If you have been visiting this site for any time, you know we have a proclivity for all things experimental, especially when it comes to theatre, music, and dance. Mix those basic art forms with mad scientists, poets, video, film, and people who just love to tinker and tease new things out of old instruments and ideas, and you have EMPAC. That’s the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at RPI in Troy, New York.
There are so many different performances and exhibits coming up for March, my head is spinning and my calendar is complaining. But making the trek to the ship-in-a-bottle home of all this madness is always rewarded by some of the most innovative – and challenging – things that are happening in the arts outside of New York City or Boston.
(Image above from onedotzero. All photos courtesy of EMPAC, RPI and the artists.)
Here’s a chronological synopsis of what is planned.
TALK + DINNER
Jean-Pierre Luminet
Observer Effects: Conversations in Art & Science
Wednesday, March 2, 2011, 6 PM
Studio 1 – Goodman
FREE
Astrophysics and aesthetics in the EMPAC collider.
Jean-Pierre Luminet, an expert on black holes, cosmology, and cosmic topology, will discuss the relationship between principles of aesthetics and the study of the cosmos through the work of artists, philosophers, and scientists, from Plato to Kepler, and Dürer to Escher. A collaborator of Gérard Grisey’s Le Noir de l’Étoile, Luminet will discuss his role in the spatial percussion piece about the death of a pulsar, which will be performed by Les Percussions de Strasbourg in EMPAC’s Concert Hall on Saturday, February 26, 2011.
“Symmetry is one of the most fundamental concepts in geometry, whose principal concern is to find ‘pure’ shapes—the equivalent of the physicist’s search for fundamental elements. It is so prevalent in nature, from the human body to crystals, atoms, particle physics, or cosmology, that it is difficult to imagine it not being central to our understanding of the world.” — Jean-Pierre Luminet, Science, Art and Geometrical Imagination
For all Observer Effects talks, dinner will be for sale at 6 PM to enjoy as part of the event. Wine and refreshments will also be available as part of our cafe service.
Jean-Pierre Luminet is a French astrophysicist. He is the research director for the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and is a member of the Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTH) of the observatory of Paris-Meudon. He was awarded the 2006 Great Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for science communication, and the 1999 International Georges Lemaitre Prize for his original contributions to cosmology and astrophysics. He has published in journals such as Nature, Astrophysical Journal, and Astronomy and Astrophysics, among others. He has also published three acclaimed novels and several poetry books.
http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/observer/luminet/
EXHIBITION
Christian Graupner: MindBox
Thursday, March 3 – Saturday, April 2, 2011
Monday – Saturday, noon to 6 PM
Video Gallery
FREE
A challenging modified one-armed bandit box.
Using a modified one-armed bandit slot machine, MindBox is a viewer-driven dance video and music triptych. Insert a coin, work the machine’s lever and buttons, and directly remix the moves of the beatboxing man on three screens. Media artist Christian Graupner and choreographer Roberto Zappalà teamed up to make a vocabulary of sounds and movements that take beatboxing—a vocal percussion style that comes out of hip-hop—into the realm of interactive media. The soundtrack takes advantage of both the randomized real-time processes of slot machine gaming and Zappalà’s rhythmic, beat-based performance. The viewer becomes an active player in the creation of the installation’s audiovisual clusters via the playful tactile interface of the machine. Complex technology developed by Nils Peters (Humatic) and Norbert Schnell (IRCAM) remains hidden as machine lights flash, and the viewer draws out an idiosyncratic movement portrait in beats and starts, playing this headstrong media sculpture like an instrument.
There will be a Q&A with Christian Graupner on Thursday, March 3 at 5 PM. All are welcome!
See a trailer for the exhibition: http://www.humatic.net/art/p/mindbox/movpub/MindBoxVOw2.mov
See more on the exhibition: http://mindbox.humatic.net/
Christian Graupner is a Berlin-based artist, film composer, guest artist at ZKM Karlsruhe and the creator and developer of real-time media playback systems. His earlier works include drawings, paintings, and experimental electronic music under the pseudonym VOOV. He recently has developed a series of reactive media installations in which characters appear significantly in the foreground. With works such as 2Lives Left and newer projects like MindBox and Don’t Dance, he is keeping alive his conceptual platform Automatic Clubbing. In 2000, he and Nils Peters formed the independent artist group and production company Humatic Ltd.
