Abacus: A Clash of Emotive Fiction and Stark Reality

This might sound a little blasphemous to the small cadre of experimental art aficionados scattered across the RPI campus, but I honestly never thought I would see something "entertaining" at EMPAC. Interesting, yes. Thought-provoking, yes. But entertaining? Laugh-out-loud funny? Poignant? Straightforward? Paul Abacus's grand tirade against national borders, titled, simply enough, "ABACUS," features all of these traditional features of pop entertainment, but unlike a simple TV speech or documentary film, this is something entirely unique to EMPAC.

ABACUS begins with static playing across all six of its massive vertical screens, which are laid out in two parallel, vertical arcs. The continuation of their shapes seem to form the bottom piece of a large sphere, something Paul was likely aiming for considering his obsession with author/inventor/visionary Buckminster Fuller and his concept of the geodesic dome. Like Fuller's theoretical device, ABACUS's screens provide visualizations of data that enhance any of the variety of messages that Paul conveys throughout the presentation. These range from the artistically fascinating (a series of stark black-and-white Steadicam shots of Paul, the audience, and the performance space) to the absurd (relative differences between American, Mexican, and Canadian kaleidoscope purchases) to the deadly serious (statistics regarding the imminent danger of continuing to live in a world separated by borders).

ABACUS meanders in philosophical territory for the first segment of the piece before finally getting into the meat of his message: namely, that national borders are arbitrary, absurd, and dangerous artifacts of a previous time, and that for humanity to progress to the next level, we will need to transcend such self-segregation and work together as a single species. His goal is noble, to be sure, but obviously a little utopian upon first glance.

That said, it is a testament to Paul Abacus's presentational skills — which lie somewhere between a TED talk and a secular church sermon — that he manages to provide as coherent and believable an argument as he does. While there are no certain solutions in ABACUS, Paul utilizes a cache of philosophy, data, and theories consisting of everyone from Charles Darwin to Al Gore to Plato, leaving the audience with an honest feeling that (a) national borders should be dissolved and (b) such a dissolution is in line with the natural evolution of the human race.

What makes ABACUS so exceptional, however, is its accessibility. Everything Paul says is presented completely straight, without the self-indulgent ambiguity that so often plagues experimental art. As such, there is a surface level that can be easily understood and enjoyed by fans of non-experimental art and entertainment. Underneath that level is an artistic use of the EMPAC space and technology — at one point lights flash on and off to create an unnerving back-and-forth pattern in the shadows on the back wall — that helps to underscore all of Paul's explicit arguments.

Unfortunately, a series of twists at the end, in seeking to create a sense of escalating emotion, actually succeed moreso in pulling the audience out of the experience. We are aware from the beginning that Paul Abacus is a fictional character being performed on stage, but only in the final act (which indeed creates some significant emotional tension) do we actually understand that he is not real. As visceral as the act is, it undercuts the Paul's brutally realistic message by portraying him as an insane street preacher whose life doesn't really follow the same rules of mortality as a real person's does.

Nevertheless, ABACUS is a performance that only could have been created and performed in EMPAC or a similar space. At once experimental and accessible, Paul Abacus's powerful work is a testament to the wide range of EMPAC's expressive ability, and reminds us that surface entertainment need not be sacrificed for the sake of artistic depth.

Filament: "Wilderness" Review

“Wilderness” was the only show that I could see during the Filament festival. I don’t understand much about choreography and dancing. I cannot easily evaluate the performance or the choreography, but it seemed like an outstanding performance to me and the meaning of space in the work was of particular interest to me.

“Wilderness” is created by Yanira Castro and her team, a carnary torsi. Yanira Castro is a New York city based director and choreographer. Her works can be called “hybrid performances” which are performances composed of a variety of visual and aural media elements (www.filament.empac.rpi.edu, www.yaniracastrocompany.org).
A canari torsi, which Yanira Castro is the director and instigator of, is a New York city based, dance focused, media collaboration performance project group. (www.filament.empac.rpi.edu, www.acanarytorsi.org)

The work, “Wilderness”, is a performance. The venue was the lobby of EMPAC, and the stage was an oval floor surrounded by 16 lights and 8 speakers. The floor was covered with pieces of black rubber made from shredded tires. The performance basically had two parts. The first part was an old man’s solo performance. The second part was four dancers’ performance. The performance itself was a little bit strange and difficult to me. Personally, after a few readings about the director and performers, I expected a multimedia collaborative performance, but I couldn’t find significant use of media and technology in the performance. Also, I couldn’t actually understand the meaning of the gestures and sounds they made. However, the way they created and used the space to create new meaning of the space was very interesting.


The multiplicity of spaces is the performance group’s basic interest. On their website, they say, “We work in a multiplicity of spaces, from warehouses to tiny restrooms to the stage, inviting audiences to make it personal”(http://acanarytorsi.org). For the “Wilderness” of Filament, they changed the space of the lobby to the stage for the performance. This made the audience have strange feelings, and made them think about the meaning and function of stage and see the space itself, the lobby of the theater, in a different point of view.

In the first part of the performance, an old man in black cloth performed a kind of dance, making noise. He started to perform around the center of the stage, which was surrounded with chairs for the audience. The space the old man initially used looked like a space for a performer. But after some time, he started to invade the audience’s space. He approached me, and talked to me and went around between chairs, making the audience confused where the stage was and where they had to watch. After a staff moved the chairs out of the stage, the audience became more confused and somewhat uncomfortable. Where is the place for audience? The audience just sat or stood somewhere in the stage in somewhat unsettled posture.

