The word hyper is derived from the Greek for “above, beyond, or outside.” In mathematics, it is a prefix that denotes four or more dimensions. For her piece HYPER-, Freya Björg Olafsonworked in residence to explore the Internet’s potential for enabling a physical passage to a fourth dimension: a place where past, present, and future become fluid, and the laws of time and space change. Olafson worked on initial tests of materials, lighting, and filming techniques—including UV lights, phosphorescent body paint, and 3D glasses—to shift the relationship of body to the screen, and between 2D and 3D representations of corporeality. HYPER- explored a choreography where virtual bodies, cyber dancers, and a contemporary reinterpretation of everyday gestures converged.

Olafson is an intermedia artist who works with video, audio, painting, and performance. Her creations have been presented and exhibited internationally.

American filmmaker Brent Green was in residence to record a live performance version of his stop-motion animation film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Originally presented as a touring film with live narration and musical accompaniment, Green wanted to create a DVD document of the project. All the video, audio, and design work took place onsite at EMPAC, with every department at EMPAC collaborating to realize the project. Based on the true tale of Kentucky hardware clerk Leonard Wood, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then uses live action and hand-drawn stop-motion animation to tell an inspiring, poignant, and darkly humorous love story of a man who built a bizarre and sprawling home for his wife by hand in the hope that it would cure her of terminal cancer.

Brent Green is a storyteller, singer, songwriter, and self-taught filmmaker. Green often performs his films with live musicians, improvised sound-tracks, and live narration in venues ranging from rooftops to art institutions such as the Getty Center, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, and MoMA. He lives and works in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania.

Commissioned by EMPAC, this interdisciplinary hybrid combined footage Cohen filmed in Nova Scotia over a decade with live music and texts ranging from poems and folklore to local newspaper fragments to scientific research. An artist who has explored and deplored the disappearance of regional character brought on by corporate-driven homogeneity, Cohen described his discovery of Cape Breton as a revelation for its beauty, but one that remains elusive and deeply itself. Known primarily as an urban filmmaker, this work was a rare foray into engagement with the natural landscape. The EMPAC premiere featured musicians from Fugazi, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dirty Three, and Silver Mt. Zion. EMPAC also screened an earlier work, Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street (Series One and Two). Cohen has made more than 40 films including personal/political city portraits made on travels around the globe, and portraits of friends, artists, and musicians. His works are in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been broadcast by PBS, Arte, and the Sundance Channel.

Quote Unquote was an interdisciplinary series presenting work by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for time-based works including installation, film, and performance.

This collection of films begins with the idea that time is a lie. Reveling in déjà vu and non-linear timelines, the series is inspired by such varied sources as Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal recurrence and the multiverse hypothesis in physics. Each of the films in the series is structured by a central narrative loop and a thematic focus on the incommensurability of the momentary and the eternal.

An audiovisual performance developed in residency by Lucky Dragons, Actual Reality is an ongoing collaboration between Los Angeles-based artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck. Connecting a Google alert archive of the phrase “actual reality” to the acoustic sounds of musicians and audience, it created a type of call and response using re-synthesized sounds to answer each query. Along with the “real” performance, collected source material—video and audio from previous performances, rehearsals, and incidental audio—was processed and layered on top in real-time, creating an endless loop of what is, and has been. This version of Actual Reality was staged for bassoon, three flutes, percussion, moiré table, and electronics.

Fischbeck and Rara have presented interactive performances and installations at MOCA Los Angeles, Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Kitchen, the Walker Art Center, REDCAT, ICA London, ICA Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

This installation has been described by the artist as an “orchestral aquarium” with images of floating, weightless bodies accompanied by ethereal sound. It is a reflection on the contemporary human body in an era of technological enhancement and desire for immortality. In this generative installation, figures or clones (they are all identical) interact sometimes instinctually, like a school of fish or a flock of birds, and other times like intricately choreographed modern ballet or synchronized swimmers. By their fluidity, speed, and endurance, they appear as super humans, exhibiting both the sensation and sensuality of dynamic bodies in extreme motion but locked inside a virtual holding tank something like an aquarium. The movement of the bodies is infinitely variable and never repeats.

