Before the Beep examines how technology mediates interpersonal communication through a performance that could be experienced in person or remotely. During their residency, Kònic thtr developed and tested software to allow the public to participate in the performance using cell phones and the Internet. The result was a performance where a dancer interacts with information generated by the onsite audience (through cell phones) as well as text and audiovisual input from audience members via the Internet. Kònic thtr offered a work-in-progress performance of Before the Beep with excerpts of past works in performance, installation, and interactive technology.

Kònic thtr is an artistic platform based in Barcelona that is dedicated to contemporary creation at the confluence between arts, new technologies, and science.

Untitled-Epilog is a two-channel video installation that examines how media influences our view of other cultures, taking as a starting point an earlier piece by Domke where intercultural collaboration failed. The residency consisted of production and post-production on a series of video interviews (partly documentary and partly scripted) with the participants of the former project. Shifting between various layers of representation—the documentary and the staged—the protagonists move within a neutral, culturally undefined space: a film studio, and later on, a cinema. Reality and representation are interlocked as filmed interviews are later projected in the cinema, playing with the idea of “cultural projection” and commenting on how media industry shapes the image we have of other cultures.

Johanna Domke was educated in fine arts in Denmark and Sweden; her work crosses between art and cinema with both a structural and socio-political approach. She is concerned with how images influence the course of history, the creation of meaning, and the shaping of identity.

Laurie Anderson worked in residence on Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo, a multimedia installation that was presented at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Using the structure of a diary and inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the installation explored the themes of love and death, the many levels of dreaming, and illusion. The work included texts as well as drawings, sculptures, projections, and sound made from materials including mud, foil, iron, chalk, and ashes. According to Anderson, “In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, also known as The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, the bardo is described as the 49 day period between death and rebirth. The book is a detailed description of the way the mind dissolves and what the spirit experiences in this transition. In April 2011, Lolabelle, my small rat terrier died after a long illness. For 12 years she had been my constant and faithful companion. Counting the 49 days from Lolabelle’s death I realized according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead Lolabelle would be reborn on June 5, my birthday.”

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

Mary Reid Kelley used her residency at EMPAC to produce The Syphilis of Sisyphus, a black-and-white, 11-minute video in which she plays a young, pregnant, 19th-century French grisette (or bohemian) named Sisyphus. She wanders through an elaborately designed set, waxingphilosophically in metered, rhyming verse about beauty, artifice, and the natural world. Jesus, Karl Marx, and Diderot are among figures of intellectual history that appear in this satire. Performing scripted narratives in rhyming verse, the artist—with her husband Patrick Kelley and various family members—explores historical periods through fictitious characters such as nurses, soldiers, and prostitutes. The piece was later included in season six of the PBS series Art in the Twenty-First Century (Art21) and released on DVD.

Kelley’s videos and drawings present her take on the clash between utopian ideologies and the realities of women’s lives in the struggle for liberation and through political strife, wars, and other historical events.

Over the course of three visits to EMPAC, Ralph Lemon worked on post-production on the video component of 4Walls, a multimedia installation with live performance that provides four points of view on one dance—entitled Wall—that was the central section of Lemon’s 2010 stage work How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? Lemon’s intention for Wall was to create a “dance that disappears,” and which dramaturge Katherine Profeta characterized as an effort to “fling the body headlong into an instant of pure presence.” 4Walls was a collaboration between Lemon and videographer/editor Shoko Letton and video editor Mike Taylor, using months of footage from the development of Wall to create a film that would provide viewers with a different kind of engagement in a creative process, one that is relentless in its questioning of the nature of what passes between performers and audiences.

Choreographer and dancer Nora Chipaumire used her research and writing residency at EMPAC to develop her first character-driven work (in collaboration with Okwui Okpokwasili). MIRIAM is a deeply personal dance-theater performance that looks closely at the tensions women face between public expectations and private desires; between selflessness and ambition; and between the perfection and sacrifice of the feminine ideal. The inspiration for the work springs from the cultural and political milieu of Chipaumire’s southern African girlhood, her self-exile to the US, and her self-discovery as an artist.

Born in Zimbabwe and based in New York City, Chipaumire has studied dance in many parts of the world including Africa (Senegal, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and South Africa), Cuba, Jamaica, and the US. She was a 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts recipient and 2011 United States Artist Ford Fellow; and a two-time New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) awardee.