Roberto Zappalà founded the Compagnia Zappalà Danza in 1989 to widen and deepen his own research in choreography while extending the possibilities for the training of young contemporary dancers. Since then he has created more than 25 pieces that have been presented throughout Europe, South America, and the Middle East. He is currently the artistic director of the Scenario Pubblico Performing Arts Centre in Catania, Italy.
Norbert Schnell studied telecommunications and music, and worked at the Graz Institut für Elektronische Musik (IEM) as a developer and advisor for projects with composers such as Beat Furrer and Robin Minard. In 1995, he joined the real-time systems team at IRCAM, which focuses on scientific and artistic projects involving real-time interaction. His team has worked on artistic productions with composers such as Boulez, Manoury, Nunes, and Stroppa, as well as participated in an array of international research projects. In 2006, Schnell organized and chaired IRCAM’s 6th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression.
Nils Peters is a coder and artist. Starting in music, his work has taken him into fields such as installation, theater, and performance. He joined machinery art ensembles such as Dead Chickens and BBM, combining music and robot sequencing. With Humatic Ltd., he developed a patented real-time multimedia sequencing environment. He has received several grants for his projects, and his musical work has been published by the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/graupner/
Artist-in-Residence Showing
Phyllis Chen+ Rob Dietz: Down The Rabbit-Hole
Monday, March 7, 2011, 7 PM
Studio 2
FREE
Down the Rabbit Hole with Phyllis Chen and Rob Dietz.
Join us for a workshop performance of a new piece by artists-in-residence Phyllis Chen (toy pianist/composer) and Rob Dietz (video artist/electronic musician).
Down The Rabbit-Hole is a performance for toy piano, music boxes, live electronics, live and edited video, and amplified objects. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, this is not a re-telling of a beloved fairy tale but a new work using objects and themes from the novels. The ticking of a pocket watch, the shuffling of a deck of cards, or the clattering of a tea set are reinvented in visual and sonic terms. With the use of microphones, a magnifying glass, and live video feeds, commonplace objects are brought to life, and a miniature stage is set in motion inside a toy piano.
The performance will be followed by an informal discussion with the artists.
Praised by The New York Times for her “delightful quirkiness matched with interpretive sensitivity,” Phyllis Chen’s artistic pursuits take her in numerous directions as a toy pianist, pianist, composer, and performance artist. Ms. Chen was named a New Music/New Places Fellow at the 2007 Concert Artists Guild International Competition. She creates original multimedia compositions using toy pianos, music boxes, electronics, and video, which she offers in concert alongside works by prominent 20th century composers such as John Cage and Julia Wolfe.
http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/rabbithole/
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SCREENING
onedotzero: extended play 10 & nightfall
Thursday, March 10, 2011, 7 & 9 PM
$5 per screening
Frame from onedotzero.
Join us for a night of double feature screenings that showcase the moving image across motion graphics, short film, animation, music videos, and more from the 2010 London festival onedotzero_ adventures in motion.
Wine, beer, and food will be available at Evelyn’s Café for all screenings from 6-9 PM.
extended play 10 @ 7 PM: Championing filmmakers who push the boundaries of traditional storytelling with adventurous narrative structures and distinct visual styles, this eclectic and engrossing range of shorts demonstrates how a powerful visual narrative can be used to create dramatic effect, and even social change.
nightfall @ 9 PM: Some of the more extreme and often bewitching examples of entries into this year’s festival program—from gaming-edged horror and sci-fi weirdness to trippy psychedelia—what more could you want from an alternative film night?
onedotzero is an international moving image and digital arts organization that commissions, showcases, and promotes innovation across all aspects of moving image, digital, and interactive arts. Founded in 1996, it is known for representing a diverse array of artistic endeavors. Its collaborative approach is attuned to technological advances and changes within digital arts and the contemporary cultural landscape. onedotzero is critically acclaimed for producing the annual pioneering audiovisual touring festival, onedotzero_adventures in motion. The festival travels the world, showcasing the most exciting ideas and brightest up-and-coming filmmaking talent alongside visionary new work by leading creative luminaries.
onedotzero brings together high-end and grass roots talent within a comprehensive package and delivers contemporary arts and audiovisual entertainment to a broad, international demographic of connected audiences. http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/onedotzero/extendedplay/
PERFORMANCE
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians + Double Sextet
performed by Signal
Saturday, March 12, 2011, 8 PM
Concert Hall
$15/10/5
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians + Double Sextet .