Chicago-based Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger creates audiovisual performances and installations. Between 1992 and 2003 he worked collaboratively as one half of Granular Synthesis, whose performances and installations confronted viewers on both a physical and emotional level, overwhelming them with sensory stimulation.

In this three-part lecture series, Michael Century presents a fresh reading of today’s experimental media art scene by surveying key works, personalities, and movements of the past century and laying out a framework for forecasting its future. Organized around an intertwined pair of narratives, the lectures are richly illustrated with stills and video, sound recordings, and live musical demonstrations. The underlying narratives are driven by contrasting conceptions of the role of the artist and of time. The first sees the artist as anticipating the powers and dangers of techno-scientific progress through idiosyncratic experiments, with time as linear and progressive. The second sees the artist as re-constituting past historical ruptures and forgotten pathways to envision alternative ways of being contemporary with a more cyclical sense of progress.

September 27— Après le Deluge, 1913-1947

Surveys key moments and tensions within the historical avant-garde, with examples from dance, abstract film and animation, experimental music, and critical theory.

October 11— The Panacea That Failed, 1948-1974

Balances the celebratory heyday of art and technology against a rising tide of disillusionment and media-archeological irony.

November 29— Virtuality to Virtuosity, 1974-2011

Moves beyond what some have termed the crisis of new media art today—its relegation to “cool obscurity” by the institutional art world, and its simultaneous co-option by the information industries—by sketching out an anti-anti-utopian view of the potential of experimental artworks as “extraordinary freedom machines.” By framing the future of art and technology in terms of creative freedom, this concluding lecture weaves together and synthesizes strands from the first two. The argument unfolds in two parts, examining in turn the micro-temporality of specific media art works, and the macro-temporality of aesthetic systems designed to enable future creativity. In the first part, “virtuality” is explained as an intensification of time; selected works by David Rokeby, Bill Viola, and Steve Reich illustrate the potential in art to vitalize and open new horizons of experience. The second part embraces political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s notion of freedom as “virtuosity”, entailing the creation of a sustainable public space for creative dialogue and collaboration. Examples are drawn from the histories of video art in the 1970s (Dan Sandin’s Image Processor), the history of computer music in the 1980s (the invention of the MAX programming language), and recent new media art (Loops by the Open Ended Group).

12 Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s apocalyptic science fiction film, imagines a future ravaged by disease. In Gilliam’s dystopian vision, John Cole (played by Bruce Willis) travels back to 1990 to gather information about the man-made virus that will wipe out the majority of humanity in 1996. Inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, the film’s narrative is structured by a parallel temporal loop.

Terry Gilliam is an American-born British screenwriter, film director, and animator. Originally known for his fantasy animations in the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74), he went on to work in film, directing such imaginative adventures as Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and The Brothers Grimm (2005). Gilliam’s films often include fantastical plotlines where the sanity of his characters is questioned.

Chris Marker's 1962 science fiction classic, La Jetée, launches The Eternal Return screening series, accompanied by a talk with experimental filmmaker Keith Sanborn, as well as screenings of his short film Operation Double Trouble, and Ben Badeau's 300 Clouds. La Jetée is a cinema landmark for good reason: it supersedes one of the most venerated myths of the cinema—that film exists only in the present. Instead of a direct refutation, Marker offers an exacting meditation on time, chance, fate, and memory in the form of a scientific fiction, which resonates strongly with Nietzsche's thoughts in his Late Notebooks. Keith Sanborn will examine the interconnections between the two thinkers and suggest echoes with these in his own Operation Double Trouble. Operation Double Trouble is an antithetical version of the propaganda film Enduring Freedom: The Opening Chapter. By repeating each shot of the film twice, Sanborn pushes the strategic manipulations of the original, both in terms of montage and ideology. The echoing effect destabilizes the transparency of the narrative and provides insight into how we relate to audiovisual media. Benjamin Badeau's 300 Clouds re-contextualizes Chris Marker's 1962 film La Jetée, imagining a different Earth and a new set of challenges shaped by the myriad, interwoven environmental catastrophes of the past 50 years. Will the count continue to slip, or can the ominous forms on the horizon help rebuild?

