Surface Tension was a film series where image trumps the narrative: special effects, intense lighting, extreme image resolution, and hyper-real sound heighten the subject of the film through the tension between surface-level sensuality and the narrative. As a result, the intuition of the senses has more interpretive power than what words can hold. 

Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba was in residence for the development of a site-specific EMPAC commission, working in collaboration with Heidi Newberg, professor of physics, applied physics, and astronomy and director of Rensselaer’s Hirsch Observatory, and Rensselaer physics undergraduate students Nicholas Palmieri, Jake Weiss, and Thomas Hartmann. A large-scale projection covering the building’s 8th Street façade in Spring 2015, it was to be viewable from downtown Troy and beyond, and the accompanying sound composition broadcast via audio stream. Using voices collaged by composer Jan St Werner from interviews, fictions, and readings by artists and astronomers from around the world, the artwork hovers at the speculative intersection of astronomy and art.

Rosa Barba’s publications, sculpture, and installation work is rooted in the material of cinema. In 2010, she won the Nam June Paik Award, and was a resident artist at Artpace in San Antonio in 2014, Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 2013, and the Dia Art Foundation in 2008. Her work has been presented in exhibitions worldwide, including the Bergen Kunsthall; Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin; the 53rd Venice Biennale; and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Brooklyn-based artists Michael Bell Smith, Sara Magenheimer, and Ben Vida were in residence to produce a new video for their commissioned performance Bloopers #1. Using EMPAC’s Black-magic 4K camera, they filmed multiple house-hold objects, as well as actors, on a custom-built rotating platform embedded into a vinyl green screen. Close-ups, wide angles, and tracking shots were then edited in post-production onto multiple backgrounds to create the effect of stock footage in the style of commercials and television shows. The video was incorporated into a live multimedia performance presented later at EMPAC. With the question “Why do we hate some objects and love others?” as its starting point, Bloopers #1 used set pieces, dance-pop, cinematic cliché, and live performance to playfully tease the boundaries of language, crowds, and the nature of things that draw them.

A day of programming devoted to the Sensory Ethnography Lab, including a master class with Lucien Castiang-Taylor, Ernst Karel, and Véréna Paravel, a premiere of a new sound work by Ernst Karel entitled Morning and Other Times, a screening of Leviathan, and a panel discussion with the filmmakers.

The day begins at noon with a master class with Lucien Castiang-Taylor, Ernst Karel, and Véréna Paravel, and the premiere of Morning and Other Times, a new sound work by Ernst Karel. Morning and Other Times is a multichannel sound piece, made from location recordings, which takes up the relationship of nonhuman animals to the urban environment of Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Programming continues at 7 pm with a screening of Leviathan and a panel discussion with Lucien Castiang-Taylor, Ernst Karel, and Véréna Paravel. An immersive portrait of the contemporary commercial fishing industry, Leviathan was filmed off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts—once the whaling capital of the world and Melville’s inspiration for Moby Dick. Today, it’s the country’s largest fishing port with over 500 ships sailing from its harbor every month. Leviathan follows one such vessel, a hulking groundfish trawler, into the surrounding murky black waters on a weeks’ long fishing expedition. Instead of romanticizing the labor or attempting to turn fisherfolk into mythic caricatures of themselves, Castiang-Taylor (Sweetgrass) and Paravel (Foreign Parts) present a vivid, kaleidoscopic representation of the sea, the work, the machinery, and the players, both human and marine.

Employing an arsenal of cameras that passed freely from film crew to ship crew, swooping from below sea level to astonishing bird’s-eye views, the film is unlike anything seen before. Entirely dialogue-free, but mesmerizing and dramatic throughout, Leviathan presents a cosmic portrait of one of mankind’s oldest endeavors.

A panel discussion with the filmmakers will follow the screening.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel collaborate in the Sensory Ethnography Lab. Their work is in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum, and has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the Berlin Kunsthalle, the Whitechapel Gallery, PS1, X-Initiative, and elsewhere. Their films and videos have won awards at Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, and other film festivals. Other works include The Last Judgement, Still Life/Nature Morte, Sweetgrass, and Foreign Parts.

Ernst Karel's multidimensional audio work includes electroacoustic improvisation and composition, location recording, sound for nonfiction film, and solo and collaborative sound installations. His work has been exhibited in the 2012 São Paulo Biennial, MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, and in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Karel is currently technical advisor and sound engineer for Non-Event, and lab manager for the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, where he teaches a course in sonic ethnography and is lecturer on anthropology.