When the four dancers performed, the dancer’s performance tangled the space between them and the audience. The performers threw themselves around the stage and between people in the audience, sometimes making people in the audience move back and forth. The performers also asked questions which audience members were expected to answer and sometimes involved audiences in small tasks as a part of their performance. This made the audience feel more engaged and involved in the performance space. The audience occupied part of the stage and interacted with performers and became part of a group of performers. Finally, the people who were left on the stage at the end of the performance were audience members. The traditionally divided two spaces, stage and auditorium, were mingled in the performance and made me think about what the stage is, what the roles of performer and audience are, and what the meaning of space in this performance was.

Self-Exploration within Multi-Channel Double Feature

I am notoriously late to everything. So Friday evening, ten minutes to the start of Multi-Channel Double Feature, ticketless, I was parking my car a ten minute walk away from EMPAC, rushing to make the walk in five, and enjoying the brisk wind through my equally brisk stride. When I arrived, the ticket line was backed up to the elevator and an announcement made that all shows were starting 30 minutes late. The momentum carrying me through the glass doors was abruptly halted by waiting. Thankfully EMPAC was running behind, too.

At 7:30, several festival goers and I were ushered into Studio 2, containing eight speakers in a circle surrounding chairs in sets of two scattered in different orientations. It wasn't till later I noticed the other 16 speakers in two rings of eight above us. Having come late and alone, I set up near the outskirts of the cluster facing the wall - a conscious decision to establish myself as an individual, separate from and not preoccupied with the other audience members, but only my own individual experience. As the lights were dimmed, I pulled my shoulders back, conscientiously straightening my spine to assume a relaxed, meditative posture.

The first piece by Volkmar Klien instilled a sense of exploratory playfulness. It seemed to tell the story of joyfully discovering mechanics! Here is a bouncing ball! And look! As I place my hand above it, watch as it ricochets, faster and faster and faster, and then I take my hand away and up it goes! This same childlike sense of wonder extended metaphorically to sound, and I felt as though I had never truly heard sound before. I relished in wonder and amazement as pieces of the sound were changed, stretched and modified little by little over a repetitive theme to quite drastically different yet similar sounds. As tempo and volume increased, I felt fully immersed in an exploration of The Things Sound Can Do and felt a smile stretch across my face like the first time I dropped a slinky down a set of stairs, kept a hula hoop around my waist, or discovered the full potential of ink and a blank piece of paper. When the piece came to a close, I still had that smile plastered across my face, looking around to try to spot the magician who had called to light the joys of sound.

The second piece, by Hans Tutschku, in stark contrast, shocked me with it's abruptness. The mourning vocals felt hauntingly trapped as they raced across the surface of a dome. I fully agree with Brian Chitester - the vocals were full of longing and despair, a despair I was instantly terrified of. Where the first piece had me looking around in childlike wonder, the second piece had me clutching the edges of my seat, eager to pull my knees to my chest, looking around with wide, scared, anxious eyes for where the female specter would come from next, trying to protect my heart from the clutches of her overwhelming despair. Metallic additions furthered the haunting clash between female vocals trapped in a dome and a post-apocalyptic urban environment. By the middle of the piece, I had finally managed to clutch at some peace of my own, not because the sounds had become any more calming, but because I had grown to accept my own position in this world of sound. I was no longer looking around anxious for the next dart of the specter across the ceiling dome, but had come to accept that it would come, and I would not know when or from where. This tension between finding and maintaining calm while immersed in a world of hopelessness and anguish made the piece worthwhile and beautiful, despite the anxiety it did draw up in me. By the end of the piece, I was calm. It was a calmness I was actively engaged in maintaining against the clinging hands of anxiety and despair, but successfully keeping.

I stayed afterward for the Q&A, and Sunday, returned again, this time leaving time and space for my arrival. Sunday, both pieces led me to a state of meditative, non-judgmental introspection. Remarkably, the second piece which had so shook me Friday, felt calming to me Sunday, the vocals enveloping me in a dome of sound in which to explore myself.

Filament Festival: Incandescent Light or Black Hole?

The curators brand the Filament Festival a biennial, which not only showcases the culmination of the past two years of EMPAC's "creations" via commissions and residencies, but also offers a "personal space" for audiences to encounter their artistic process.

What they don't mention, but I feel is equally, if not more critical, is that the curation of these 15 premieres, exchanges with interdisciplinary practitioners and the archived documentation of the past two years also articulates their "founding discourse" and vision for the future of the "center."

Taken together, these collected works (carefully contextualized by the talks and the documentation) define and author institutionally what "experimentation" means in relation to media & performance in the 21st c., and attempt to establish the "center" as a legitimate site for both rigorous research and process-driven inquiry.

As articulated by Johannes Goebel in the Director's foreward in the program, events at EMPAC "evoke reactions ranging from enthusiastic appreciation to raised eyebrows--exactly the mix necessary to ensure that experimental media and performance arts are living up to their challenge."

The works I experienced this weekend did consciously provoke and proactively engaged their audiences, challenge their respective mediums conventions/technologies, and incite deep emotional and intellectual inquiry. They induced what Jane McGonigal calls an "experience grenade."

In particular, Yanira Castro's Wilderness, was a brave and ambitious exploration into not only the delicate eco-systems we inhabit, but of the invisible symbiosis between our senses, one another and technology. The use of contact microphones dispersed beneath the mulch to trigger an open musical score dictated by both the dancers and audiences movements, which the pianist played real time, and which in turn the dancers responded to with improvised phrases mediated by their inter(re)actions with the audience, all quietly underscored the interplay of control and subjugation required to sustain (or potentially distort) even a temporary habitas.

