During his residency, Thom Kubli worked on an EMPAC commission that invited the audience to experience a session in a unique flotation tank. The intent of the piece was to create what the artist calls an “anti-environment,” a physical experience that stands in radical contradiction to those we encounter in everyday life, where we feel the tug of gravity and spend most of our time on dry land. This installation was premiered at EMPAC’s Dancing on the Ceiling exhibition. FLOAT! Thinktank 21 was comprised of a flotation tank, a sound composition, and an archive of audio performances by the artist and a context table filled with books by a variety of philosophers and inspiring thinkers. Drawing from experiments in brain research conducted by John C. Lilly in the 1950s, the piece allowed the audience to listen to audio recordings on politics and zero gravity that Kubli made after floating in the tank in the days leading up to the exhibition opening. A select number of viewers could also float in the isolation tank, custom fit with an underwater sound system.

Berlin-based composer and artist Thom Kubli has exhibited and presented his work in the US and Europe, including ICA (London, UK), Akademie der Künste (Berlin, Germany), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), and The New Museum (NYC).

For two weeks, the London-based dance company Wayne McGregor | Random Dance is pursuing a creative residency at EMPAC, investigating tools, ideas, and visual design concepts for their current work-in-progress. Their work involves collaborations in research on the cognition of choreography and the development of new directions in scenography. To open up the process to our audience, talks and a panel discussion by collaborators, research partners, and Artistic Director Wayne McGregor are happening throughout the residency period. At the end of their stay, the company will perform ENTITY, a magnificent work of dance, sound and video projection.

Dr. Philip Barnard, program leader at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and a collaborator and research advisor to Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, will present a talk on his research work.

If any one band can heal the rift between the raw and the cooked, artifice and intensity, it's Extra Life. The brainchild of composer and virtuoso guitarist Charlie Looker, the Brooklyn-based quintet plays songs in which zig-zagging guitar lines give way to sudden, dramatic silences and a voice as pure as a choirboy's soars above a rhythm section from hell. Extra Life is “scarily focused and ruthlessly complex . . . with a dark, sumptuous art-pop vibe,” says Time Out New York. “The end product is relentless, enveloping and frequently gorgeous." In the course of his career, Baltimore-based Dan Deacon has evolved from a producer of hypnotic, wordless electronica to a galvanic showman who flails audiences into ecstatic motion. He'll be making good on his thwarted (we're glad he's better) attempt at shaking EMPAC's studios with a wave of exuberant indie noise dance with cohorts Nuclear Power Pants, whose latest album was described as “a warping, Salvador Dali-surreal glob of sneering synth[s]… and dinky, Dark Meat-esque noisemaking.” (City Paper) Nuclear Power Pants have unfortunately cancelled due to the inclimate weather further down the east coast.

In a two-week residency, Wayne McGregor and Random Dance (WM|RD) investigated visual design concepts, tools, and ideas for a work-in-progress, a sequel to Entity, choreographed and directed by McGregor and premiered at Sadler’s Wells, London in 2008. The company performed Entity at the conclusion of the residency. Set to a torrent of sound by Jon Hopkins (Massive Attack and Coldplay collaborator) and composer Joby Talbot, Entity is a work of exacting and sensual movement for nine dancers, framed by several moving screens.

Wayne McGregor | Random Dance was founded in 1992 and in 2002 became resident company at Sadler’s Wells; in 2003, McGregor was appointed artist-in-residence at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Experimental Psychology. Collaborations with research scientists in neurology and psychology informed the creation of the Entity, which interrogates the relation of the working mind and the dancing body, and during the residency, EMPAC presented panel discussions and talks by WM|RD’s collaborators, research partners, and artistic director Wayne McGregor:

Cognition, Emotion, and Action: Dr. Philip Barnard, program leader at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge and a collaborator and research advisor to WM|RD spoke on his research work.