Presented by Steven Soderbergh, Visitors reveals humanity’s trancelike relationship with technology, which connects humans in extreme emotional states to experiences far outside themselves. Beyond simply relaying information about the historical moment in which we live, the film is a visceral exploration of the senses and the kinds of machinery we’ve built to expand them. Visitors, the fourth feature-length collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi) and composer Philip Glass, was made with filmmaker Jon Kane.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with Reggio and Langdon Winner, Rensselaer professor of science and technology studies. A panel discussion with Director Geodfrey Reggio and Rensselaer Professor Langdon Winner will follow the screening.

Shrouded in darkness, Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo is a classic film noir credited with ushering in a new era of cinematic violence in which the villain is often more interesting than the hero. The film’s visual composition—considered one of the best works by cinematographer John Alton—is stylistically exemplary of classic noir detective stories, animating its deceptively simple B-movie plot and making way for the real star of the movie—camera work and expressionistic lighting effects that externalize the shifting dynamics of its moral universe.

Bloopers #1 is the newest iteration of the performance-driven collaboration by artists Michael Bell-Smith, Sara Magenheimer, and Ben Vida. Using the language of “breakdowns,” or comedic outtakes, the artists blend props, video, and electronic music to play with the social power of different kinds of media.

Presenting a joyously subversive take on popular culture and the social connections produced through sound and music, Bloopers #1 takes the question “Why do we hate some objects and love others?” as its starting point, and uses set pieces, dance-pop, cinematic cliché, and live performance to playfully tease the boundaries of language, crowds, and the nature of things that draw them.

Michael Bell-Smith in an artist and musician based in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited and screened in museums and galleries internationally, including MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of The Moving Image, NY; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the 2008 Liverpool Biennial, UK; the 5th Seoul International Media Biennale; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, ES; The New Museum, NY; Hirshhorn Museum, DC; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; MoMA, NY; and Tate Liverpool, UK. His work has been featured in Art Forum, Art in America, and the New York Times. As a member of the punk band Professor Murder, he has performed music across the US and Europe.

Sara Magenheimer lives and works in Brooklyn. Language, music/sound, and objects comprise a large part of her video-based practice. From 2004-2010 Magenheimer formed two bands, Flying, and WOOM, touring extensively and releasing five records. She received her BA from Tufts University, her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and her MFA from Bard College. Magenheimer has screened video work and performed at CANADA Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum, MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and ISSUE Project Room, among others. 

Ben Vida is a Brooklyn-based artist and composer. He has been an active member of the international experimental music community for the past 17 years with a long list of collaborations, bands, and releases to his credit. In the mid 1990s he co-founded the group Town and Country and has worked as a solo artist under his own name and as Bird Show, with releases on such labels as PAN, Alku, Thrill Jockey, Drag City, Amish, Bottrop-Boy, Hapna, and Kranky. He has presented his work in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, South Korea, and Japan. Recent activities include performances at The Kitchen, NYC with David Behrman, and the debut of the Tyondai Braxton/Ben Vida Duo at the Sacrum Profamun festival in Krakow, as well as solo performances at Electrónica en Abril festival in Madrid and Akousma Festival in Montreal. His exhibition, Slipping Control, was presented at Audio Visual Arts in Manhattan, NY in spring 2013. He was a 2013 artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn and at the Clocktower in Manhattan.

Begun as a 40-minute personal essay for French-German Arte TV, this then untitled film by EMPAC distinguished artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson captures a series of interconnected confessional stories set against a soundtrack of original music.

Partially filmed at EMPAC, the film has been expanded to feature length, driven by Anderson’s spirit of transformation, embracing uncertainty in her process while allowing the work to take on new properties as it was being made. In crossing the nebulous border between television and feature film, Anderson’s film reveals new insights into each, while also opening a cinematic window into her own life.

The screening will be accompanied by a discussion about Anderson’s artistic process, how making film soundtracks differs from making music, and what it’s like making something that gradually begins to turn into another thing altogether.

,000, is an EMPAC-commissioned multimedia artwork by Canadian artist Isabelle Pauwels. Layering sculpture, light, audio, and video, the performance guides the audience through the story of two entwined characters: a dying rust-belt town unable to let go of nostalgia for the “old days,” and a small-time actress struggling against the indignities of the film industry while making ends meet as a part-time dominatrix.