And Lars Jan's Abacus was equally complex and compelling. I was mesmerized by the schizophrenic juxtapositions of empirical visual evidence and absolutist conjectures which Paul Abacus persuasively pro-offered. And yet, I left wondering who was Paul Abacus really, an enlightened subject instigating new modes of knowledge, a talk show charlatan post-TED, or a vacuous conduit of regurgitated information, a zombie, who has lost his subjectivity within the overwhelming data stream of contradictory evidence and prismatic points of view, drowning him? Certainly, he represents a dynamic "digital identity;" simultaneously inhabiting the multiplicity of the collective on screen, and the single, vulnerable Beckettsian man, alone on stage, articulating himself into existence.

Lastly, Micah Silver and Sergei Tcherepnin's interpretation of Maryann Amarcher's inscrutable unfinished composition, The Star Room, which attempts to sonically represent zero gravity through precise speaker constellations, sculpted sound configurations and 30 datasets transported me into a sublime visceral hiatus from reality. I felt myself lifted into a stratisphere not to dissimilar from what the members of Apollo 12 experienced when they first encountered the splendor of the moon.

All of these works show a tremendous commitment on EMPACs part to interrogating critical contemporary ideas and an unabashed openness to experimentation, and the integrity of individual artistic process. And no doubt, the incredible technical resources and institutional support provided by the period of intense incubation at EMPAC, not to mention the exposure to diverse audiences will enable these productions to go on to wider visibility in major cities across the U.S. and globally.

Returning to EMPAC's stated mission and methods, however, I am nonetheless troubled by a few questions. Who's the intended/attending audience for this work? What is the "challenge" their commissioned work is living up to? Does "enthusiastic appreciation" and "raised eyebrows" justify such cost prohibitive experimentation?

Let's address the above one at a time.

Audience
Based on rudimentary observation, I would observe that the majority of audience members were the artists themselves, friends of participating artists, and local artists either within RPI or surrounding Capital region, and a handful of students. On a whole, for an art festival, many years in the planning, the numbers were relatively low. Which makes me question, who was the intended audience, how were they marketed to, and what was the anticipated outcome of the festival?

If the "wider public" or student population was not indeed the intended audience, perhaps the goal was to cater to the media, cultural practitioners and funders. And yet, none were insight.

Challenge
My assumption would be that by selecting the word "challenge" Goebel intends the work coming out of EMPAC to engage in a confrontation with the "status quo;" the status quo of the commercial art market, the status quo of accepted social and political realities, the status quo of disciplinary boundaries and technological implementation. Through cross-pollinizing experimentation in ideas, process, collaborative configurations and technology, EMPAC could effectively re-orientate the "centers" of power and knowledge to the periphery where experimentation flourishes.

But I don't believe this is what the director had in mind.

Response
Evoking "reactions ranging from enthusiastic appreciation to raised eyebrows" suggests to me a non-critical, bourgeois response. One which invites navel gazing and little reflexivity. The intellectual, creative, technical and economic resources available at EMPAC offer an an unprecedented opportunity to re-signfiy culture, to anticipate social evolution in new and exciting ways. To galvanize change. We want audiences to be provoked, to awaken their hearts and minds in new and unanticipated ways. To stir their passions and imaginations!

But again, the articulated vision falls short.

So, the success of the EMPAC's programs goes without question. The quality and value of the research and creative undertakings are ambitious and inherently innovative. But what I am contesting is EMPAC's stated goals, which upon closer examination seem ambiguous and shrouded in mystery. I sense there is much more incredible potential in terms of impact and visibility to unearth.

Wilderness

Abacus: A failure to communicate (but not to critique)

Speaking to audience members after the Saturday night performance of Paul Abacus, it seemed if Early Morning Opera’s production was meant to make a convincing argument about the limits of the nation-state it failed. The narrative of a thoroughly post-modern world shaped by the grand visualizations of statistics spread across six enormous screens and the theater-wide wandering exposition of Paul Abacus did not cohere into a moment of shared understanding or collective action under his banner. But in this rhetorical failure the work succeeds as an interrogation of the presentation forms seen as best practices in our media culture.

It might be useful to consider this argument through the ways in which Abacus performs in a way that speaks through and against dance. Dance in the writings of figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and Alain Badiou has been taken up as a metaphor for thought.* The intersection of a commitment to motion and a restraint of movement figures strongly in these philosophies. Abacus conveys the idea of a dance and thought interrupted, an act and call to action that is subverted by the contrivances common to the presentation of knowledge and organization of people today, TED talks and arena-style megachurches.

As a first consideration, it is important to note that dance is not a march, and in kind thought must avoid following the beat of a drum and shaping the public into an “aligned and hammering body” as Badiou says in his Inaesthetics (59). Contrary to this, Abacus’ talk often appears as a precise arrangement of established presentation styles.

The graphs Abacus employs produce a mechanical dance of visualizations indifferent to insight. The source of the data matters little compared to the striking display of animated line and bar graphs. Form shows itself superior to logic as Abacus insists the patterns display self-evident truths such as in a comparison of Kashi cereal consumption and catholic school attendance rates. Nevertheless, the audience laughs along.

Illustrative of how such performances are regimented and in turn order the responses of their audiences, Abacus calls out to the audience to raise their hands, flash their cell phones, and sing in unison in gestures of call and response. The significance of falling in step with such hailing gestures is made clear later in the talk when Abacus thrusts his own hand into the air and repeatedly chants “nation.”

In addition to employing such common presentation forms, Abacus also resorts to cut-and-paste appeals. For instance, he makes a gesture familiar to any who have seen TED talks when he acknowledges how some viewers might draw away from his post-national view due to the similarities it bears with socialism. He then in kind assures his audience that they should fear not, he has spoken with business leaders and it turns out they are just as eager to tear down all borders, that state restrictions hurt their bottom line as much as our sense of social justice. In this post-state, post-scarcity, post-Post-cereal argument, all momentum seems to be in alignment, if not lockstep.

