Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s rarely screened science fiction thriller World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) is an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3. A film in which the boundary between reality and simulation is ceaselessly questioned, World on a Wire follows Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), a cybernetics engineer who uncovers a conspiracy at the Institute for Cybernetics and Future Science. The narrative centers on a simulation project in development at the institute called Simulacron 1, which will be able to predict future social, economic, and political occurrences as precisely as though they were reality. After the initiator and the head of the research project, Professor Vollmer (Adrian Hoven), dies under mysterious circumstances, Stiller is asked to assume his responsibilities and begins exhibiting symptoms uncannily similar to his predecessor.

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.

Hoot is a fast-paced and hilarious movie about kids working to save a burrowing owl habitat in Florida – threatened by plans to build a pancake house. Jimmy Buffet provides music, and plays the high school science teacher. Based on the book by Carl Hiaasen.

We will screen the original Lorax, Jim Hensen’s Fraggle Rock, Earth Day Word Girl and Curious George, Mulch Ado About Nothing.

“The Reach Of Resonance”, filmed in ten countries, is a meditation on the meaning of music, which juxtaposes the creative paths of four musicians who use music to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world around them. Among them are Miya Masaoka using music to interact with insects and plants; Jon Rose, utilizing a violin bow to turn fences into musical instruments in conflict zones ranging from the Australian outback to Palestine; John Luther Adams translating the geophysical phenomena of Alaska into music; and Bob Ostertag, who explores global socio-political issues through processes as diverse as transcribing a riot into a string quartet, and creating live cinema with garbage.

Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain sparked a riot at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 and has been the source of controversy ever since. The film creates an uncompromising vision of the rituals and power of religion and Western desires for Eastern spirituality through beautiful, fantastic, and visceral images. Inspired by St. John of the Cross’ Ascent of Mount Carmel and René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, it depicts a group of individuals on a quest for enlightenment and immortality through a journey to a holy mountain that is said to unite heaven and earth.

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.

Begun as a 40-minute personal essay for French-German Arte TV, this 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.

Laurie Anderson, EMPAC’s inaugural distinguished artist-in-residence, presented a series of events focusing on topics unique to her practice as an artist.

In two back-to-back screenings in one evening, Laurie Anderson presented many of her films and videos, culminating in a silent film with live music performed by Anderson and Pauline Oliveros. 

Laurie Anderson, EMPAC’s inaugural distinguished artist-in-residence, presented a series of events focusing on topics unique to her practice as an artist. 

5PM PROGRAM

What You Mean We? (1987) What You Mean We? stars Laurie Anderson, who also wrote and directed the piece. It was originally produced as a segment of the PBS arts series Alive from Off Center.

Personal Service Announcements (early 1990s)

Carmen (1991) Anderson’s Carmen, who works in a tobacco factory, is as strong-willed and carefree as the original (she steals cigarettes off the assembly line). The one significant difference in that she is married. The young soldier from Georges Bizet’s original opera (1875) has been transformed into her indifferent husband who sits home idly watching television with the kids while she works.

Puppet Motel (1994) Puppet Motel is a CD-ROM which invites to an imaginary universe made up of the interplay between light and darkness, mystery and poetry. This universe is populated by puppets and, of course, its creator, the artist herself.

Home of the Brave (1986), excerpts Home of the Brave is a concert film directed by and featuring the music of Laurie Anderson. The performances were filmed at the Park Theater in Union City, NJ, during the summer of 1985.

8PM PROGRAM

Hidden Inside Mountains (2005) Hidden Inside Mountains is a film of short stories about nature, artifice, and dreams. Located in a fictitious world of theatrical spaces, the stories unfold through music, gesture, text passages and the poetry of variously juxtaposed, evocative visual images.

Hidden Inside Mountains, commissioned by EXPO 2005 Aichi, Japan, is a high definition film that debuted in Japan at WORLD EXPO 2005 on the largest high definition Astrovision screen in the world. An original score was written and recorded by Laurie Anderson with additional vocals by singer /performer Antony.

Duets with Pauline Oliveros to films by Ken Jacobs and others

Excerpts from Performances

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.

Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer, and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ senses to the many facets of sound. Since the 1960s, she has profoundly influenced American music through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual. Many credit her with being the founder of present day meditative music. All of Oliveros’ work emphasizes musicianship, attention strategies, and improvisational skills.

She has been celebrated worldwide. During the 1960s, John Rockwell named her work Bye Bye Butterfly as one of the most significant of that decade. In the 70s she represented the US at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan; during the 80s she was honored with a retrospective at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. The 1990s began with a letter of distinction from the American Music Center presented at Lincoln Center in New York, and in 2000 the 50th anniversary of her work was celebrated with the commissioning and performance of her Lunar Opera: Deep Listening For_tunes. Oliveros’ work is available on numerous recordings produced by companies internationally. Sounding the Margins—a forty-year retrospective, was recently released in a six CD boxed set from Deep Listening.

