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.

Choose one of the following options:

OPTION ONE: WATCH THE LIVESTREAM

• Just head over to the Chameleon event and find the on the livestream at the beginning of the page starting at 11AM.
• You do not need to join in the Discord conversation, it will be streamed along with all the other events.

OPTION TWO: INTERACT ON DISCORD

• What is DISCORD?
• Discord is an application we will be using that has both text and voice chat capabilities to create a more interactive experience. If you are familiar and comfortable with apps such as reddit or teamspeak, then you'll be right at home in Discord.
• I want to participate with the Discord app, can i sign up now?
• YES! You can sign up anytime. In fact, we will be available to help you learn how to use the application on April 21 at 3PM EDT.

• How do i get started with Discord?
• Step One: If you haven't used Discord before, create an account.
• Step Two: You can then install the app on your device and login. We invite you to do this set up now so that you are ready to roll on April 22.
• Step Three: Have your account created, downloaded the app, verified your email, and logged in? Then just come find us by tapping the button (and don't forget to come visit us there on April 21 to test!).
• DISCORD SIGNUP DEADLINE: WEDNESDAY, 4/22 9AM EST

FAQS

• Do I have to create my own server?
• You do not have a create your own server to join Chameleon. If prompted to do so you can press “skip” and move forward in creating your login.
• I can't hear anything and nobody can hear me!
• If for some reason you are unable to talk or hear anyone you might want to try a different web browser or a different device.
• What about?!?!
• If you encounter individual obstacles sometimes a quick google search will provide troubleshooting options, or you can explore the Discord help links below.
• I'm Lost
• It's OK. Join us for the livestream!

DISCORD HOW TO VIDEOS

• What is Discord?
• Install Discord
• Make an account
• Find a server
• Join a server
• Turn off the annoying notification noises
• Set up Push to Talk
• Discord Help & Support

To “jump the line” in filmmaking means to break a basic rule of cinematic realism—moving the camera across an imaginary 180° line that normally allows viewers to maintain their natural sense of left and right within the film. This week-long film series celebrates jumping the line by presenting moving image works whose directors deliberately break the rules to reveal the unquestioned structural and stylistic conventions of image and sound production.

Jump the Line is a reflexive take on the multiple timescales and varied technical and dramaturgical strategies that make up films, recordings, performances, and broadcasts. By focusing on how, why, and for whom such things are made, Jump the Line represents what EMPAC stands for as an institution: the daily work of producing new artworks behind studio doors, invisible to the public until completion.

Spanning the week of film events, Gerard Byrne’s installation In Our Time is open to the public in Studio 1 where the film’s temporal reality is synched to the actual hours of each day. A radio host goes about the repetitive activities of a daily live broadcast, reinforcing Byrne’s questions around synchronicity, (in)visibility, and the dramaturgy of production.

In much the same way, Stan Douglas’s legendary jazz epic Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) is presented for the first time ever as a single six-hour theatrical screening. Luanda-Kinshasa depicts a fictional 1970s jazz-funk band engaged in a seemingly endless real-time jam turning EMPAC’s Concert Hall into the recording studio.

Two further screening programs are presented using the double-and triple-bill format: The first framed by Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Shoot for the Contents that renders “the real in the illusory and the illusory in the real” in a journey through Chinese storytelling, and the second anchored by Eric Baudelaire’s newly released documentary, Un film dramatique, that charts the artist’s four-year collaboration with a group of Parisian middle-school artists, who learn to use the camera in ways unique to their burgeoning points of view.

Special physically-distanced screenings are available for Rensselaer classes of the EMPAC-commissioned film The Inheritance by Ephraim Asili during the week of 16-20 November. 

In addition to these in-person class-specific screenings, all Rensselaer students, faculty and staff can request to watch The Inheritance online and we will provide a link.

Ephraim Asili’s The Inheritance weaves histories of the West Philadelphia–based MOVE Organization, the Black Arts Movement, and dramatizations of the life of the filmmaker when he was a member of a Black activist collective. Centering on what Asili describes as a “speculative reenactment” of his time in a West Philadelphia collective, the actors scripted lives on set are entwined with cameos by MOVE's Debbie Africa, Mike Africa Sr., and Mike Africa Jr., and poet-activists Sonia Sanchez and Ursula Rucker.

After the EMPAC preview of The Inheritance on April 9, 2020 was postponed due to COVID-19 protocols, it premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and had its US premiere at the New York film festival US premiere on Friday 19 September.