But dance as a metaphor for thought warns against embracing these appearances of structural unity. Dance rather adopts a “theme of a mobility that is firmly fastened to itself, a mobility that is not inscribed within an external determination, but instead moves without detaching itself from its own center” (Badiou 59). This competing need for an autonomous movement of thought and a call for intervention is registered in appropriately conflicted ways by Abacus.

In terms of autonomy, the position the audience occupies bears little if at all on Abacus. He wanders out of sight, speaking to the cameras. The audience meanwhile is in a balcony, the cheap seats. These spatial relations mirror those of the by-invite-only, multi-thousand-dollar, front-and-center accommodations of the TED conference and the YouTube lookers on. The audience peers silently at the power brokers or chime in at prefigured moments, a managed transparency and interactivity giving them controlled access to power.

Along quite different lines, Abacus screams at his audience to listen to him because something needs to be done. He knows something, and the crowd just needs to listen to him. But, to misuse Foucault in "What Is an Author?" on the potential authorless future, “what difference does it make who is speaking” when everyone shares the same mezzo-level perspective? (120). Abacus appeals to astronauts and cosmonauts being changed by seeing the world from space, but how can privileging this totalizing view be anything but the construction of another border? Why in this post-hierarchical age should anyone listen to anyone else? Should we not delight in our choice to sit in the shadows, in the “anonymity of a murmur” arising from the discomfort about being so suddenly put upon to do something? (119).

Here, along with the point about thought not being regimented, it is shown that thought is not purely impulsive either. Rather:

“dance designates the capacity of bodily impulse not so much to be projected onto a space outside of itself, but rather to be caught up in an affirmative attraction that restrains it. … this force of restraint will be manifested only in movement, but what counts is the potent legibility of the restraint.

[…]

In dance thus conceived, movement finds its essence in what has not taken place, in what has remained either ineffective or restrained within movement itself” (Badiou 59-60).

Following this reasoning, it is sensible that the real dance in Abacus is taken up late in the show by the camera operators. They do not merely choreograph shots in steadicam synch with their bodies. In fact, when they begin dancing they seem to move without much regard for what is projected onto the screens. The stage reclaims its position as a focal point from the screens when their movements cease to be epiphenomena and they become people. In turn the audiences' ways of seeing cease being screened and instrumental and become briefly engaged with a newly active stage.

Outside of any useful considerations of dance, additional commentary on popular modes of presentation are present in the performance. Abacus and a cameraman are shot while retreating backstage. Is this not the nostalgic dream of all modern-day theoretical radicals – to say something so dangerous that the establishment puts out an old-fashioned death warrant with their name on it rather than burying their truth with sidebar excerpts and scrolling commentary? After his death, Abacus returns to the stage without a mic. As the screens go dark, the speakers grow silent, and the stage lights fade, he repeats some of his earlier thoughts. While repetition is a Nietzschean theme that comes up throughout the piece, here is where I found it most valuably employed. Upon his return Abacus seems human. The props are gone, the sermon is over. Abacus addresses the audience in those last moments not as a choir of technocrats but rather as humans touched by his pathos rather than his trend lines.

* Badiou is particularly concerned with thinking infinity. His name came to mind when Abacus raised the question “what is infinity?,” and so it feels fitting that I put the two into some sort of dialogue here.

Abacus Review

Paul Abacus engages the audience on three levels. The first is an introduction to his ideas and asks to audience to exercise their imagination skills. His factoids about the visible color spectrum, color receptors, and the eye were fascinating and combined with his charisma immediately pulled me in to the presentation. The second level is where he discusses his ideals and uses Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope as a paradigm in which one can imagine a world without borders. Here he engages history and epistemology in such a way that left me longing that current news castors would do the same and actually give some context to facts with which they are constantly bombarding viewers. His understanding of society speaks to the post modern concept that we are not progressing, that the world in not getting better under our current understands of nature, science, ownership. However, he still believes in progressivism, just not through science or facts. Rather, it will be through social evolution that we will progress.

On the first two levels Abacus is merely a highly charming lecturer with impressive audio/visual aids. However as the performance climaxes, he moves from the position of giving a multimedia lecture to that of a stage actor, of a prophet who is plagued by self doubt, by these ideas that have not come to fruition. He curses and yells that “Patience is not a virtue. Patience is a prison. Patience is accepting a lie,” showing his humanity but also making the audience wonder whether this frustration is in fact his, or if it is performance and critic of activists. He leaves the stage and on the screens we see him walking through the hallway and then being shot, a nod towards assassinations of prophet-like figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy.

Within the presentation itself, I was particularly intrigued by the purpose of nations and that we have outgrown their usefulness. The idea of nations is so engrained into me that the idea of a world without borders is shocking. However I did agree that the most effective form of community is a local one. I also particularly resonated with the idea that humanity has not outgrown god and religion but rather that it has taken a different form.

As for the multimedia aspect, the six large screens symbolized the confusion of borders. When images were split over the six screens, they were unclear and were not cohesive. In the same way borders between countries disrupt our ability to visualize a world without them. I was confused by the cameras circling around and do not understand what they added. Perhaps it was designed to disorient the audience and help them to see beyond societal conditioning. I agree with JVolyn that the projections of Abacus over multiple screens mimicked fascist techniques. And I admit that Abacus’ charisma drew me into his ‘cult of personality.’ That being said, I think that the piece successfully challenged the audience to see beyond ‘antique’ conditioning, presented a convincing argument for a world without borders, and finally placed his presentation within the context of the history/nature of prophets. It reminds me of the recent movie Inception, where the audience is pulled into level after level of dream only to be left wondering whether ‘reality’ in the movie is merely another dream. Abacus may be just another idealist doomed to failure, but his self-awareness of that possibility elevated his presentation to visionary artwork.