Real-time Reactive Systems: rAndom International spoke on their award-winning design and art work. Best known for large-scale public installations combining design, technology, and media, they play with real-time reactive systems that offer viewers an intuitive body-based experience.

Panel Discussion on R-Research: A discussion on projects and directions of R-Research, the research branch of WM|RD, which initiates and implements new research collaborations across disciplines including dance, neuroscience, cognitive science, biology, philosophy, and technology. McGregor and Phillip Barnard were joined by Scott deLahunta, a researcher, writer, and consultant on international projects about bringing performing arts with a focus on choreography into conjunction with other disciplines and practices.

To most people mathematics is an arid discipline, disembodied, abstract and remote from the human sphere. To mathematicians, their subject sings; it is the language in which they articulate an exquisite formal poetics. In this dinner and discussion, Margaret Wertheim, a science writer and exhibition curator, will present her work with the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles based organization devoted to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics.

VIDEO

Made as its auteur approached her 80th birthday, Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès is a playful, elegiac autobiography in cinema by the “grandmother” of the French New Wave. Varda has created a living, moving collage in which clips from her earlier films are juxtaposed with images from her travels, projects, and relationships, and documentary realism gives way to dreamy montages and surrealist set pieces. Supporting players include Harrison Ford and fellow filmmaker Chris Marker, appearing in the guise of an orange cartoon cat. The result is a luminous meditation on Varda's life in film and on the art of film itself. Winner of a César (France's equivalent of the Oscar) for best documentary, the event will take place one year after EMPAC screened Varda's The Gleaners and I.

Jeremy Wade's there is no end to more delves into Japanese kawaii (cute) culture – from the infantile fluff of Hello Kitty to the doe-eyed teenage love stories of anime – and its ubiquitous global influence. Through dance, stories, animation and video, Wade peeks under the slick, silly surface of kawaii to reveal its more insidious subtext, in which societal norm becomes aberration and consumption gives way to delusion. The result is a funny yet disembodied spectacle in the style of a children's television show that exposes our relationship to the “endless more” that exists just beyond our grasp.

In conjunction with Jeremy Wade's performance, there will be an exhibit on the Mezzanine exploring the culture of Japanese manga and anime, whose exuberant visual style is a source for there is no end to more. The exhibition will include the first episodes from key anime and manga series, related movie and artist posters, as well as books on the powerful cultural influence of these forms of production.

This exhibit will be open from Wednesday, January 20 through Wednesday, February 3 and will be viewable from noon to 6 PM (longer if there is a public event happening).

Keiko Courdy worked on initial design concepts for HALO v-2, an interactive video installation for public space in which viewers would physically generate the electricity needed to run the installation by riding human-powered generators such as a stationary bike, before entering. In the installation, viewers would lie in a dome and experience a kind of space travel, immersed in interactive visualizations of real-time earth data from a satellite. By insisting on making the production of energy visible, HALO v-2 reflects on how humans have the capacity to adapt and invent new patterns of behavior in response to impacts on the environment due to climate change. Other versions of Halo were designed for deployment in the ocean.

Courdy is a French multimedia artist and director who creates installations, performances, and interactive and immersive works that push the limits of perception. Collaborators on this project included Jacques Parnell, a French illustrator and painter who works on representations of utopian architecture, and art director and photographer Frederic Sofiyana.

Since 2009, Jill Sigman has worked on The Hut Project, a series of site-specific huts made from found and re-purposed materials. Each hut is simultaneously a structure, a sculpture, and an emergency preparedness kit in which themes of sustainability, shelter, real estate, and apocalypse intersect. Each hut acts as catalyst for activities, such as performance, video, collaboration, and community dialogue. At EMPAC, Sigman collaborated with the JOAN group on a performance installation in the Hut series, that incorporated movement, music, and video into the creation of a small hut from found material.

Jill Sigman/thinkdance creates conceptual performance that grows out of physical experience at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual installation. Sigman’s work transforms simple actions into complex statements about self, society, and human experience.