For the past two years, EMPAC has hosted a residency by The OpenEnded Group, an innovative digital arts collective specializing in the creation of 3D digital works. Now audiences can see the result. Upending, a work commissioned by EMPAC and appearing here in its world premiere, is a revelatory stereoscopic theater performance, an actor–less drama of disorientation and reorientation that compels us to rethink our relationship with the material world. Using ordinary flat photographs and processing them with non-photorealistic rendering and stereoscopic HD video, Upending transfigures familiar objects, spaces, and persons in ways that are both beautiful and uncanny. The play of images is accompanied by a gutsy EMPAC-made recording of Morton Feldman's first String Quartet by the FLUX Quartet, which The New Yorker's Alex Ross describes as “legendary for its furiously committed, untiring performances.” The music provides an aural lens that renders the video almost balletic, even as the visuals allow us to hear Feldman as never before. Listen to a short interview on WAMC with Curator Micah Silver and Paul Kaiser of The OpenEnded Group

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A special panel organized by the Rensselaer School of Architecture, with Rachel Armstrong, M.D (Bartlett School of Architecture), Heidi DeBlock, MD (Albany Medical Center), Ted Krueger (School of Architecture, Rensselaer), and Deepak Vashishth, PhD (BioMedical Engineering, Rensselaer). The panelists will discuss the architectural and medical challenges of a lunar medical center like the ones envisioned in the exhibition.

Will Rawls (producer) and Kyle Wilamowski (director and editor) created this short documentary on the founding, history, and current relevance of Movement Research (MR), one of the world’s leading laboratories for the investigation of dance and movement-based forms. Through interviews with key participants in the organization, the film explains MR’s vital mission: valuing individual artists and their creative process and vital role within society; creating and implementing free and low-cost programs that nurture experimentation and instigate discourse; and reflecting the cultural, political, and economic diversity of the MR community, including artists and audiences alike.

In the late 1960s, Frederic Rzewski left his native U.S. to embark on a 40-year career composing and playing music that addresses not just artistic questions but sociopolitical ones, music meant not just for the conservatory but the street. “It seemed to me,” he explained, “(that) there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners.” Today, Rzewski's compositions display that same audacity, along with a range that encompasses the minimal and the epic. They're political music in the tradition of Cornelius Cardew, Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill. And Rzewski plays them with a mastery that can be nothing less than breathtaking. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians calls him “a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.” The performance will be followed by a talk by Frederic Rzewski.

Dancing on the Ceiling: Art & Zero Gravity, is a major group exhibition in which contemporary artists explore—and on occasion recreate—the condition of weightlessness on earth. The exhibition will present the work of multiple national and international artists, including three newly commissioned pieces for the exhibition. Distributed throughout the public spaces in the building the exhibition is itself un-tethered from the confines of the traditional gallery exhibition paradigm.

Arts Catalyst • Benjamin Bergmann • Denis Darzacq • Edith Dekyndt • Chris Doyle • William Forsythe • Julia Fullerton-Batten • Thom Kubli • Tomás Saraceno • Jane & Louise Wilson • Xu Zhen

» ONLINE EXHIBITION CATALOG «

Dancing on the Ceiling will bring together artworks that use the metaphor of floating or weightlessness as an expression of the relationship of the individual to social, political or personal contexts. In addition, several of the pieces relate to lightness as akin to an agility of mind, freed of entrenched perspectives.

Occupying EMPAC’s Studio 2, Jane and Louise Wilson’s four-channel video installation Stasi City is a psychological investigation of the former headquarters of the East German secret police, culminating in a moment of escape. Xu Zhen’s In Just a Blink of the Eye poses individual actors as if caught in a moment, defying gravity and time. The two video works that comprise William Forsythe's Antipodes I/II constitute a study of destabilizing habits of bodily movement in relation to gravity.

The artworks in the exhibition deploy helium, parabolic flight, rigging, and digital effects. They feature floating performers, an upside-down kitchen, an isolation tank and skateboarders freed from physical laws. They evoke the golden age of space exploration and the dreams of the counter-culture. Dancing on the Ceiling is a provocative convergence of time-based photography, sculpture, installation, and video.

Curated by Kathleen Forde, Curator of Time-Based Arts, the exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalog including essays by Italo Calvino as well as interviews with commissioned artists Chris Doyle and Thom Kubli.