Maryanne Amacher: The Star Room; a truely remarkable performance

Maryanne Amacher (February 25, 1938 October 22, 2009) was an installation artists from the United States as well as a composer.  She was interesting in perceiving art with regards to three- dimensional works designed to transform the perception of a space.  Her major pieces have almost exclusively been spatially specific, often using many loudspeakers to create what she called "structure borne sound", which is a differentiation with "airborne sound", the paradox intentional. From using several kinds of diffuse sound sources (either not in the space or speakers facing at the walls or floors), she illustrated psychoacoustics (human perception of sound) using sound shapes in relation to “precense” or the fact of existence.
Amacher's greatest earliest works the sonic telepresence series, "City Links" 1-22 (1967- ); the architecturally staged "Music for Sounds Joined Rooms" (1980- ) and the "Mini-Sound Series" (1985- ), new avant garde media of rooms that used architecture to influence the projection and perspection of sounds.

She additionally succeeded in musical achievement of otoacoustic emission, in which the ears themselves act as sound generating devices. Amacher composed several "ear dances" designed to create "third" tones coming from the listener's ears. The subtitle of her first Tzadik Records album Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) references these "ear tones".

Over her lifetime, she received several major commissions and awards for her work mostly in the United States and Europe with occasional work in Asia and Central and South America. In 1998, she received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. In 2005, she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica (the Golden Nica) in the "Digital Musics" category for her project "TEO! A sonic sculpture". At the time of her death, she had been working two years on a 40 channel piece commissioned by The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY which was performed this evening of October 3, 2010 by her fellow colleagues Sergei Tcherepnin and Micah Silver.  In this piece, her colleagues spent six weeks solely trying to figure out arrangements of speaker for the speakers and doors for optimal projection and perception of the musical track.  At least 30 loudspeakers placed in different rooms were used for this piece.  The “Star Room”, as Maryanne called it during the course of the project, was placed into use for the project.  In the orchestra theater, the “Star Room” placed underneath the audience of the theater contained vented tunnels which ran to underneath the audience seats, allowing for ideal movement of air to illustrate her wanted perception for the audience of sound in zero gravity. 

While the piece seemed to carry with some predictability with rises and falls in pitch and volume, the predictability allowed for appreciation of the Maryanne’s use of psychoacoustics to allow for optimal perception and projection of the music.  Two electronic tracks were placed in a thirty minute period of time.  The first set of musical peaks were analogous to chimes.  The suspense of the chimes would build over time which then led to loud vibrations in the music that started to occur.  The vibrations I first perceived to be imitation of thunder because of the noise and difference in pressure when the noise built within the room.  Later on, the artists Tcherepnin and Silver mentioned how Maryanne wanted to use wings on the side of the piece.  This would have fit into the piece very well as the piece possessed qualities of dynamism with consistent raising of pitch and volume. The piece then build up with power in its volume to a peak then slowly declined.  The peaks and declines became more frequent and occurred with slightly more speed each time with the music’s progression.  The building and declining of the music has resemblance to a storm approaching then passing.  Between the perception of sounds of a storm with the thunder and plane noises, I believe that Maryanne Amacher was trying to depict the flight of a bird in this piece.  This would make sense in theory to her perception of noise at zero gravity since the bird could be flying high above the earth’s surface where sound is depicted differently.    She demonstrated its flight and the noises associate with it wonderfully for the 30 minute piece making complete use of psychoacoustics.  She mainly used the position of the speakers and doors to influence human perception of the sounds, however, with use of the “Star Room” which allowed for the passing instead of containment of air in the orchestra area.  This allowed for the room’s ability to project noise at a great degree in addition to speaker use.

To conclude, the piece composed by Maryanne Amacher today performed by Sergei Tcherepnin and Micah Silver demonstrated Maryanne Amacher’s phenomenal ability in demonstration of psychoacoustics and use of architecture in influence of noise.  So much was brought into consideration to optimize the perception of such a dynamic piece.  The artists even considered the perception of noise being changed as the audience would sit in the auditorium during the performance.  This piece possessed qualities of dynamism as the music was in ‘constant motion’ with significant rise and decline.  The piece also possessed qualities of surrealism as Maryanne’s dreams of hearing the noises of zero gravity which seem so unperceivable came to life as her inspiration.  It made her work stand out as she used architecture to structure sound perception, which was quite avant garde for her time. 

Live Shorts: ST2A

Act Curtain

Live Shorts: ST2A takes place in Studio 2. As I enter, the room is dark. A black performance floor is flanked on four sides by rows of chairs illuminated in soft spotlighting. The walls of the studio are lined with black translucent fabric. Large bulbs hang in columns behind the fabric, pulsing individually into existence, and then fading to a dim glow until the first performance begins.

Part I—Already Seen

Two women step onto the performance floor and stand together at the center. Slowly they begin to move: bending and strutting away from each other in symmetrical unison. Workers place two projectors on opposite edges of the floor, then lower screens in the remaining corners. Soft music begins to play as the dancers spiral outward to the audience then back, each time approaching us more closely. Light appears projected on the screens. At first abstract, the light transforms into the shape of objects (a purse, a candlestick, a briefcase) descending on a yellow rope. The dancers cross behind the screens disappearing from view then cross in front of the projectors, their shadows enveloping the screen. They begin to echo and complement one another in their gestures, no longer just perfect reflections. The dance continues as an evolving pattern. Similar movements repeat while others are added or subtracted. And the lighting of the room, which was at first bright, steadily dims through the entire performance until the dancers stop, the music fades, and the room goes dark.