The minimalist music style has had a profound influence on all Western music. Not only has classical music been challenged and changed, but electronica, jazz, hip-hop, and pop have fallen under its influence, as well. Starting in the 1960s as an alternative to the “joyless” classical music coming out of academia, its pulsing rhythms, shifting patterns, focused harmonies, and mesmerizing repetitions, which move continuously through metamorphoses, spoke to listeners in a new way. Music for 18 Musicians, by Steve Reich and musicians, premiered in 1974 at The Town Hall in New York City.
In 2009, Reich won a Pulitzer Prize for his piece Double Sextet, where two identical groups of six musicians each play interlocking patterns of music—and the interwoven rhythms and phrases draw listeners into a maelstrom of pulsing music.
Signal, under Brad Lubman, performs these minimalist masterpieces with absolute virtuosity.
Watch a clip of Signal performing Music for 18 Musicians: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1WimEDwfAA
Evelyn’s Café will be open at 7 PM for food and beverage, and will remain open during the intermission and after the concert.
Steve Reich has embraced not only aspects of Western classical music, but also the structures, harmonies, and rhythms of non-Western music. Reich graduated from Cornell University in 1957 with a degree in philosophy. He studied composition with Hall Overton, and at The Juilliard School and Mills College. In 1966, he founded a three-musician ensemble, which grew to 18 members. Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and in 1999, he was awarded Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres. His music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles around the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Ensemble Modern, the London Sinfonietta, and many others. Several noted choreographers have created dances to Reich’s music, including Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Jerome Robbins, Laura Dean, and Alvin Ailey.
Signal is a large music ensemble comprising gifted and innovative New York-based musicians devoted to presenting a broad range of new music with energy, passion, and virtuosity. The ensemble performs under the musical direction of Brad Lubman. The group has appeared at the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Ojai Music Festival, and Le Poisson Rouge in New York City. In 2010, Signal was the visiting resident ensemble at the University of Buffalo. The ensemble currently is in recording residence at EMPAC.
Conductor and composer Brad Lubman has enjoyed a multi-faceted career. Formerly assistant conductor to Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center, he has emerged as an unusually versatile conductor of orchestras and ensembles all over the world. He has worked with a variety of illustrious musical figures including Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, Steve Reich, Michael Tilson Thomas, and John Zorn.
http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/reich/
EXHIBITION
Graham Parker: The Confidence Man
Monday, March 21 – Saturday, April 30, 2011
Monday – Saturday, noon to 6 PM
Mezzanine
FREE
Graham Parker: The Confidence Man.
In this collection of projects by New York-based artist Graham Parker, new film and audio work, made by the artist while in residence at EMPAC in spring 2010, is shown alongside a series of alterations to the building’s environment that range from the theatrical to the virtually invisible.
Parker has long been interested in spectrality—the concealing of one set of operations behind the appearance of another. His 2009 book Fair Use (Notes from Spam) explored spam emails as the latest manifestation of a longstanding mode of deception that has accompanied nearly all new developments in human transport and communication networks (the book touched on such phenomena as Nigerian spam, 19th century railroad cons and medieval beggar gangs). The Confidence Man features work that has grown out of that research—including hacked ATM machines, rogue WIFI networks, monologues drawn from spam emails, and a tribute to the 1973 film The Sting.
For three weeks starting on Monday, March 21, the artist will be working in the space for a few hours each day, using the exhibition as a studio and making ongoing alterations to the installation. Parker will be available for conversations with the public on a drop-in basis if he is onsite. To book or confirm a tour or conversation with the artist, please call the EMPAC box office at 518.276.3291.
Graham Parker is a New York-based multimedia artist and writer. His work considers contemporary digital phenomena against the historic contexts and antecedents from which they emerged—often finding unexpected, even uncanny connections between these different moments and modes. His work has been commissioned by the Tate Gallery, Henry Moore Institute, Center for Understanding the Built Environment, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Arts Council England, among others, and is held in public and private collections around the world. His 2009 book Fair Use (Notes from Spam) was described in Artforum as “meticulous historical research… a superb analysis.” http://www.grahamparker.info/
http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/parker/
PERFORMANCE
Nicole Beutler: 2: Dialogue with Lucinda
Thursday + Friday, March 31 + April 1, 2011, 7 PM
Studio 1 – Goodman
$15/10/5
Nicole Beutler: 2: Dialogue with Lucinda.
