This work-in-progress presentation will introduce artist Clarissa Tossin’s research into pre-Columbian wind instruments. Tossin is in residence with Mexican flautist Alethia Lozano Birrueta and Brazilian composer Michelle Agnes Magalhães to develop the score for a new EMPAC-commissioned moving image artwork. Working with 3D-printed versions of these traditional instruments, which are held in US and Guatemalan museum collections, Tossin will discuss and demonstrate the prototypes she has produced in collaboration with anthropologist/archaeologist Jared Katz, the Mayer Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow for Pre-Columbian Art at the Denver Museum.

Tossin’s Chu Mayaa (2018) was screened at EMPAC as part of the Spring 2019 season. In the artist’s first moving image work to explore the appropriation of Mayan motifs in the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, she collaborated with choreographer and dancer Crystal Sepúlveda, who moves in and out of the shadows cast by the pastiche of indigenous motifs at the architect’s famous Hollyhock House.

This new work not only explores the sonic potential of traditional Mayan forms to resituate Mayan Revival buildings in the context of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architectural lineage, but also reveals the ways in which this lineage is continuous in the cultural hybridity of contemporary Mayan communities in Los Angeles.

Work-in-Progress events offer a window into the research, development, and production of new works by artists in residence at EMPAC. These free events open up a dialogue between our audiences, artists, and EMPAC staff.

Sound artist, vocalist, and composer Ken Ueno has the ability to completely transform the nature of spaces with sound. Loudspeakers become ceremonial objects. Megaphones become musical instruments that shape feedback in the room and amplify its natural resonance. Ueno’s breath is woven into the electronic parts, slowly introduced so they become a complex background texture upon which he layers live vocalizations. Instead of treating feedback and white noise as sounds found in a city to be ignored or eliminated, Ueno places them around the room in such a way that they can be heard as individual colors, encouraging the listener to open their ears to hear not only this music, but also hear their own daily environments as musical. At times Ueno’s incredible ability to control his breathing makes it sound as though he is channeling a radio transmission from another galaxy. In the artist’s own words, “My art practice organically floats between architecture and sound and improvisation and written music and classical, experimental noise.”

Ueno’s intense performances reveal the acoustic power and complexity of the different audio ecosystems surrounding us every day from all directions. His music asks: How do we open our ears to the sounds of our cityscapes? In our efforts to control the spaces around us, do we lose our humanity? In exposing the rawness of our humanity do we alienate others? How do we stay open in a time when technology allows us more and more to be isolated and closed off?

The title of this screening is named after German thinker Walter Benjamin’s “thought-figures,” as he described the format of his 1929 essay collections Short Shadows. Like Benjamin’s thought-figures, each film entangles political narrative, aesthetic form, and technical subjectivity in an attempt to capture the essence of a place and time. In Gede Vizyon, a Haitian goat circles a labyrinthine Port-au-Prince graveyard, and a wayward drone strays from its intended path in Meridian, while a series of sculptures are lovingly captured by a ghostly lens in The Maid.

Calum Walter’s Meridian follows the last unit in a fleet of autonomous machines sent to deliver an emergency vaccine. The film shows footage transmitted by the machine before its disappearance, tracing a path that seems to stray further and further from its objective. Meridian is inspired by a real event that occurred in Washington, D.C. on July 17, 2017, where an automated security robot from the company Knightscope was found floating in a fountain at the building it patrolled. It had plunged into the water while on a routine patrol, spurring speculation about whether the machine had chosen to end its life or if this was just a glitch in an otherwise reliable new technology.

Titled after novelist Robert Walser’s short story that follows a maid as she searches for her lost charge, then dies of joy upon finding her, Carissa Rodriguez’s The Maid captures the places that house American artist Sherrie Levine’s Newborn sculptures. From storage crates to the glassy tables of art collectors, and from plinths to auction rooms, the intimate portraits of the artworks lay bare the architectural, social, and financial infrastructure that has taken care of them since they left the artist’s studio. Made from either crystal or sandblasted glass, they were each cast from the mold of Constantin Brancusi’s canonical egg-shaped sculpture Le Nouveau-Né, which was produced in 1915 in marble and subsequently in bronze. In producing these new versions, the artist not only takes authorship of an artwork from a celebrated male Modernist, but also imposes a shared parental position. Rodriguez’s film traces yet another transition by capturing the sculptures in their new homes.

The camera in Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon’s Gede Vizyon is guided at riotous pace by one of the inhabitants of the Grand Cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Gede Vizyon is part documentary portrait and part magical realism. It entwines local folklore and Haitian Vodou culture with a portrait of a place whose  architecture  bears  traces of both the living and the dead. The “goat’s-eye” view carries us on a low, jagged path through a visual history of the site, charting the damage wrought by the 2010 earthquake, and the people, animals, plants, and traditions that continue to inhabit it. Gede Vizyon is narrated through poetry written in response to the images by Ougan (priest) Jean-Daniel Lafontant, his words entangled into a soundtrack of religious songs performed by Mambo (priestess) Jacqueline.

Please join us following the screening for a Q&A with curator Vic Brooks, filmmaker Marcos Serafim, and filmmaker / Rensselaer Arts faculty Zé (Jefferson) Kielwagen. 

Program

• The Maid (2018)
• Carissa Rodriguez
• Meridian (2019)
• Calum Walter
• Gede Vizyon (2018)
• Marcos Serafim, Zé Kielwagen, and Steevens Simeon

Oslo based British composer Natasha Barrett’s Innermost is a collaboration with US digital artist Marc Downie (OpenEndedGroup). Following their previous collaboration at the Pompidou Centre, Paris last year, Innermost fuses ambisonics, 3D sound and stereoscopic projection. Points of light and sound are animated around the sound system in patterns that each possess their own characteristic ‘gait’ – a unique way of moving and behaving.

Innermost will be premiered this coming September at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway and performed at EMPAC in Spring 2020.

Remove the visible and be touched by sound. Experience a transformation of the world, the way it behaves, and the traces that it leaves behind in this unique electroacoustic music concert unfolding inside EMPAC's high-density loudspeaker arrays, featuring hundreds of loudspeakers.

Natasha Barrett will perform this public concert as part of the Spatial Audio Summer Seminar, which takes place at EMPAC July 18-20, gathering audio experts, musicians, and composers for an intensive exploration of sound in space. Works will include one of Barrett’s latest compositions in high-resolution Ambisonics and Wave Field Synthesis, as well as recreations of works not previously heard in full 3D.

Natasha Barrett is a composer and performer of acousmatic and live electroacoustic concert works, sound and multi-media installations, and interactive music. She is a leading voice in the new wave of artists working with Ambisonics, 3D sound, and its contemporary musical context. Her work is commissioned, performed, and broadcast throughout the world by festivals, organizations, and individuals, and includes a regular schedule of portrait concerts and featured programs.

Her inspiration comes from the immediate sounding matter of the world around us, as well as the way it behaves, the way it is generated, and by systems and the traces that those systems reveal. These interests have led her into the worlds of cutting-edge audio technologies, geoscience, sonification, motion tracking, and some exciting collaborations  involving solo performers and chamber ensembles, visual artists, architects and scientists. Binding together these inspirations is an overarching search for new music and the way it can touch the listener.

Barrett will spend two weeks before the concert as artist in residence at EMPAC, where she will collaborate with the digital artist and filmmaker Mark Downie on the new work Innermost, which will be premiered this coming September at the Ultima Festival in Oslo, Norway. Innermost will be performed at EMPAC in Spring 2020.

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website. 

More information and tickets for the 2019 American Music Festival can be found on the Albany Symphony Orchestras website.