EMPAC can be seen as a big instrument that bridges the world we can see, hear, touch and move around in, the world we can experience, and the intangible realm of digital computers that can only become meaningful when it is connected to our experience through sound, light, images, movement or anything our senses can perceive. While in the Old World, Johannes Goebel built non-traditional instruments out of wood, metal and plastic; when in the New World, he programmed instruments in digital code. (For a few decades he also played music on ready-mades like pots and pans, scrap-metal and radios, wrenches, defunct pianos and garden hoses.)

3:00 PM – WORKSHOP

In the workshop, Goebel will show some of the instruments he built, talk about how digital and physical worlds influenced each other in his instrument building and compositions, and how musical instruments are tuned more by culture than by human genes. He will play recordings of music created on the instruments.

7:00 PM – CONCERT

In the concert, electronic pieces will be played that were composed under the influence of both computers and centuries of instrumental music: among them, Of Crossing the River, a piece of exact duration that seems to be of greatly varying length to each listener and at different times when listened to repeatedly.

Miguel Azguime, a composer, percussionist, and poet from Portugal, began work at EMPAC with his team on a new multimedia performance piece, A Laugh to Cry, including stereoscopic projection, a small chorus, and several onstage musicians. An evening-length work featuring himself as soloist, the piece was based on a variety of texts in several languages: Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, as well as contemporary Portuguese poets. The work was premiered at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 2013.

Azguime’s previous opera Salt Itinerary toured America, Canada, Europe, and Asia; in its performance he spoke and sung in five languages, and used a combination of real-time algorithmic audio and video. Azguime has composed instrumental and/or vocal works with and without electronics, electroacoustic music, sound poetry, including music for sound installations, theater, exhibitions, dance, and cinema. He also dedicates himself to the promotion of contemporary music as artistic director of the independent label Miso Records and of the Música Viva International Festival.

Luciano Chessa came to EMPAC to reconstruct Futurist composer and inventor Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori (or noise intoners). In collaboration with EMPAC and Performa, Chessa embarked on this reconstruction using his research that revised longstanding misconceptions about their construction, making this ensemble the first sonically accurate portrayal. Chessa brought instrument builder Keith Carey to EMPAC and a small team worked in Rensselaer’s architectural fabrication studios to produce the ensemble of instruments. A demonstration video was also created to share with a number of composers—Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Ulrich Krieger, and Mike Patton—commissioned by Performa to compose new works for the intonarumori to be premiered at New York City’s Town Hall as part of Performa 09. Chessa is a composer and musicologist, and teaches music history at the San Francisco Conservatory. The research done at EMPAC contributed to his book, Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, published by UC Press in 2012.

Michael J. Schumacher is a composer, performer, and installation artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He works predominantly with electronic media, creating computer-generated acoustic environments that evolve continuously for long time periods. In their realization, Schumacher uses multiple speaker configurations that relate the sounds of the installation to the architecture of the exhibition space. Architectural and acoustical considerations thereby together become basic structural elements.

At EMPAC, Schumacher continued his site-specific, multi-channel sound installations—called Room Pieces—with Room Pieces Troy 2010. Each Room Piece takes on a unique identity based on the space in which it is installed. During his residencies, Schumacher developed his piece for EMPAC’s vast, multi-zone public address system to be experienced in and around the current noise of the building—not only adding a sound environment but reframing the one that already exists.

Musician and multimedia artist Jesse Stiles performs a new live score within Quayola’s brilliant video installation Strata viewed on a massive screen suspended from the ceiling.

Quayola is a visual artist based in London. His work simultaneously focuses on multiple forms exploring the space between video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print. Quayola creates worlds where real substance, such as natural or architectural matter, constantly mutates into ephemeral objects, enabling the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously. Integrating computer-generated material with recorded sources, he explores the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm.

Working in both the artistic and the commercial field, Quayola intelligently experiment with mediums traditionally perceived as separate. Currently active as Visual Artist, Graphic Designer and Director, he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects. Quayola creates hybrid works blurring the boundaries between art, design and filmmaking.

Path to Abstraction, a performance consisting of multichannel sound and video, explores the relationships between sound and image, inspired by the true representation of sound itself: the wave- form. It consists of a continuous visual stream that retains the precise behavior of a waveform, while interpreting the music in a very unique and personal way. PTA combines together two different ways of interpreting the music, the analytical one of computers with the intuitive of human beings.

Quayola is a visual artist based in London. His work simultaneously focuses on multiple forms exploring the space between video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print. Quayola creates worlds where real substance, such as natural or architectural matter, constantly mutates into ephemeral objects, enabling the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously. Integrating computer-generated material with recorded sources, he explores the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm.

