in the opening of her work Leg of Lamb: “A line/Break could reflect/The way the sun breaks/Through the clouds or breakfast…” For Mayer, the subject of poetic form itself becomes a prism through which words may scatter and recombine meaning and affect.

Likewise, Tao–known for his rigorously assembled and thoughtful juxtaposition of old and new work–collects pieces by Johannes Brahms, Todd Moellenberg, David Fulmer, Rebecca Saunders, and Maurice Ravel to evoke fresh thematic, formal, and emotional revelation.

Moellenberg’s Leg of Lamb (after Bernadette Mayer) (2020) plays against the lyrical introspection of Brahms’s Klavierstücke Op. 118 while a new work by David Fulmer, I have loved a stream and a shadow (With glitter of sun-rays, Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back to heaven…) (2023) luxuriates in musical line and rhythmic freedom. London-born composer Saunders’ enigmatic Mirror, mirror on the wall (1994) and Ravel’s fiercely virtuosic Gaspard de la nuit (a suite of pieces after poet Aloysius Bertrand) find beauty and richness amidst the vastness of myth.

Conrad Tao is a leader of the new generation of classical music. Dubbed an artist of “probing intellect and open-hearted vision” by The New York Times, the pianist and composer has amassed a steady stream of awards and critical acclaim for his performances, compositions, and recordings.