Already Seen is intended to explore the idea of “loops.” The audience little by little discovers a changing performance. When you are finally lulled into a secure understanding of the piece’s steady evolution, the dancers slap their hands together and spring forward or the guitar erupts in a jumble of harsh shrieking notes, startling you back to attention. I enjoyed the piece; it was beautiful, and the constant evolution kept me enchanted.

Part II—The Golden Veil: A Cautionary Entertainment

Now the room fills with banjo music and a young woman singing. A man and woman in old-fashioned clothes spread a tarp on the center of the performance floor. The woman stretches out on her knees to smooth out the tarp and the man ties a white cloth mask over his eyes. Blood red yarn hangs down over his face. And as the woman turns around and sees him, the room is plunged into darkness. The audience freezes—afraid to move or breathe. In the red light of the exit sign I can see the silhouette of the man moving closer and closer to where we sit. The silence and darkness stretches on for minutes—a painful empty silence. The audience shift uncomfortably in their seats. Finally the soft sounds of a forest drift down from the speakers. A tiny green light appears above then slowly descends. As it nears the ground, the woman laying on the tarp is illuminated by a growing circle of green light. She speaks of girls who fall asleep by a river in the green wood and wake up covered in marks and bruises—girls who “abdicate the thrones of their fragile bodies.” Her voice is silenced by the sound of a horse approaching—closer and closer until the pounding of his hooves fills the room. The man appears again, no longer masked—his face illuminated by a red light. He talks about riding his horse through the woods. “…A teeming city, broken open—I’m not sure if they were men or demons, or what they were after.” And he talks of finding a girl. The woman now sits on a stool under a spotlight, gently playing a banjo and singing of her search for a man to love. The piece ends as she stands and gives a final warning to avoid the green woods.

The Golden Veil was not what I expected. It looked nothing like the photos I had seen online. Looking back at the description now, I suppose it fits. (In the program, The Golden Veil is described as “the tale of two improbable figures, ghosts trapped in the sympathetic reverberations of a collective psyche.”) I still wasn’t prepared to be that terrified by a performance. But that’s what I loved about it. It was shocking and frightening and unexpected.

Part III—Paul Abacus

Whispering voices carry over the speakers. “The green light is on!” Then the microphone is silenced. Then a man begins to hum and sing and entering through the back door Paul Abacus begins his "pantomime—with words." He speaks so fast—his thoughts fluctuate so quickly that I can hardly hope to keep up. He says so many things, makes the most random connections that I can’t begin to tell you any of the things he said. All I know is that I found every word hilarious and believed everything he said. And then all too soon he left the same way he entered—humming through the back door.

My only problem with Paul Abacus’s piece was that it was over too quickly. I would listen to him for hours (even Early Morning Opera: Abacus proved unable to gratify my new found infatuation). It was by far the simplest piece and yet I think it was my favorite.

The entire Live Shorts: ST2A was an emotional journey. From beauty and rhythmic tranquility to dread and distress to hilarity and adulation it was a great performance and I’m so grateful I had the chance to see it.

Live Shorts – Program C

Trouble: A Narrow Vehicle

The 10 minute show of Trouble, presented at EMPAC's Studio 2, could be mostly spent waiting in line for entrance depending on how early you arrived. The performance relies on guests entering the studio four at a time to participate in a cleansing ceremony before finding their seats which extends the wait. The “ceremony” was a three step process: walk through the center of the room where you will be sprayed with a hopefully hygienic liquid by a cast member, walk towards another cast member that brushes your shoulders with a palm leaf, and finally receive an index card with the word fire written on it. This cast-audience interaction is not unusual for Trouble, who has also done another performance called YOU ARE HERE (the Maze) that involves a sculpture maze that guests travel through. I admit that part of the fun of the show is watching the reactions of following audience members to the stoic shamans. Most people were accepting and allowed the performers to do their job; others were not interested and were surprised at the determination of the cast. After all of the audience was seated all of the performers congregated in the center of the room to wave their right hands; hopefully a significant gesture relating to the eye drawn in the center of their hands instead of just a greeting. The slow departure of the performers from the stage signaled the end of this unusual performance and the transition into the next piece. There was some bustle as stage-hands removed the various props and fans from the center, allowing us to discuss and wipe mist from our eyes.

Jen DeNike & Rose Kallal: Another Circle

The next performance was a multimedia solo ballet performance. There were two projectors with screens in the center of the room along with a giant projection against one wall of the studio. All three projections showed a repeated clip of a ballerina doing a pirouette. There was also a lady in the corner of the room playing different notes on a keyboard for ambiance. Soon a ballerina came to the center and proceeded to perform a series of movements that sometimes mimicked the on screen projection. She occasionally moved around the room in a circle before stopping in front of the projectors to do various movements. The sounds from the musician changed over time from the keyboard to slow strums on the guitar at varying volumes. I should note that I was sitting opposite from the musician and speakers and therefore the sounds were only intense instead of painful. However there were others across from me that were holding their ears at various points during the music. After about fifteen minutes the projectors were turned off and the music stopped. The blue lighting that was present during the performance changed to one spotlight over the ballerina. She started a pirouette that continued for several minutes before she stopped and the lights dimmed. This performance was not very memorable aside from the ballerina; she was the only interesting part in the piece.

