This screening and discussion is for Rensselaer community members only at this time. Registration is required.

Please join artist and poet Anaïs Duplan for a screening, discussion, and book-signing. Following a program experimental documentary works selected by Duplan, there will be a collective discussion on the films and videos that inspire his work. 

Blackspace is an ongoing project that encompasses Duplan’s recent book and his EMPAC-commissioned radio series that follows the artist’s lyrical exploration of the political potential of aesthetic experiences, from everyday sensations to the transformative reckoning with an artwork. These experiences are viewed through the prism of how Black and Indigenous artists and artists of color are working with media technologies on their own terms to seek “liberatory possibility” through specifically aesthetic means. 

The screening features films and videos that Duplan is currently researching. Each in its own way subverts the documentary impulse and expresses the tension between a straightforward documentary form of “telling” and an aesthetic approach that experiments with opacity as a strategy of refusal.

The event will finish with a book-signing by the artist of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020). A limited number of copies are available for our campus community for free on a first come first served basis.

Program

• SPLASH (1991)
• Directed By Thomas Allen Harris
• 7 min, color, sound 
• Graft and Ash for a Three Monitor Workstation (2016)
• Directed By Sondra Perry
• 9:05 min, color, sound, HD video
• Nor Was This All By Any Means (1978)
• Directed By Anthony Ramos
• 24 min, color, sound
• Off Limits (1988)
• Directed By Rea Tajiri
• 7:30 min, color, sound
• Water Plastic Bag (1973)
• Directed By Anthony Ramos
• 8:45 min, b&w, sound
• Hand Dryer (2012)
• Directed By Maggie Lee
• 00:27 sec, color, sound
• Re Dis Appearing (1977)
• Directed By Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
• 2:30 min, b&w, sound
• Landscapes and Subtitles (2013)
• Directed By C. Spencer Yeh
• 6:16 min, color, sound, HD video
• ART THOUGHTZ with Hennessy Youngman: Relational Aesthetics (2011)
• Directed By Jayson Scott Musson
• 5:27 min, color, sound, HD video

Please join us for a presentation by American artist Tony Cokes. 

Through a rigorous analysis of images and language, Tony Cokes dissects the often-obscured power dynamics at work in the cultural and political representation of histories of Blackness, class, and the war on terror. 

Cokes’ distinctive artworks and installations center on videos that foreground textual statements, often overlaid onto colorful monochromatic backgrounds with pop, punk, and electronic music soundtracks. Quoting language from across the political spectrum—from philosophical statements to news, art criticism, advertising, and song lyrics—Cokes mixes linguistic, visual, and sonic oppositions in a pared back approach that refuses the easy desire for a spectacular image. Shot through with wry humor and the aesthetics and upbeat music of popular culture, the videos project unstable meanings that deconstruct how we receive and read images.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.

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This talk is being presented simultaneously in person for campus audiences (faculty, staff, students of Rensselaer) and streaming online for the general public. In-person attendance is limited so please register early. Registration is required for both physical and virtual attendance.

Please join us for this online event featuring the artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka in conversation with curator Mariana Fernández. 

Over the past decade, Hopinka’s videos and films have been animated by an exploration of language as a way to formulate questions of identity and belonging. Hopinka’s filmmaking career began around the same time he started learning Chinuk Wawa, an almost extinct creole trade-language spoken in the Pacific Northwest, and Hočąk, the endangered, Indigenous language of the Ho-Chunk peoples. His works often overlay English, Chinuk Wawa, and Hočąk to move beyond static ideas about language and cultural identity. 

As the third in EMPAC’s Decolonizing Language series of conversations seeking to destabilize linguistic hierarchies and present strategies of Indigenous language revitalization, Hopinka will discuss his use of language in crafting alternative understandings of place, community, and knowledge transmission.

Please join us today — Friday April 2, 2021 at 3:30PM EST — Live on ZOOM for a live screening and Q&A to follow.

ZOOM Information:

On a computer: Join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 859 9003 0639
Passcode: 411921

On a phone:

+16465588656,,85990030639#,,,,*411921# USA
+496938079883,,85990030639#,,,,*411921# Germany

Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbvo5MQPr9

For more information about this event please visit https://www.facebook.com/events.

Every year, the Rensselaer Department of the Arts programs seven events utilizing the infrastructure and support of the production teams at EMPAC. These productions often include final graduate thesis projects that are developed in the venues themselves.

Break @ut is a symposium (of sorts) that celebrates the research, writing, and filmmaking initiated during THE UNDO FELLOWSHIP and presented by our partners UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art. Four ambitious research topics will be explored through a set of online screenings, study groups, and public dialogues. We are excited to share the ideas resulting from the inaugural year of this endeavor. 

Five artists — all extremely different in their curiosities, aesthetics, methods, and personalities, but more or less aligned in their efforts to break out of the patterns and preconceptions that dominate the documentary form — paired up with four intellectually adventurous writers. Together they proposed a research topic inspired by the artist’s practice. Having stewed on these thorny questions in regular dialogue with the whole group of brilliant fellows, their drafts now seek readers.

So, Break @ut with UnionDocs! Choose a single thread of inquiry, or weave connections between them all. Tune into the stream to watch and listen in, or sign up for an UNDO STUDY GROUP to get the reader and join a rigorous and creative discussion.

