JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland) collaborated with EMPAC’s audio and video teams while in residence to finish their recording of Helmut Lachenmann’s complete string quartets. At the residency’s conclusion, the JACK Quartet presented a performance in two acts. The first featured three pieces (by Earle Brown, Peter Ablinger, and Alex Mincek) spanning the 1960s to the present that played with conventions of music notation and performance. The second act featured Horat,iu Radulescu’s haunting 30-minute String Quartet No. 5, before the universe was born from the 1990s. JACK Quartet commissions and performs new works, working closely with composers in the US and Europe, and touring extensively. JACK also offers fresh interpretations of early music, including works by Don Carlo Gesualdo, Guillaume de Machaut, and Josquin des Prez.

The three towers are prison, museum, and (housing) project, albeit loosely. Music, video, and performance draw parallel lines between the three industrial archetypes. Moving through these structures, the artists utilize fragments of their environment to envision a utopian creative endgame. Meanwhile, an Austrian super villain (Florian Reither) attempts to unite and destroy the dystopian worlds. The Cake of The 3 Towers (TCo3T) is a collaborative project featuring Japanther, Schuyler Maehl, Florian Reither, and Felice Faison commissioned for Quote Unquote: Experiments in Time-Based Text, an interdisciplinary series presenting work by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for installation, film, and performance.

Japanther is an art project established circa 2001 by Ian Vanek and Matt Reilly in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to wild interactive live showings in unconventional settings, the duo has collaborated with Dan Graham, Gelitin, Eileen Myles, ninjasonik, and Spank Rock, among others. Japanther was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial as part of Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty and the 2011 Venice Biennial as part of Gelitin's Some Like It Hot performance. The duo has made a name for themselves through unique performance situations including shows with synchronized swimmers, oversized puppets, from out of the back of a moving truck, alongside giant dinosaurs, and with BMXers flying off the walls of the Whitney sculpture garden.

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).

While in residence, eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) worked on The Cruise, recording a three-and-a-half hour monologue performed by Maja Sweeny. An audio film for radio, The Cruise was inspired by daily observations of a waitress on a cruise ship who habitually kept track of every task she performed: number of footsteps taken, number of words spoken, tea drinkers who appeared, non-tea drinkers who didn’t, cuts to prepare the sandwiches, waves that passed, temperature, etc. Based on their observations and the waitress’s log, eteam wrote a script that covered six days on board the ship. The resulting monologue premiered on WGXC, an upstate New York community radio station that is a division of Wave Farm.

eteam works at the intersection of relational aesthetics, the Internet, and land art, and coordinates collective happenings and conceptual transactions.

EMPAC commissioned Japanther to create and present The Cake of The 3 Towers. With performers perched on three “towers” made up of scaffolding and platforms—to represent a prison, museum, and housing project—the piece mixed music, video, and performance to draw parallels between the prison-industrial complex and the “art-industrial complex.” The Cake of The 3 Towers was a collaboration among Japanther, Schuyler Maehl, Florian Reither (as an Austrian super villain who attempts to destroy this dystopia), and Felice Faison.

Japanther is an art project established by Ian Vanek and Matt Reilly in Brooklyn, New York that creates interactive live shows in unconventional settings: out of the back of a moving truck, alongside giant dinosaurs, with synchronized swimmers, with oversized puppets, and with BMXers flying off the walls at the 2006 Whitney Biennial presentation of Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, All Over Again in collaboration with Dan Graham and Tony Oursler.

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

American culture has been defined by pop music. It’s who we are—and our pop stars must cultivate a persona, while maintaining an unquestionable sense of authenticity. Or are those things one and the same? It is a delicate balance of conscious mythmaking and absolute earnest humanity. Or could it be one pursuit alone? Reclusive singer, songwriter, and pianist Francis Farewell Starlite will be in residence to create a new pop music spectacle—The White Room.

White Room references the small, white, environmentally controlled chamber used by NASA astronauts to make final preparations before entering the spacecraft, such as donning parachute packs, putting on helmets, and detaching portable air conditioning units. First used in Project Gemini, its use continued through subsequent programs up to and including the Space Shuttle program. You may not have expected a show like this to be produced at EMPAC, but here it is. Don’t miss it!