Steve Cuiffo, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle – AMAZINGLAND IN TROY EmagicPAC

The performance started with the performers setting up the stage for the magic show. They were very loud and obvious as they 'improvised' with the position of their props and cords. This pre-show along with the main piece is meant to engage the audience as their exploration of the 'pathos' of popular magic shows seen in Las Vegas. This feeling of inclusion is continued as the three magicians involve the audience in the tricks that are performed. In one trick they ask an audience member to choose another and another to prove that the person involved in the trick is anonymous to the magicians. They also joke with the audience members, asking for phone numbers and commenting on appearance. There were some moments when the trick would fail, as in the time when one cast member was trying to guess the next card in a deck and guessed wrong. But this was part of their plan to see the audience's reaction to different magic situations. At first I was just humoring them, thinking of how amusing they were, but as the show progressed I was distracted by the fantastic tricks and the epic music playing in the background. By the end of the show I was cheering loudly for the goofy yet lovable characters and the awesome magic that I witnessed. And the amazing song that was playing in the background is called The Oh of Pleasure by Ray Lynch. Look it up.

Filament Reviews (variety pack)

For my main review I decided to both participate in AND observe Abacus: Early Morning Opera directed by Lars Jan which was held in the Concert Hall. First of all, this is the first time I have been in the Concert hall and let me tell you it is amazing. Sound quality is perfect, lighting and seating are fantastic, and this was just an overall fun and relaxing experience. So the main concept was to manipulate sound, imagery, and lighting using two iPads attached to a giant panda's (Dr. Hieronyous Yang) hands while a pre-recorded audio narrative is played. It pretty much takes you on a journey through the idea of and the future of the "screen age" and the materialistic time that we are living in. According to the narrative, this is the contrast the age of media filling the void where architecture and static art once stood. The conclusion drawn was that the next step is reconstructing geography, which is where the interactive part came in. When touching the iPad with your fingers (in addition to fancy lights that follow your fingers) you would manipulate the continents that were shown on thehumongous screens. After this, it switches to more of a light manipulation where the user changes the colors and strobing of the lights on the stage. Finally, the narrative resolves to the point of reconstructing the entire planet, where the display shows an earth and moon from space. This can in turn be manipulated to be zoomed in on and rotated at will. There were red blocks on different points of land on the planet which when you got closer, they would play different sound clips at varying intensities based on distance. It was like a voyeuristic view into the soundscape of that land.

This, however, was nearly impossible for me to control. For a first time user of the system it was more about just making things happen. It wasn't until my time as an observer that I actually learned ANYTHING about the piece's message. I didn't actually realize what the red blocks were for until 2 times watching someone else use it! It was actually a pretty neat epiphany once it all clicked. I felt really bad for the poor person in the panda suit, I could feel their arms shaking from holding up these iPads for so long, haha.

Overall this was a neat experience that I enjoyed. I was a little hesitant to go one on one with a person while people were watching me, though the panda suit helped ease any anxiety because you didn't have to see the person behind it.

The other exhibits that I saw were in the Process Boxes. These were basically just glass boxes with pieces of different productions, or the exhibit itself in whole.

Daniel Teige: what this consisted of was 2 Cassette Players with cassettes labelled with titles such as "Piano", "MetalBow", and "Machinery". These were field recordings and sound art clips that were obviously high quality. They were probably used as background for some installation or other piece. I found that mixing two tapes at once was really fun and actually worked out really well when I put together "Space" and "Machinery". I felt like I was on a space ship (not to mention that i was inside of EMPAC which is in itself so modern and alien to me).

Michael Schumacher & Bruce Andrews: Trouble, Force Fed Gibberish, Did IDisappoint You?

I'm not sure if this is the title or not (And you will understand why soon), though it seemed fitting. This piece is a computer in a glass box, the keyboard covered so only the screen is visible; on it is a white background with a grid of dots. At seemingly random intervals the screen will pop up a bunch of words, phrases, or quotes... which were HILARIOUS. So random you wouldn't believe. For Example:

- Granulate Their Species

- Hyphen Labor

- How Many Giggle Sticks?

- OK, Chinchilla!

- Duck Taped to the Equator

and of course, the ones that really caught my attention (and which were displayed in a cluster that seemed too planned to be quite as random as the rest)

- TROUBLE

- Force Fed Gibberish

- Did I Disappoint You?

It was so much fun to stand there and just read these really random phrases. They made me laugh a bunch and it reminded me of some of the random things that I have thought of in my dreams (can you say surrealism?). Overall I loved it regardless of how simple it seemed. Oh, and to answer the question: No I was NOT disappointed, haha.

Sounds of Zero Gravity

At 4:00 PM today, I was standing in a line of people outside the doors of EMPAC's Theater waiting to hear the performance by Maryanne Amacher, a composer of electronic sound shapes created by what you could think of as extreme surround sound in order to mimic a multifaceted atmosphere. By using over 30 speakers placed in a very particular location and direction as well as changing certain attributes of the Theater, such as having all curtains up and revealing an open space under the stage, she created sounds and complex dissonant harmonies that seem to be coming from a space so large that it emulates outer space itself. This performance was called The Star Room. 

The lights were dim as the sound emerged from silence in a soft gradient. As it developed, I started to recognize more tones coming from the distant noise. It was a type of progression that suggests a mysterious adventure into a large, unknown world. The transitions between certain tones and volumes were so smooth and interesting that I never lost attention to the movements of sound going on in the space. There were long periods of huge, rumbling sound that I could feel pulsing through my entire body, giving such an intense feeling of being overwhelmed by the simulation of the colossal entity that could be causing such vibrations. During the parts where I could hear pitches more clearly, some overtones brought on a sense of discovery and admiration. At some of the loudest parts, there were so many different pitches at once that I found myself frozen in my chair from the frightening intensity of the massive mixture of frequencies. The almost constant dissonance in this piece was so beautifully arranged because there were so many types that provoked different feelings and made for intricate transitions. The long, developing tones were also successful at making the sound seem to emanate from a faraway place, no matter how loud or soft.