Fascinated by the radical and deceptively simple minimalism of American choreographer Lucinda Childs’ early work, Nicole Beutler has remade two of her silent dance pieces, Radial Courses (1976) and Interior Drama (1977), setting the latter to specially composed music.
Nicole Beutler works with the tension between intense emotionality and cool calculation while also reflecting on the history of theater. How do we look at emotions—what moves us and what doesn’t? How does the past resonate in our contemporary reality? These are issues that are at stake in Nicole Beutler’s work. Always searching for new forms, she currently is drawn to working with existing texts or dances.
The underlying choreographic scores used by the dancers while performing are fiendishly complex. Radial Courses is based on three movement sequences in a constantly shifting, circulatory composition. In Interior Drama, five dancers conform to an apparently perfect system, moving in repetitive and hallucinatory patterns. Childs describes her own work as an “intense experience of intense looking and listening.” Beutler’s reinterpretations focus on the individual dancer’s roles and actions within the group patterns, revealing parallel realities and the ritualistic qualities of both dances.
“Beutler (one of the more interesting new dance makers in the Netherlands) exposes choreographic processes: the dancers’ sense of themselves and the way the audience looks upon them. And this is the conceptual message that lies at the heart of her dance. Beutler’s cover is a veritable feast of physical suspense.” — Trouw (NL), Sander Hiskemuller, March 29, 2010
“Cool, expressionless and ritualistic, leavened with a dust-dry humor, this is a legitimate expansion of Childs’ severe original.” — The Stage London (UK), Neil Norman, Sept. 30, 2010
Watch a clip from 2: Dialogue with Lucinda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md374oWtyzU
http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/beutler/
Nicole Beutler: 1:Songs
PERFORMANCE
Nicole Beutler: 1: Songs
Thursday + Friday, March 31 + April 1, 2011, 9 PM
Studio 2
$15/10/5
1: Songs is a dramatic solo performance in the style of a rock song-cycle that crosses rough terrain. Performer Sanja Mitrovic channels the final words of tragic female protagonists from the history of theater, including Antigone, Medea, and Gretchen, allowing their timeless cries of suffering to enter her body and distinctly contemporary voice. As she shouts, speaks, and sings, she violently shifts between characters, at times fragile, raw, calculating, or emotional. Created by director and choreographer Nicole Beutler, with electronic music by DJ/composer Gary Shepherd, 1: Songs asks us to reconsider the words of these classic literary heroines (and anti-heroines) in the here and now. Who is speaking? What do these words mean today? Where does the character end and the performer begin?
“By turns rousing, seductive, serene, introspective, meditative and life-threateningly dangerous — with a rock ‘n’ roll attitude — this piece grabs the spectator… Right from the beautiful opening scene — in which Beutler once again brings to life her fascination for the domain between the visible and the invisible, between presence and absence — the performance unfurls, revealing its true identity: a soul-stirring concert.” — Jury Report, September 2010
“From gentle, frail and melancholic to rough, wild and hysterical, 1: Songs careers from one emotional extreme to the other as the literary greats infiltrate contemporary reality.” — The 2010 Selection, Flemish Theatre Festival
“…a sublime and substantive study of the concept of the tragic woman in literary history. The result is overwhelming.” — Knack, Els Van Steenberghe, Aug. 26, 2010
Watch a clip from 1: Songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_A0QvDOXL0
Discounted general admission double feature tickets are available until Thursday, March 30 at 6 PM.
Dinner, beer, and wine is available for purchase at Evelyn’s Café from 6–9 PM. The café is open for drinks and snacks after 9 PM.
Nicole Beutler is a choreographer, curator and performer based in Amsterdam. Her work is situated on the threshold of dance, performance, and visual arts. She seeks to precisely articulate sense and experience through performances, installations, and books. Her performances are composed musically, and suffused with subtle humor. They are characterized by minimal stage sets and a focus on the performer as a human being.
In 2005 Beutler co-founded LISA, the Amsterdam-based theater makers’ collective. From 2008 to 2010, she was dance and performance curator at Frascati Theatre in Amsterdam. She collaborated for years with choreographer and performer Paz Rojo and has worked with David Weber-Krebs, Hooman Sharifi and the live art group Private Thoughts in Public Places. She is an artistic adviser for choreographers, and a guest teacher at the School for New Dance Development and the Mime School at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK). http://empac.rpi.edu/events/2011/spring/beutler/
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