ISOS is a 3D video installation inspired by the apocalyptic science fiction novels of J.G. Ballard. Theater maker and visual artist Kris Verdonck worked extensively in residence on this installation, which focuses on the feeling of estrangement and “unheimlichkeit” (or eeriness) that arises from the tension between man and machine. Following the residency, an audience was invited to an open studio and lecture demonstration of his innovative stereoscopic filming techniques. Verdonck and his collaborators worked at EMPAC to construct precision sets, create custom lighting effects for microcosmic sets, and on a challenging 3D shoot with two high-definition cameras mounted for a bird’s-eye perspective.

Kris Verdonck’s visual arts, architecture, and theater training is reflected in the work he creates: his creations are situated between visual arts and theater, installation and performance, and dance and architecture.

In Other Words brought together six artists who delivered lecture-performances, and six thinkers who gave traditional talks. Juxtaposed, these talks built connections across boundaries and made dialogue a continuous process of renewal. This talk was presented in conjunction with Ursula Heise’s talk (see page 173).

Petra Cortright’s Bridal Shower was produced during a Frieze Film commission production residency. The work moves beyond Cortright’s past Internet-based experiments to test new production values associated with broadcasting. Cortright used the time, space, and technical support that the residency afforded to produce multiple videos that played with online language, particularly focusing on the representation of the physical body within the computer screen.

Petra Cortright lives and works in Los Angeles, and is a member of the Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club, Loshadka Internet Surfing Club, and Computers Club. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including at the New Museum, New York; Rhizome, New York; the 12ième Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon; San Jose Biennial; and the Internet Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She has also had solo exhibitions at Club Midnight, Berlin, and Preteen Gallery, Mexico City.

Susanna Bolle + Benjamin Nelson • Keith Fullerton Whitman • Miki Kaneda • Lawrence Kumpf • Mark Lewis • Robert AA Lowe • Justin Luke • Pauline Oliveros • Jessica Rylan • Frank Smigiel • Robert Snowden

Almost a decade after EMPAC presented Wow and Flutter—featuring music, performances, and artists of the 1960s multidisciplinary San Francisco Tape Music Center—this two-day colloquium gathered varied perspectives on the current trend of cross-disciplinary artistic practice from those who produce and present visual arts performance and music. The colloquium explored the disconnect between visual and performance artists working with sound, and composers/musicians working with electronics. Despite collaboration, there remains a slippage of presentation and theorization between the disciplines. Currently, it seems that the modular synthesizer could be a bridge between the two. Through the process of obsessive planning, the tactility of performance, and the creation of dense soundfields, the analog mod synth is experiencing a resurgence among visual artists and musicians. Questions explored included: How do such old technological concepts have relevance in a digital world? Is knob twisting influencing a new generation of visual artists with its ease of entry, and entrancing composers and musicians with its physical controls? Will that one module that makes everything truly awesome ever be found? Does the experience of a satisfying click create a different sonic outcome than the reassuring LCD flash onscreen? Or is it really all the same to a lay audience? Is anyone even paying attention? 

The Jaffe Colloquia is a series of exchanges that brings together small groups of artists, curators, and theorists to informally discuss ideas centered around the conditions of, and perspectives on, time-based arts. These events take the form of closed group discussion; however, sessions will be recorded and subsequently made available online.

Thom Andersen • Caetlin Benson-Allott • Richard Birkett • Evan Calder Williams • Ed Keller • Maryam Monalisa Gharavi • Carla Leitao • Pablo de Ocampo • Lucy Raven • Jason Simon • Alberto Toscano • Oraib Toukan

To what degree does industrial cinema, through the degradation of its surface that obscurely reveals the history and trajectory of each print, generate its own critical cinema? How have critical practices developed—not through opposition to industrial cinema—but from the cues given? How has industrial cinema, both in its period of strength and in its mutations into the ancillary and streaming economy, borrowed back what it tossed away, reincorporating the operations of critical cinema into its own history?

This discussion begins on the literal surface of films, with the scratches, dust, patches, and stains that come to mark a reel over the course of its circulation, as it is projected again and again over weeks, months, and years. These marks accumulate as it moves from first-run theaters in the city center out to the third-, fourth-, fifth-runs of periphery, until, exhausted of value by dint of no longer being adequately novel or having become too scratched to satisfy a paying audience, it comes to a stop: occasionally in an archive, but above all, in a basement or a dumpster. In this process of material and economic degradation, we get a glimpse of a different map of the city—not the one filmed, but the one where the film was projected; not in what the images contain, but in what obscures them.
—Evan Calder Williams (Keynote)

The Jaffe Colloquia is a series of exchanges that brings together small groups of artists, curators, and theorists to informally discuss ideas centered around the conditions of, and perspectives on, time-based arts. These events take the form of closed group discussion; however, sessions will be recorded and subsequently made available online.