,000, tracks the history of the Canadian city of New Westminster, which lies on the periphery of Vancouver, alongside biographical details of its residents and the urban landscape that they inhabit. A former provincial capital founded by the United Kingdom in response to fears of an American invasion, New Westminster’s past is visible today only in the crumbling architecture, condominium marketing campaigns, community festivals, and grand landscaping. Its last economic lifeline comes from irregular use as a Hollywood film set, transformed for the screen into gritty industrial hub, a thriving west coast city, or a model of 1950s America. As a long-time resident of this “Hollywood North,” the aspiring actress Bijou Steal supplements her work by moonlighting as a dominatrix, producing hundreds of fetish videos for online clients.

,000, sets the proud but unattainable visions of city-hall marketing against the dirty narrative economy of the dominatrix and her clients behind closed doors. The audio and visual elements combine the competing voices of the players—the actress, her clients, the wives and girlfriends, the critics, and the town bureaucrats—into a collaged narrative, with the pre-recorded voice of each character embodied by a related object that includes props, sculptures, lights, speakers, and screens.

Narratively approached as an interwoven structure of the different characters’ views and interpretations, ,000, was composed by superimposing the structural logic of a crossword puzzle onto the city grid. Framed by the narrator and Paul Kajander’s score, Pauwels choreographs visual and auditory cues to guide the audience through a story whose differing associations and rapidly shifting references challenge viewers to assemble their own interpretations.

This performance has very limited capacity, please plan accordingly.

Isabelle Pauwels was born in Kortrijk, Belgium, and lives and works in New Westminster, BC. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Working primarily in video, Pauwels’ blend of performance and documentary realism highlights the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. Focusing on the possibilities of non-linear editing, her video installations reconfigure popular genres such as the sitcom, the home movie, and the documentary. Recent exhibitions include the Power Plant, Toronto; the Western Front, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Pauwels is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

Paul Kajander is a Canadian artist based in Seoul, South Korea. His practice encompasses video, sound, performance, installation, photography and drawing. Kajander’s recent works have been shown in various exhibition contexts (including the Daniel Faria Gallery; Toronto, the Seoul Museum of Art; Seoul, The Real DMZ Project; Cheorwon-gun, and ArtSonje Center; Seoul) and appeared in screenings, film festivals and publications. He has participated in residency programs at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong International Studio Residency; Seoul, The Guesthaus Residency; Los Angeles, The Banff Centre; Alberta and “Rehearsal Research”; a residency partnership between the Scotiabank Dance Centre & Western Front Artist Run Centre; Vancouver. Kajander has been releasing independently recorded music projects on compact disc in various collaborations since 2001. His most recent recording project was released in 2014 under the moniker “Active Pass” and features 14 songs that combine electro-acoustic and popular music approaches to recorded sound.

"Along with magician's assistant Flo, I have presented live film-performance since 1975 but other spectacles before that, including 3D shadowplay (with shadows reaching into the audience), in an ongoing investigation of "expanded cinema". This will be a performance with the Nervous Magic Lantern, a device so elemental it puts us in the running with the very earliest inventors of cinema. You will see Abstract Expressionism in depth, monster-creations of dark and light forming and reforming without film or electronics, live! and without 3D spectacles but with 3D available to be seen even by the single-eyed. A projection of evolving and moving, twisting and turning dimensional forms that could've happened before the invention of film, though Abstract-Expressionism had to come first to prepare minds. Light will pulse throughout, not to everyone's pleasure, but no pulse/no hallucination. (Do not prepare with drugs, the Nervous Magic Lantern is the drug.) Accompanied by the surround-sounds of the New York subway and its joyful inhabitants."

—Ken Jacobs, 2014

Time Squared, one of avant-garde film pioneer Ken Jacobs’ iconic Nervous Magic Lantern performances, uses projected light, the most basic ingredient of cinema, to create hallucinatory optical effects. Colored slides, a lens, and a spinning shutter are hand-manipulated by the artist—assisted by Florence Jacobs—to animate the patterns reflected onto the screen, creating stereoscopic effects without celluloid or video. Alongside numerous film and video productions, and extensive work with 3D filmmaking techniques, Jacobs has explored the histories and technologies of the moving image through projector performances for the past five decades, both in shadow plays and with The Nervous System—an apparatus consisting of two 16mm projectors with identical strips of film that create the illusion of spatial depth. Time Squared Nervous Magic Lantern performance is by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. Sound gathered from the New York Subways.

Ken Jacobs is a pioneer of the American film avant-garde and a central figure in post-war experimental cinema. His films, videos, and performances have been received at such international venues as the Berlin Film Festival among many others; and MOMI, the Whitney, and MoMA, New York City. He was a featured filmmaker at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2004, and Courtisane Festival, Ghent, in 2014.