Singer, songwriter, and paradoxical pop icon, Francis Farewell Starlite was in residence to create a new pop music spectacle commissioned by EMPAC—The White Room. The title references the small, white, environmentally controlled chamber used by NASA astronauts to make final preparations before entering the spacecraft. Starlite began developing and composing a piece that would involve extensive stage and lighting design, a steadicam operator, and a highly choreographed experience for two nights: the first for a live audience, and the second streamed online from an empty performance space.

Starlite’s background as a virtuoso jazz pianist and commitment to a disciplined, and sometimes spectacular, performance aesthetic offers an expansive view of popular culture. For several years Starlite only performed at a space in downtown Brooklyn that he had built for his band; The White Room was an opportunity to document this area of his practice.

This six-day workshop will take place in the EMPAC studios, and will utilize multi-channel loudspeaker configurations set up specifically for the workshop. A powerful 24-channel system with three rings of eight speakers each, creating a “sound dome,” will be installed in the large studio (3,500 sq. ft. / 320 m2 and 30 ft. / 9 m height). Eight-channel and 16-channel systems also will be set up. Composing multi-channel electroacoustic pieces requires more than technical infrastructure; it also requires new approaches of compositional thinking and the use of sound material. Hans Tutschku has composed for such environments extensively and has taught the compositional and technical aspects of this work internationally. This workshop will provide participants access to the multi-channel setups for use in their own practical work. In lectures/demonstrations, working methods will be discussed and existing compositions will be played and analyzed. There will be two 90-minutes lectures and two 90-minutes presentations by participants each day. Throughout the workshop, all participants will have the chance to present their music and compositional ideas to the group. Late afternoons and evenings will be reserved for individual practical work. The final piece, or work in progress, will be presented during a concert at the end of the workshop. While limited to 10 participants the workshop is also open to auditors, who may sit in on all lectures and presentations. Applications are reviewed on a continuous basis until the available slots for the workshop are filled.

Compositions for a Sound Dome

On June 10 at 8:00 PM, with 24 loudspeakers suspended in the air as a sound dome, the eight composers who participated in this workshop will present their explorations of sound, music and space to the public. FREE + Open to the public

TOTAL ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS:

10

HOW TO APPLY:

To apply for active participation, composers are invited to send three examples of electroacoustic compositions (they do not need to be multi-channel pieces), as well as a CV and a short statement about their interest in multi-channel composition. They should also describe what project they would like to work on during the workshop and their technical needs. (Every participant is required to bring a laptop for their practical work; interfacing the laptop to the multi-channel systems may be supported by EMPAC.)

WHAT TO BRING:

Participants are required to bring their own laptop.

WORKSHOP FEE:

$500 for active participants; 50% payable after acceptance; no fee for auditors.

HOUSING:

Participants in the workshop will be able to choose single dormitory style housing near the Rensselaer campus for $60/night, or may organize their own housing in Troy.

SCHEDULE:

Check-in will be on June 4 and check-out is on the morning of June 11.

Tool is Loot was a collaboration made from the aesthetic disorientation arising from an elaborate, performance-based game between two dance experts willingly disenfranchised from their creative habits. Choreographers and dancers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey created the work in two phases. In the first phase, Cardona and Lacey worked separately for a year, in the US and France, respectively. Each solicited weeklong encounters with experts in various fields, allowing the opinions and desires of a dance “outsider” to influence their approach to creating short dance solos. These experts included a sommelier, an architect, a film editor, a medical supply salesman, a kinetic sculptor, a baroque opera singer, an art critic, an acoustician, and a social activist. Cardona and Lacey then worked together while in residence at EMPAC to build their disparate experiences into a duet.

Lacey is an American choreographer based in Paris whose solo works often emphasize ambiguous borders. Cardona is an award-winning Brooklyn-based choreographer and dancer. Tool is Loot’s sound score was created by composer, musician, and singer Jonathan Bepler.

Dancer, choreographer, and philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone will lead a discussion over dinner on the primacy of movement in perception and our fundamental understanding of aliveness. A topic rarely acknowledged in the history of western philosophy and science, Sheets-Johnstone will examine how our understanding of space and time is fundamentally conditioned by our experience of movement. Observer Effects invites thinkers to present their highly integrative work in dialogue with the fields of art and science. This lecture series takes its title from a popularized principle in physics that holds that the act of observation transforms the observed. Outside the natural sciences, the idea that the observer and the observed are linked in a web of reciprocal modification has been deeply influential in philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and politics.