Lost & Found is a DANCE MOViES Commission utilizing pedestrian and abstracted movement, Dada-inspired vocals, original text, and music. It wanders, forgets, and reinvents as it traverses a psychological and musical fugue-scape layered with coordinates, musical fragments, messages, and textual shards—and remembers the body in crisis. Kim and her team worked with EMPAC staff on location filming topographical material to be projected as a backdrop on a giant wall constructed at EMPAC, which consisted of hundreds of layered paper panels to create a pixel-like effect. An intricate lighting design to accentuate these panels/pixels was created, followed by rehearsals and filming of the two performers on the set.

Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner, a.k.a. chameckilerner, are Brazilian choreographers and filmmakers whose collaboration began with the shared desire to create work based on bold physicality. Moving from live performance to film did not diminish their interest in the body as a map of oneself. In residence to produce an EMPAC-commissioned dance film, chameckilerner experimented in the use of high-speed video to achieve extreme slow-motion images of dancers’ bodies—of various ages and shapes—in an Eskasizer vibrating belt massager. Zooming in to the point of abstraction, the result is a dance of the flesh. To achieve this result with 4,000-frames-per-second filming with the Phantom camera, EMPAC’s lighting team created a high-power lighting effect with custom-made diffusion panels.

During their 15-year collaboration, between 1992 and 2007, Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner created more than 10 evening-length dances that toured internationally to much critical acclaim. In 2007, they premiered EXIT at The Kitchen in New York City. EXIT was a goodbye to their dance career and marked the beginning of their filmmaking collaboration. In 2008, the two were awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Vision Machine is a kinetic light sculpture that produces a short film based on the behavior of light in prisms. Melvin Moti led a team of undergraduate physics and engineering students to assemble the components of The Vision Machine: a light source shines through a prism and reflects off a series of Mylar-covered panels affixed to a rotating bike chain, projecting a kaleidoscopic display on the wall. The effect evokes rainbows, sundogs, halos, and other atmospheric optical effects that rely on the position and perspective of the viewer to become visible. The project is, in part, Moti’s response to the obsolescence of celluloid film: an attempt to create a movie that will still be viewable 50 years or more from today, due to its mechanical rather than electronic construction.

Melvin Moti lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He examines neurological, scientific, and historic processes in relation to visual culture. Over the last several years he has produced films, artist books, objects, and drawings. His two most recent films, Eigengrau (2011) and Eigenlicht (2012), were included in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice.

Shrouded in darkness, Carol Reed’s classic film noir, The Third Man, follows pulp novelist Holly Martin as he unravels the circumstances behind his friend’s death in Vienna, a situation that increasingly resembles a plot from one of his own novels. Starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, The Third Man won an Academy Award in 1951 for Robert Krasker’s lush cinematography. Hailed as one of the greatest British films ever made, The Third Man combines wit with a sense of existential crisis, which is visually reinforced through the film’s dramatic use of light and shadow.

Shadow Play is a series of films that tread nimbly between reality and illusion, acknowledging the artificial nature of cinema. Referencing the tradition of shadow puppetry, the origins of cinema in phantasmagoria, and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, each film draws on the metaphors of light as reality and shadow as artifice. In Plato’s The Republic, the allegory of the cave illustrates the difference between truth and illusion. Many writers have noted that Allegory of the Cave (written c. 360 BCE), bears great resemblance to the contemporary movie theater.

As one of America’s foremost contemporary artists; a persistent experimenter at the intersection of performance, media, and technology; and an inventor of tools and instruments, Laurie Anderson and EMPAC’s exceptional research and production environment for adventurous new work are an ideal match.

The residency provides Anderson with wide access to space, technology, and support for creative experimentation, but just as important, brings the artist into ongoing dialogue with students and faculty at Rensselaer.

Anderson’s voice being altered through electronics—creating her alter ego—is as much a part of her work as her singing, talking, and storytelling voices. This talk explored the many voices she created over the years.

One of America’s most renowned performance artists, Laurie Anderson’s genre-crossing work encompasses performance, film, music, installation, writing, photography, and sculpture. She is widely known for her multimedia presentations and musical recordings and has numerous major works to her credit, including United States I-V (1983), Empty Places (1990), Stories from the Nerve Bible (1993), Songs and Stories for Moby Dick (1999), and Life on a String (2001), among others. She has had countless collaborations with an array of artists, from Jonathan Demme and Brian Eno to Bill T. Jones and Peter Gabriel.

Anderson has invented several technological devices for use in her recordings and performance art shows, including voice filters, a tape-bow violin, and a talking stick. In 2002, she was appointed NASA’s first artist-in-residence, and she was also part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. She has published six books, produced numerous videos, films, radio pieces, and original scores for dance and film. In 2007, she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. She lives in New York City.

Ryoichi Kurokawa’s audiovisual work syn_ obscures familiar everyday imagery with vibrating, impossibly detailed geometric constel-
lations. Performed live on dual projection screens, his visuals were accompanied with clouds of sound that pulsed in accord to construct a sensory experience of overwhelming energy. 

Kurokawa’s works take multiple forms, including installations, recordings, and live performance. His audiovisual compositions bring visual and sonic materials together using a completely revolutionary perspective. His works have been shown at international festivals and museums including the Tate Modern (London), Venice Biennale, Transmediale (Berlin), and Sonar (Barcelona). In 2010, he was awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Music and Sound Art category. He lives and works in Berlin.