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.

The New York City-based contemporary music group Talea Ensemble was in residence to perform and record the music of Fausto Romitelli, the Italian composer who died in 2004 just as his music was beginning to gain notoriety. This album marks the world premiere recordings of several chamber ensemble works from the composer, described as one of the most promising of his generation. Romitelli took the power of psychedelic rock and the sonic-analysis techniques of the French Spectral school and twisted them together to create a deformed, artificial sound world.

The Talea Ensemble has given many important world premieres of new works by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Jason Eckardt, Pierluigi Billone, Stefano Gervasoni, and Marco Stroppa, in addition to Fausto Romitelli.

A collaboration between American Peter Edwards and South African Sabisha Friedberg, The Hant Variance was an exploration of audio composition driven by an audience’s movement through space. The score was inspired by the writings of Vic Tandy and other scientific and metaphysical sources that suggest certain sonic equations yield supernatural experiences. Performing from the center of the room, and using analog and digital sound interfaces, Edwards and Friedberg distributed the sound in real-time through a site-specific arrangement of loudspeakers and subwoofers. After the performance, The Hant Variance was recorded, edited, and mastered for release on vinyl record.

Friedberg’s composition, performance, and installation work draws on the phenomenological and phantasmagorical, exploring perceptual delineation of space through sound, and low-end experiential thresholds; she has performed and presented installations widely in western and eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, and the US. Edwards is an American artist and musician living in Holland, best known for his DIY experimental electronics website casperelectronics. His work has been presented internationally at venues including the MIT Media Lab, Transmediale, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, and New York Electronic Arts Festival, among others.

American cellist Mariel Roberts was in residence for the recording, mixing, and mastering of her first solo album, nonextraneous sounds. Roberts took over the Concert Hall with an assortment of microphones and a KVM station (keyboard, video, mouse) that allowed her the autonomy to operate on her own schedule. Afterward, the material was assembled and mixed in EMPAC’s audio production room. nonextraneous sounds features music by Andy Akiho, Sean Friar, Daniel Wohl, Alex Mincek, and Tristan Perich.

Roberts has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Zankel Hall, MoMA, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette, and has performed internationally as a member of the Mivos String Quartet, as well as with a variety of other ensembles in venues around the world.

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.

A string quartet performance in two acts featuring three pieces from the 1960s to the present that play with conventions of music notation and performance, and a haunting 30-minute piece from the 1990s with an uncanny spectral interplay.

Program Info:

Earle Brown, String Quartet

Peter Ablinger, Wachstum und Massenmord Alex Mincek, String Quartet No. 3 “lift-tilt-filter-split”

Intermission

Horaţiu Rădulescu, String Quartet No. 5 “before the universe was born”

The JACK Quartet electrifies audiences worldwide with “explosive virtuosity” (The Boston Globe) and “viscerally exciting performances” (The New York Times). David Patrick Stearns of The Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed their performance to be “among the most stimulating new-music concerts of my experience,” and NPR listed their performance as one of The Best New York Alt-Classical Concerts Of 2010.

Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland, JACK is focused on commissioning and performing new works, and the quartet has worked closely with composers Helmut Lachenmann and György Kurtág, among others. JACK also offers fresh interpretations of early music, including works by Don Carlo Gesualdo, Guillaume de Machaut, and Josquin des Prez.

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).