Complete silence came back for about 20 seconds as we waited for the second part. It was a similar development to the first part of the piece. I really enjoyed the fact that she used noises that did not have tones or developed into tones because it gave the sound even more of an atmosphere. Much of it sounded like a distorted electric organ. The second part did not even get half as loud as parts of the first, but this time most of the dissonance was clearer and easier on the ears. When it got softer and sounded further away, I had a feeling of yearning for it to come back. The audience, anticipating more after silence came again, waited to applaud until one of the collaborators stated, “That was the end of the second part.”

Although this piece was not completed and was partly an interpretation of her collaborators, I believe it was very successful in achieving its original goal discussed at the end: to simulate zero gravity. It leads me to wonder what it would have been like if there was a projection as well as the completion of the piece by Ms. Amacher. By setting up the speakers so one could not hear sound coming from any individual one, the movement of sound is perfect in the space which it takes up. Someone brought up a subject I thought about in the beginning of the piece. He asked why the space was not complete darkness and instead a dim light. The response was that you could close your eyes if you wished for it to be dark, and open them if you prefer it otherwise. This was my only criticism in the performance, as I would rather it have been dark so that I my brain could interpret only sound during the piece since vision had no importance. Despite this matter, I did not have a hard time paying attention to the sophisticated sounds of this experimental performance because it was an extremely enjoyable and incredible experience.

While I was not able to find any good quality previous pieces of Ms. Amacher, I found that she has done a lot of compositions related to environmental soundscapes and has also collaborated with John Cage in this manner. She fits the avant-garde style in that the way she had an innovative way to create, emit, and transmit sound shapes to emulate a specific atmosphere with interesting sounds like nothing I’ve heard before.

Dance MOViES: MO-SO

For EMPAC’s Filament Festival I decided to attend a screening of Dance MOViES Commissioned MO-SO. This 10-minute looping video installation was directed by Kasumi and composed by Fang Man. I watched the three side-by-side video screens in the dark and completely empty Studio 1. As soon as I walked in I was overwhelmed by the bright colors and vividness of the work. I couldn’t decide which screen to watch. I wanted to watch all of them all at the same time. They were all so interesting to watch my eyes bounced from screen to screen.

To make sure I didn’t miss anything I sat through the screening twice and I enjoyed every minute of it. The work had many layers and scenes that where intense but also relaxing. It kept my full attention the whole time and it was fascinating to watch at how all the screens related to each other. The music was very interesting and had many experimental sounds that fit well with the colorful piece. During one of the scenes of a moving ocean, the sounds of raindrops were played through the speakers creating a very calm feeling in the room. Not all three screens played at the same time the whole duration and I liked that about the piece. When only one screen played and the other two were off you could give your full attention to that one screen and really understand it.

The layered film had a very interesting effect that I had never seen before. The overlapping of the film made it seem like it had many layers and created a sense of movement. The artist mixed vintage film along with colorful abstract paintings, Chinese calligraphy, and other scenes of a man in motion. It created a theme and added many textures that were very beautiful and tied in very nicely. The close ups of the dancer’s feet and hands where my favorites scenes in the film.

~ShannonRamelot

Ballet Labs: Miracle analysis

Ballet Lab’s: Miracle was, if defined by a single word, “crazy.” This craziness wasn’t subtle either; it was a bombastic sequence of unearthly sounds and screams accompanied with ferociously spastic movement and action from the dancers. This craziness was perpetual, and the intense emotions and dramatic atmosphere that resulted was reliant on it. The crazy was good.

The meaning behind the piece was for the most part cult related. It delved into cult mentality and scrutinized it. It seemed to take on cult behavior from many eras, and many cultures. The first act seemed to symbolize cult behavior in ancient time, using costumes made from robes (possibly to signify ancient Greek or Roman culture). One notable and terrifying part of this act involved a human sacrifice, or at least that was what I thought it represented. They dragged one of the female dancers around the stage, and ignored her blood curdling screams, and writhing twisting motions of distress, eventually pushing her against a wall while she screamed (perhaps offering her to a god).

The second act seemed to take a more modern look at cult behavior. Modern clothing was worn (or not worn...) and new props were added, such as a spinning swinging PA monitor in the middle of the stage, long extension cords, and megaphones. Wooden clogs were also used, and I found little meaning in them, aside from the fact that they were so strange to dance in that it furthered the hysteric quality of the act.

The third act I took to be a futuristic look at cult mentality, or an examination of cult like behavior with media and pop culture, or both. The outfits they adorned were strange and “futuristic” looking. At one point, one of the female dancers had the line “save me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope…” which is an obvious reference to Star Wars the cult like following that had, and still has. This act became even crazier, with a scattered assortment of harmonicas and peculiar motions.

The last act was by far my favorite, and possibly the most meaningful. It involved two of the dancers “floating” above the air in a meditative position, holding on to canes, and seemingly defying gravity as the murmured nonsense speech under their breath. It seemed to represent a kind of nirvana, or ultimate state of being, which most extremist cults are usually trying to reach. The mumbled speech, I think represented the vagueness of enlightenment, as well as our separation from it. We could not understand what they were saying, and perhaps they were saying greatly important things that we could only understand had we achieved that level of being. This ending could have meant that the dancers, through these mass suicides and insane rituals had actually achieved the enlightenment they were pursuing. I think it’s more likely though that it represented a false sense of hope for the cult followers. Being that the audience knew the laws of gravity they knew that the floating, though very convincing, was a magic trick. It was very impressive, but to give in to a belief that they were truly floating, would be to believe something that didn’t actually happen. False hope and delusions, brought about by very convincing propaganda and magic tricks in real cults, are what perpetuate mass followings in the first place.