Working in both the artistic and the commercial field, Quayola intelligently experiment with mediums traditionally perceived as separate. Currently active as Visual Artist, Graphic Designer and Director, he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects. Quayola creates hybrid works blurring the boundaries between art, design and filmmaking.

The Nature of Being is a live audiovisual “conversation” between Scanner and Mink comprised of three channels of stunning cinematic video projection and an intense - at times haunting - live soundtrack Sometimes familiar, sometimes ambiguous, this performance transforms and mutates across the borders of recognition: footsteps become rhythm; wind becomes melody, as cinematic images reflect, compliment and contrast the soundtrack. Their goal is towards building an emotional relationship to the projections and sound, a work that seeks a departure from the familiar digital paths, striking the heart, the soul, and the mind.

The Nature of Being is a performance guided by contemplative sound and image, creating an abstract story yielding to a state-of-flux- cinematic experience. By use of immersive projections, panoramic views and surround sound, sensuality is re-imagined, reinterpreted, connecting multiple realities in a multi-angled perspective, merging and juxtaposing various points of views.

Scanner - British artist Robin Rimbaud traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form, creating absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways. From his early controversial work using found mobile phone conversations, through to his focus on trawling the hidden noise of the modern metropolis as the symbol of the place where hidden meanings and missed contacts emerge, his restless explorations of the experimental terrain have won him international admiration from amongst others, Bjork, Aphex Twin and Stockhausen.

Olga Mink works as a media-artist and filmmaker in the Netherlands. In 2002 she finished her Masters Fine arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Her work ranges from conceptual approaches in digital media, to audiovisual performances, interactive installations, animation-design, and educational programmes. She likes to explore and research the boundaries within interdisciplinary media and arts. Always pushing the envelope to create and experience something new and unique. In 2003 she has been commissioned to develop a permanent interactive installation for a newly build cultural centre in the South of Holland. She curates events in new media and live cinema performance.

In a special live event following the Mink/Rimbaud performance in the theater, EMPAC luminaries skfl and jenks (from the infamous Troy goodship crew) bring the café alive with live cinematic video and bouncy audio played and conveyed on multiple projections and sound emitting devices throughout the space that is tailor-made to delight, defy, and perhaps even make you get up and dance.

During multiple residencies at EMPAC, Laurie Anderson developed Delusion, a new meditation on life and language by way of music, video, and storytelling. Commissioned for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Anderson conceived of the work as a 90-minute series of short plays featuring two characters (both played by Anderson) that would look at opposing views of issues, beliefs and themes. Anderson described her motivation to address how “our strident media culture communicates increasingly in tirades... Contemporary culture is full of dualities and conflicts and these plays would address themes like the creation of enemies, the dependence on experts, and contrasting views on death, religious beliefs, and the nature of time.” The residency was also an opportunity for Anderson to revisit her use of video in a theatrical setting. In particular, she experimented with screens and equipment that are small, flexible, and easy to tour. The residency included work-in-progress sessions with students, faculty, and staff.

One of America’s most renowned performance artists, Laurie Anderson’s genre-crossing work encompasses performance, installation, film, music, writing, and photography. Anderson has invented several technological devices for use in her recordings and performance art shows, and published books, produced numerous videos, films, radio pieces, and original scores for dance and film.

Yvon Bonenfant is a vocal artist and interdisciplinary performance maker with a unique musical imagination. Always using the voice and singing as his starting point, Bonenfant has created or collaborated on live performance, installation, video art and videodance projects, underpinned by his cutting-edge approach to the potential for live performance to engage and transform the body. Beacons extends Bonenfant's intensity and technique into a world of presence and absence, of calling and wanting, and of the purity of the experience of light in darkness. Exploring a simple concept, ubiquitous in our modern environment: the flashing beacon light, Beacons is both a concert and a piece of refined video Theater. The project brings together the sensual, passionate and yet restrained and spacious video work of the UK's David Shearing with Bonenfant's own otherworldly extended voice techique and his all-voice musical compositions.

Performing sometimes solo and unamplified, sometimes live with amplification, and at others accompanied by choirs of carefully composed vocal environments, Bonenfant's voice - sounding both male and female, with the tonal range of the 'cello - takes the audience on a journey through a broad spectrum of sensation and emotion. With sounds ranging from the angelic to the hyperemotional, this voice is unforgettable. The world of Beacons explores the most fundamental of human experiences and invites the audience into a multisensory world of contemplation, reflection and passion. Voices: Yvon Bonenfant Video footage: David Shearing, Ludivine Allegue, and Yvon Bonenfant Video editing: David Shearing Composition and artistic direction: Yvon Bonenfant Compositional assistance and recording: Francis Silkstone