Erie County Smile is a satirical short film by Van Tran Nguyen, in collaboration with Alex Derwick, Ako Shergazy, Bryan Czerniawski and Mengtai Zhang.

The film is a parody of "Paris By Night" (PBN), a popular Vietnamese-language variety show. PBN gained notoriety in the Vietnamese diasporic community by the mid 1990s and is still in production today. Music from the live shows were recorded and commonly played at Vietnamese-owned businesses all over the world. In the waiting area of my family's nail salon, we always had PBN in the VHS player.

This movie is dedicated to children of immigrants, who grew up behind doors labeled "EMPLOYEES ONLY".

Every year, the Rensselaer Department of the Arts programs seven events utilizing the infrastructure and support of the production teams at EMPAC. These productions often include final graduate thesis projects that are developed in the venues themselves.

Please join us for a talk by the director Lisa Rovner and producer Marcus Werner Hed of Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines, an award-winning documentary that maps the history of twentieth century women experimental music pioneers. 

Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors features the work of visionary composer and Rensselaer professor Pauline Oliveros alongside Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, EMPAC-alum Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel. Through rigorous research, interviews, and archival footage, the film follows the electronic music composers’ radical experimentations with machines that redefined the boundaries of contemporary music.

The talk will include an educational screening of the film in Zoom. Students, staff, and faculty at Rensselaer were able to access the film throughout the semester. 

Sisters with Transistors opened at Metrograph on April 23, 2021.

Please join us for a screening of Spaceship Earth by award-winning documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf. The film brings a fresh perspective to the famed 1991 habitation experiment in which eight volunteers lived within a biosphere that replicated the earths ecosystem at the earth system science facility in Oracle, Arizona. By asking why these people wanted to embark on such a self-imposed quarantine in a closed-sustained environment, Spaceship Earth reminds us of the utopian promise and environmental ambition of Biosphere 2, the “brainchild of this countercultural group called the Synergists.” 

The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with Wolf on the history and production behind the project on Zoom. 

Alexa Echoes is a film in the mode of a chamber opera by visual artist Amanda Turner Pohan in collaboration with composer Charlie Looker, choreographer Dages Juvelier Keates and performer Katy Pinke. The first iteration in a series of three performances, Alexa Echoes recasts the relationship between cultural movements and commercial technologies through the history of women’s devocalization and disembodiment. It begins with mythical Greek figures, such as Echo, and leads up to Amazon’s smart speaker and digital voice-based assistant, Alexa. 

In this film, EMPAC is concurrently the site of production, setting, and subject that surrounds three manifestations of the voice: candid, staged, and disembodied. As in much of Pohan’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, the film looks at the body’s complicated relationship to technology as it relates to autonomy, animation, and the melismatic sound of breath. Alexa Echoes incorporates movement, speech, and an orchestral score to abstract the gendered decisions that frame new media technologies, gesturing to the corporate entities which choreographed them.

The film will be released on EMPAC’s website on Thursday, February 4 at 5PM (EST) followed by a conversation between Amanda Turner Pohan and curator Marisa Espe. This project is accompanied by a text version of the project’s script. 

Alexa Echoes is organized by Muheb Esmat, Marisa Espe, Bergen Hendrickson, Ciena Leshley, Ana Lopes, Liz Lorenz, Brooke Nicolas, Elizaveta Shneyderman, and Rachel Vera Steinberg from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies class of 2020, working with EMPAC curator Vic Brooks.

Theater-maker Annie Saunders collaborates with theater/pop/new music band Wild Up and composer Emma O’Halloran on a new work called Rest. Rest interrogates sensory overwhelm, sensory deprivation, hallucinations and the nature of consciousness with respect to the feeling and understanding of “rest” in our modern world.

Saunders, along with Wild Up, O'Halloran, Andrew Schneider, and additional collaborators were in remote residence this fall to develop an EMPAC-commissioned online version of Rest. The commission provided the artists an opportunity to explore their archive of material and whether Rest might have a digital life; an iteration for audience members to experience on their own on a mobile device.

On January 25, the artists will premiere the proof-of-concept film that came out of this residency time, created collaboratively with the EMPAC team, with concept and direction by Annie Saunders, composition by Emma O'Halloran, visual concept creation, direction of photography and editing by Andrew Schneider, music direction by Christopher Rountree, dramaturgy by Adah Parris, Rita Williams, and Rachel Joy Victor, and creative consultation from Jackie Zhou, Mike Merchant, James Okumura and Brian Hashimoto, as well as over twenty thinkers and experts who were interviewed about sensory experience and the nature of consciousness. The music is played by members of Wild Up, Jiji, Jodie Landau, Allen Fogle, and Archie Carey, with mixing by Lewis Pesacov.

The work is featured in the Sounding Darkness Festival as presented by collaborator Wild Up.

Light, shadow, and sound help to sculpt a “performance" environment that you will experience in this proof-of-concept. The work includes moments of near-silence, music, and field recordings from a diverse set of conversations. Source materials included conversations with consciousness experts, people sharing their early sense memories, and reflections on our relationships to our smartphones. You will be able to access the Rest proof-of-concept here on January 25 at 8PM.

Read an interview with Annie Saunders and her collaborator on the moving-image content of this work, Andrew Schneider.

Additionally, please join us on the Wild Up Instagram for a series of live conversations with the artists from 2:30-3:30PM EDT on January 25.