Related Events:

Inhabiting Other Worlds: Microgravity, Perception, Physiology, and Design
A panel organized by the School of Architecture at Rensselaer with Rachel Armstrong, MD, Heidi DeBlock, MD, Ted Krueger, and Deepak Vashishth, PhD marking the opening of a student exhibition resulting from a studio dedicated to designing a medical station for a NASA lunar module.

Unfiction Series: Man On Wire
An Academy Award-winning documentary about Phillipe Petit’s daring and defiant tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, which became known as the “artistic crime of the century.”

Extraterrestrial Medical Workstation
Students from the School of Architecture and Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer imagine a medical center on the moon, in an exhibit of design studies commissioned by NASA’s Habitability and Human Factors Branch. These design proposals anticipate the clinical and research protocols that will be used on the moon, and perhaps beyond. The best of them will be incorporated into a full-scale prototype lunar module that will be tested in the Arizona desert in August 2010.

DOUGLAS TRUMBULL 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
A talk with special effects legend Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner) followed by a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of science fiction cinema on the massive 56’ concert hall screen.

In collaboration with Marije Baalman, Harry Smoak, Vincent de Belleval, Justine Chibuk, Thomas Spier, Duncan Swain and Brett Bergmann In Just Noticeable Difference (JND), Chris Salter ratchets down the level of sensory information to the threshold of the perceptible. On entering the installation the visitor is immersed in an environment of near-total darkness, insulated against external sound and vibration. Sparked by an array of sophisticated built-in sensors and devices that emit micro-levels of tactile, auditory, and visual feedback, the slightest motions cause this environment to respond, though so subtly as to test the limits of both perception and interpretation. The result is a revelatory aesthetic experience in which noise shifts towards order, sensation becomes sense, and the apparent randomness of threshold sensory impressions gives way to a new understanding of meaning in the relationship among body, self, and external world. On Thursday, March 4 at 7 PM in the Theater, Chris Salter and Rensselaer faculty Michael Century, Mark Changizi, and Ted Krueger with other experts will all take part in a panel discussion on topics including thresholds of perception, multi-modal perception, and the use of research in art practice.

Set to a torrent of sound by Massive Attack and Coldplay collaborator Jon Hopkins and composer Joby Talbot (The Divine Comedy, White Stripes), Wayne McGregor's ENTITY is a work of exacting and sensual movement for nine dancers, framed by multiple moving screens. Ongoing collaborations with research scientists in neurology and psychology informed the creation of this stunning performance, which interrogates the relation of the working mind and the dancing body.With its fierce kinetic intelligence, large-scale video projections, and propulsive music, ENTITY further establishes Wayne McGregor | Random Dance at the forefront of contemporary dance. Wayne McGregor | Random Dance will be performing ENTITY at the end of a two-week residency at EMPAC, during which they will investigate tools, ideas, and visual design concepts for their current work-in-progress, the sequel to ENTITY. Panel discussions and talks by leading collaborators, research partners, and Artistic Director Wayne McGregor will take place throughout the residency period. ENTITY features set design by Patrick Burnier with film/video by Ravi Deepres, and lighting by Lucy Carter.

A discussion on projects and directions of R-Research – the research branch of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance – which initiates and implements new research collaborations across disciplines including dance, neuroscience, cognitive science, biology, philosophy and technology.

rAndom International will give a talk on their award-winning design and art work. Best known for large-scale public installations combining technology, media, design and art, they play with real-time reactive systems that offer viewers an intuitive body-based experience. rAndom International is in residence at EMPAC, working with Wayne McGregor | Random Dance to create the scenography for the company’s new work, the sequel to ENTITY. Working at the fringes of innovation in science, art and design, rAndom International have developed a series of projects and installations that aim to re-interpret the ‘cold’ nature of digital-based work by providing the viewer with the opportunity for a more hands-on experience with technology. Their work emphasizes the ephemeral quality of information, harbors an intense curiosity toward experimental processes, and includes a body of diverse installations, commissioned works, and performance projects. More recently, rAndom International has investigated the potential of endowing usually inanimate objects and environments with behavioral qualities. As part of their evolving relationship with Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, they are designing the scenography for the company’s current work in progress to be premiered in 2010.

Come take class with the dancers of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance! A ballet-based technique class open to intermediate/advanced dancers. Class size is limited. Please reserve a spot by calling the box office 518.276.3921.