Enigmatic French filmmaker Chris Marker is one of the most highly regarded and experimental figures in cinema. Aside from his work, little is known about him. Born in a suburb of Paris, he has allowed a legend to grow about his birth in a “far-off country.” Born Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Marker is one of a half-dozen aliases he has used. It is thought that he chose “Marker,” in reference to the Magic Marker pen. Chris Marker began his career as a writer (publishing poems, a novel, and various essays and translations) and journalist (whose travels took him all over the world). His films include Le joli mai (1963), Le Jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983), The Last Bolshevik (1993), Level Five (1996), and The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004).

His work was been presented internationally. Marker was the subject of a film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was a featured artist in the exhibitions Passage de l'image at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany.

Keith Sanborn is a media artist and theorist based in New York. His work has been the subject of one-person shows, and has been shown in major surveys including the Whitney Biennial and “Monter/Sampler” at the Centre Pompidou, as well as festivals such as OVNI, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, and the European Media Arts Festival. His theoretical work has appeared in journals (Artforum), anthologies and exhibition catalogs for the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Exit Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and the University Art Museum, Berkeley. He has translated into English the work of Guy Debord, René Viénet, Gil Wolman, Georges Bataille, and Paolo Gioli. He is currently at work on a translation of the writings of Esfir Shub and a video installation called Energy of Delusion. He teaches at Princeton University and at the Milton Avery Graduate School in the Arts of Bard College.

Benjamin Badeau received his BArch in 2011 from the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As a graduating thesis student he received the Matthew W. Del Gaudio award for excellence in design, theory, and structural understanding. Emergent relationships between man, technology, and environment have become primary foci for his research and theoretical practice. He currently works as an Intern Architect in Bennington, Vermont.

Wings of Desire is Wim Wenders' award-winning existential film about angels who silently watch over all of humanity, and guide individuals through the trials of their daily lives. The film follows the angel Damien (Bruno Ganz) as he falls in love with a trapeze artist and strives to relinquish his immortality to join her on earth. The film is divided between the angels, which exist outside of time, and humanity, which exists within it, showing these different temporal states through shifts between color and black-and-white film. In his notes for Wings of Desire, Wenders commented on how difficult it would be to be an angel: “To live for an eternity and to be present all the time. To live with the essence of things—not to be able to raise a cup of coffee and drink it, or really touch somebody.”

Wim Wenders is one of the leading representatives of new German cinema. He enrolled in the University of Television and Film in Munich in 1967, and was deeply influenced by the new American underground, a genre of filmmaking derived from Andy Warhol’s films featuring long, uneventful scenes with an open narrative. Wenders was one of the 15 directors and writers who in 1971 founded the Filmverlag der Autoren to handle production, rights, and distribution of their films. His first professional film was an adaptation of Peter Handke’s novel The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, for which he was awarded the Prize of the International Federation of Film Critics in Venice. Other notable films include Lightening Over Water (1980); Wings of Desire (1987), for which he was awarded Best Director at Cannes, the European Film Festival, and German Film Awards; Until the End of the World (1991); Faraway, So Close! (1993); The End of Violence (1997); Buena Vista Social Club (1999); The Million Dollar Hotel (2000); and most recently, the 3-D film Pina (2011).

In the 1990s, Wim Wenders became chairman and then president of the European Film Academy. Since 2003, he has been a professor at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg.