Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon experiment with translating their 2022 video collaboration from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

The artists riff on 1980s archival footage of influential choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) performing at The Kitchen NYC, which also commissioned the original version of this project. Revisiting their own video work Reynolds and McClenon share Cummings’s preoccupation with domestic spaces and everyday, physical practices of sustenance and relation that occur inside them.

Cummings used a stop-motion–like choreographic practice she called “moving pictures” that manipulated how her quotidian, expressive gestures were perceived in time and space, like traces of memory in quick succession. Such choreographic processes turned Cummings into both photographic subject and photographer—choosing and ordering her own image, at once being surveyed and surveying the world closely.

Reynolds and McClenon build on the intimacy Cummings created between herself and her observations of the world through these embodied love letters to Black domestic experience: a partial buffer from an anti-Black world. How do visibility, opacity, public, and private function when framed at once within the stage, screen, and home?

This sequence of somatic, gestural “how to’s” for living a domestic Black life first took the form of a video work shot in the public but intimate space of an open lot in Chicago. Translated into Studio 1—Goodman, the videos are housed in a shifting, home-like interior holding moving image, soundscape, and body, allowing the artists to physically intervene in how and when the original videos are witnessed. In this simultaneously protective and exposed enclosure, the artists move through cooking, holding hands and holding their breath, silently weeping, and loudly surviving.

Audiences can enter the installation at any time. On the first day of the festival, the artists perform intermittently; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space on the second day.

Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon return to further develop their video collaboration, Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings (2022), from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

Transcroporeality is a trial of immersive multi-modal work incorporating smell and video related to the Anthropocene, microplastics, hybrid geology, and late industrialisms. Transcorporeality, as termed by feminist science studies scholar Stacy Alaimo, is the recognition that "the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world," and that the materiality of our bodies is porous, hybrid, and inseparable from “the environment.” Most information about ecological demise is depicted through data or visuals, and this installation attempts to prioritize more embodied contact points with Anthropogenic changes to the environment. 

Hanging censurs fill the atmosphere of Studio 1 with smell—a sense that bypasses cognition, more directly activating emotion and memory. The subjectivity and corporeality of olfaction does not preclude it from being a valid form of knowledge of our environment, and in fact, may be a benefit to understanding the lived realities of ecological collapse. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smell was a legitimate way to understand environmental changes, as toxic industrial pollution was frequently reported via its noxious odor. Smell provides evidence of manufactured risks that may be unperceived by the naked eye, pervasive in late industrialisms.

In الزَمن غَدّار وَالدُنيا تَدور | Treachery of Time; Revolving World, Palestinian-Canadian artist Abu Zaineh blends installation and archival videos to explore the intertwined themes of placelessness, memory, joy, and resilience. This reflective journey connects personal grief with broader socio-political realities, emphasizing the severance of humanity toward Palestinian lives while celebrating their enduring spirit. By evoking nomadic and exilic experiences alongside contemporary colonial struggles, the installation honors the lives and legacies of those affected.

•  الزَمن غَدّار وَالدُنيا تَدور | Treachery of Time; Revolving World
•  Jude Abu Zaineh
•  multi-channel video installation
•  2024
•  duration 00:12:00

A selection of stand-alone transducer-based installations will populate EMPAC’s interstitial areas. Visitors will have the opportunity to experience these evocative pieces as they run throughout the symposium’s duration.

Works

• Level 6 Mezzanine
• What is Your Emergency? (2024)
• KS Brewer
• Plastic, rubber, and silicone; bone conduction transducer, amplifier and audio player; metal conduit; paper on clipboard
• You see the face of the original CPR manikin, Resusci-Anne, mounted like a death mask—in plastic purgatory, she spends eternity helping you help you. She calls you to put your forehead against hers, and plug your ears. Just like that—now, you will be saved.
• Level 7 Main Lobby
• watershed (2023)
• John Eagle
• Transducers, contact microphones, PVC pipe, vinyl tube, plexiglass, aluminum foil, super absorbent polymers, water, wood, steel, glass bottles, plastic, salvaged metal, slate, water pump
• At the center of this water cycle, the path splits via a bell siphon mechanism and diverts some water across the surface of a sheet of aluminum foil, which is shaped by the changing water flow. This flow is further affected by super absorbent polymers (SAPs), which absorb water and gel together, thus adding weight and slowing the flow. An array of paired surface transducers and contact microphones suspended below the foil start feeding back when the foil becomes depressed above the contact mics, effectively closing the circuit. As the feedback increases, the sonic energy transferred through the transducers tends to increase the local flow of water as it pushes the water down the slope.
• Level 6 spine—EMPAC Concert Hall bridge
• Fenestra
• Jenn Grossman
• Five acrylic panels (18 x 32 in, 1/8th in thick), surface transducers, amplifiers
• Fenestra is a 5-channel spatial sound installation made with transparent acrylic panels and surface transducers. It references a connective tissue membrane of the inner ear, a transparent spot, and the Latin term for window. Tonal and found sounds move from panel to panel, like a sonic skin. The piece evokes the embodiment of looking and listening through physical surfaces; muting and resonating sound while drawing attention to the environment around it.
• Level 6 Mezzanine
• Women's Labor: Embedded Iron (2021)
• Jocelyn Ho, Margaret Schedel
• Embedded iron, ironing board, coat rack, miscellaneous textiles
• Embedded Iron is part of Women’s Labor, a feminist-activist project that repurposes domestic tools to become new musical instruments. Based on an early-20th century wooden ironing board and antique iron, Embedded Iron uses spectroscopy, ultrasonic, LIDAR sensors, and machine learning to see the color, feel the texture, and sense the position of any fabric, to play different timbres and pitches. Audio quotes from a 19th-century marriage manual are mapped to the ironing of a special white apron. Women's Labor is the winner of the 2021 International Alliance of Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize.
• Level 6 Mezzanine
• We were away a year ago (2023)
• Kazuhiro Jo, Paul DeMarinis
• Turntable with customized coils
• We were away a year ago is a work in which sound is produced through the flow of electronic current in a coil, generated by the magnetization of magnetic ink on a thin film caused by a magnet. There is no physical contact between objects in this work.
• Level 5 spine—EMPAC Concert Hall bridge
• apterygota (2022)
• Pascal Lund-Jensen
• Sound installation with exciters
• The installation represents a community of beings whose individual and group dynamics are fluid and constantly evolving. These dynamics of group behavior are continuously changing. A scenario is presented in which some entities behave similarly, while others exhibit different patterns. Communication, conflict, and chaotic interactions unfold among the ground-dwelling insects, creating a continuous evolution of shape-shifting, evolving abilities and intuitive transformations.
• Level 5—EMPAC Theater Lobby
• Summerland (2019–20)
• Matthew Ostrowski
• 24 telegraph sounders
• Summerland explores the interconnections between the electromechanical technology of the telegraph and the spiritual technology of mediumship, closely linked throughout the infancy of the electrical era. It seizes from the ether the voices of two individuals at the tangled nexus of 19th-century information technology: Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and medium Kate Fox, a founder of the Spiritualist movement. A generative computer system attempts to reproduce their words through taps and clicks, using 21st-century synthesis techniques applied to 19th-century technology. All sounds in the piece are derived from Morse’s writings and Fox’s mediumistic encounters with the dead inhabitants of the Summer Land, materializing their voices in an electromagnetic séance of digitized speech.
• Level 6
• Untitled 12 (2021)
• Marianthi Papalexandri
• Twine, mic stands, rosin, foam board, motor
• Papalexandri’s practice stretches basic principles of how sound is produced and how we explore resonances and sounds by suggesting a new paradigm, which can be thought of as programming with material. By awakening micro-sounds within materials through physical interactions like friction, the work creates minimal but rather complex organic sounds and textures. The sound installation proposes a refined and focused exploration of everyday materials and sounds, carefully shaped and placed at different distances, without any post-processing.

As a part of the Reembodied Sound 2024: Festival & Symposium on Transducer-based Music and Sonic Art, and co-presented by the Rensselaer Department of Arts and the curatorial program at EMPAC, David Tudor’s landmark 1973 sound performance-installation Rainforest IV will be presented in Studio 2.