This residency supported a collaborative project featuring music by composer Jaroslaw Kapuściński and projections by The OpenEnded Group. The resulting work, Linked Verse, premiered at Stanford Live and was an evening-length concerto for cello (Maya Beiser), Japanese shõ (Ko Ishikawa), voice and surround sound from 24 speakers, and live 3D stereoscopic visual projection. A multimedia evocation of otherness and union that builds on tensions and accords between Japanese and Western cultures, Linked Verse explores ancient and contemporary eras and sensory modalities, both visual and aural. The work’s structure is derived from the ancient Japanese poetic practice of renga (“linked verse”) in which two or more poets take turns adding interlocking links to form a chain of unexpected associations. In Linked Verse, 3D scenes (captured on location in Tokyo, Kyoto, New York City, and the Bay Area) are linked and presented in counterpoint to the music

Shot in Western Australia, Death Down Under is a documentary video about death and decay, and follows the collaboration of a young fashion designer/artist, Pia Interlandi, and a mad forensic scientist, Professor Ian Dadour. An experimental research project was created between them, allowing Pia to test out her fashion-for-the-dead and Ian, an entomologist who studies human homicide, to research clothing decay on dead victims.

Pia and Ian amassed a team to wash, dress and bury 21 dead pigs on a kangaroo reserve. Then they dug up the remains to examine the decay of the ritual burial garments. Death Down Under follows the entire process from gathering the slaughtered pigs to the results in the laboratory. This video looks at our care for the dead — be they human or non-human animals. It also brings to light ideas of green burials and the ecology of death and life. How can we think through death and decay to sustain the earth's balanced environment?

Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working with time-based arts and biology. In the early 1980s she studied film and video at University of Buffalo with media pioneers Hollis Frampton, Steina Vasulka, and Tony Conrad. She produces videos, performances, and installations about gender and technology, empathy, and animal sentience. She is a scholar of the history of video technologies, systems, and video art. She has received awards from Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her art works have been shown at Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Exit Art (New York), Science Gallery (Dublin), NGBK (Berlin), MASS MoCA (North Adams), and Videotage Art Space (Hong Kong). Her co-edited book, The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued (with Sherry Miller Hocking, and Mona Jimenez), on the history of video imaging tools, was published by Intellect Books (UK) in 2014. High is Professor in the Department of Arts at Rensselaer.

Cynthia White has an MFA in Film and Television from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Over the past ten years she has worked on several award winning projects, both documentary and narrative. After two years of working in Santiago Chile for Productora Nueva Imagen, El Show de los Libros, she completed a short film, Sobarzo Pega Fuertewhich won best documentary at the Valdivia International Film Festival and was later broadcasted on TVN, Chile. In 2000, Cynthia joined Emmy award winner Bill Moyers’ production team in New York City and worked as an assistant producer and editor on his feature length documentary called America’s First River: Stories from the Hudson. ¶ She has produced and directed various short films and documentaries in the San Francisco area. Gordo, a film she produced, screened at US film festivals and won three separate audience awards. Bird Dog, a short film she wrote and directed, is currently in distribution through OUAT Media in Toronto, Canada and aired on Movieola The Short Film Channel. ¶ Cynthia now lives in Western Australia as a freelance filmmaker following Ship Spotters and documenting the world of BioArts for researchers at SymbioticA, University of Western Australia.

Jason Livingston is a film and video maker primarily based in NY, and currently teaches cinema at the University of Iowa. His work has received awards and been programmed at numerous festivals and venues, including Rotterdam, Cinematexas, Media City, Margaret Mead and more. Under Foot & Overstory, winner of a Jury Prize from the New York Underground Film Festival, can be rented from the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.  Some of his recent video work can be seen as part of ETC: Experimental Television Center 1969-2009, a 5-DVD collection distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix.  His work-in-progress, INTERSTATE, has received support from the New York State Council of the Arts.

Pia Interlandi is a fashion designer whose work often incorporates death as a scientific and psychological concept. She has a particular interest in textile manipulation and garment transformation, informed by her fascination with human biology and time spent in Japan under the instruction of Yoshiki Hishinuma. While studying a Bachelor of Design in Fashion, she began dissecting garments ‘autopsy-style’ and experimenting with dissolvable fabrics as a method of exploring life’s transient qualities. This became the basis of her current PhD study at Melbourne’s RMIT University, entitled [A]Dressing Death: Garments for the Grave. Part of this study has involved an in depth residency at Perth’s SymbioticA, where she researched the effects of clothing and textiles on decomposition with forensics specialist Professor Ian Dadour. Involving rigorous immersion in the rituals associated with preparing the body for interment, garments from this investigation are currently on exhibit at the London Science Museum. This doctoral study has evolved into the design of funerary garments and even the dressing of the deceased, which is now where much of Pia’s practice is now located.