A stellar double bill featuring two of Britain's hottest musicians, producers, and composers of electronic music performing their trademark energetic knob-twisting beats intertwined with live video and a unique instrumental piano set. 

With several Four Tet studio albums, remixes, and live shows to his credit, Kieran Hebden is rooted in many musical camps. He has worked with jazz drummer Steve Reid on critically acclaimed albums for Domino records; produced remixes for artists such as Explosions in the Sky, Thom Yorke, and Steve Reich; worked with directors and artists such as Woof Wan Bau and Jason Evans; and extensively toured the UK, Europe, the US, and Japan.

Jon Hopkins is a London-based electronic composer, producer, and remixer who makes emotive, instrumental music that crosses genres, ranging from solo acoustic piano to explosive, bass-heavy electro. In addition to a  long-term collaboration with Brian Eno, his career includes collaborations with Wayne McGregor, King Creosote, and David Holmes, remixes for such varied artists as Wild Beasts, Nosaj Thing, James Yorkston, and Four Tet, and film scores for directors such as Peter Jackson and Gareth Edwards. 

This concert featured six performers (Keith Fullerton Whitman, Fat Worm of Error, David Shively, Caboladies, Graham Lambkin, and Jason Lescalleet) celebrating the experimental music micro-cultures—underground sonic research labs for aesthetics and technology—that exist in many cities. Performances in tiny clubs, nonprofit galleries, people’s houses, bookstores, and on college campuses provide fertile ground from which experimental musicians and audiences have evolved. 

Keith Fullerton Whitman is a composer and performer obsessed with electronic music—from its midcentury origins in Europe to its contemporary worldwide incarnation as “digital music.”

Fat Worm of Error is a “rock” band that collectively writes songs with nonmusical sounds, structural constraints, and open improvisational passages mixed with readymade props and costumes.

David Shively performs as a soloist and chamber musician ranging from traditional percussion to Hungarian cimbalom to analog electronic systems and feedback.

Caboladies is an experimental electronic duo formed by Chris Bush and Eric Lanham in Lexington, Kentucky, in response to a vibrant experimental music community.

Graham Lambkin formed his first band, The Shadow Ring, in a small town in England, building a passionate fan base because of its sui generis blend of folk, noise, cracked electronics, and surrealist poetry.

Jason Lescalleet—one of a growing list of producer/musicians who rework existing material—uses reel-to-reel tape decks to explore the textures of low fidelity analog sounds and the natural phenomena of old tape and obsolete technology.

• Rock/noise homespun electronics by Fat Worm of Error
• Analog synthesis by composer, performer, and record distributor Keith Fullerton Whitman
• David Shively performing Max Neuhaus' electronic classics from the 50s
• Live electronics by Caboladies
• The unique duo of Jason Lescalleet and Graham Lambkin

Tales from the Gimli Hospital: Reframed paired Guy Maddin’s first feature film with a live performance of a newly-commissioned score by Matthew Patton, performed by a cast of Icelandic string musicians and vocalists including twin sisters Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir and Gyða Valtýsdóttir (formerly of the band múm), Sigur Rós bandmates Amiina, Borgar Magnason, and more. A new narration, written by Maddin, was also performed live, accompanied by Foley sound effects (by Seattle’s Aono Jikken Ensemble) and live visuals created by electronics engineer Paul Corley. A cult sensation when it was released in 1988, Tales from the Gimli Hospital tells a dream-like, elliptical story of jealousy and madness instilled in two men sharing a hospital room in a remote Canadian village. In this new performance, the score takes the original film in an entirely new direction: layers of music mirror the film’s story-within-a-story structure and provides an ethereal quality that underscores the dark and haunting elements of the film.

Laurie Anderson worked in residence on Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo, a multimedia installation that was presented at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Using the structure of a diary and inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the installation explored the themes of love and death, the many levels of dreaming, and illusion. The work included texts as well as drawings, sculptures, projections, and sound made from materials including mud, foil, iron, chalk, and ashes. According to Anderson, “In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, also known as The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo, the bardo is described as the 49 day period between death and rebirth. The book is a detailed description of the way the mind dissolves and what the spirit experiences in this transition. In April 2011, Lolabelle, my small rat terrier died after a long illness. For 12 years she had been my constant and faithful companion. Counting the 49 days from Lolabelle’s death I realized according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead Lolabelle would be reborn on June 5, my birthday.”

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