Rainforest IV grew out of a 1973 workshop in Chocorua, New Hampshire that included a group of artists who would soon become the collaborative Composers Inside Electronics: David Tudor, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Linda Fisher, Ralph Jones, Martin Kalve, Paul DeMarinis, and Bill Viola. In this performed installation, each composer designs and constructs their own sculptures, which function as instrumental loudspeakers under their control. Each sculpture produces sound material that display the object’s resonant characteristics.

For Reembodied Sound, Driscoll and Edelstein, along with Rensselaer professor Matthew Goodheart, guide Rensselaer Arts Department students in choosing and sonifying their chosen objects. This version of Rainforest IV will be mounted as an installation and durational performance in EMPAC Studio 2 and symposium participants are invited to move freely among the sculptures, creating their own sonic environment as they roam.

A 2014 recreation of Rainforest IV. Courtesy the Internet Archive.

A light and sound installation by Yael Erel and Avner Ben-Natan incorporating dynamic reflected light drawings that engage with soundscapes by Pauline Oliveros, Jonas Braasch and Zack Layton recorded through the Dan Harpole Cistern System.

Light shines onto stainless steel discs and reflects dynamic light drawings that respond to sound, creating a sense that both the sound and the light are alive. Data engraved onto the reflector by a robotic arm is derived from the footprint of the cistern along with the way that sound reverberates off the cistern itself. Once illuminated, the information is reflected and transposed into light drawings. Multiple reflections from one light source create a sense of reverberation echoed in both light and sound.

As viewers enter the space they are immersed within a field of light and sound reverberation. Echoing the intent of Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice, this work aspires to support this sense of immersion and focus in a meditative space by enhancing the soundscape as a multi-sensory experience.

The sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left by Beatriz Cortez will be available for public viewing as part of its voyage north onboard the fireboat John J. Harvey.

Members of the public can witness the sculpture at the riverfront Marina on the Hudson River Maritime Museum campus throughout the day on Saturday, October 28.

For those interested in touring the Museum, it is open 11am-5pm on Saturday. Visit hrmm.org for Museum admission and accessibility info.

For the complete itinerary and live broadcasts of the sculpture's travels, please visit the journey's event listing.

The welcoming reception on Friday has reached capacity.

On view will be a 360-degree panoramic film and a participatory sensorium installation. The piece explores anthropocene geology and the mutual metabolism that occurs between landscapes and bodies. The artist considers toxins and materials that humans input into the earth for digestion across deep time, and how we ask our own bodies to process geologic materials (often for potential detoxification). The work situates asphalt as a kind of speculative future geology and suggests forms of intimacy with industrial detritus. The word asphalt (asphaltos, ἄσφαλτος) comes from the greek sphállō— “to fall, cast down." The installation acts as an open-ended communal feast, where guests are invited to consume edible clay and geologically-inspired foods.

Transtraterrestrial, a prequel and premiere of The Unarrival Experiments – Unconcealment Ceremonies is a new live performance work by artist Sage Ni’Ja Whitson designed to amplify the dark. In dialogue with Yorùbá Cosmology, Astrophysics, and research on the “blackest black,” the work centers the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy through a Black, Queer, and Transembodied lens. Dark matter and dark energy serve as portals to interrogating spaces of the unknown, yet have an unequivocated impact on the composition of the universe. The performance and its environment takes an audience through an otherworldly dive into the dark. Led by space conductor, Trans Trappist the Extraterrestrial, this work traverses the dark as an ancestor, embodied transgender technology, and cosmic intervention.

Transtraterrestrial happens inside and outside of a custom-built space|ship, which is uniquely designed as a futuristic space vessel covered in painted organic matter. Whitson worked with architect Valery Augustin to realize the first prototype of this space|ship during an EMPAC residency in 2022. For the space|ship environment of the 2023 prequel and premiere, Whitson worked in collaboration with DNA Architecture + Design, Inc. and Gordon Clement. Its design and fabrication aids in visualizing darkness while also allowing for the seamless integration of immersive VR, projection, and spatial audio. The space|ship cradles performers and witnesses in encounter, collectivity, medicines, and invisibilities.