“Sisters with Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines, an award-winning documentary that maps the history of twentieth century women experimental music pioneers.
Narrated by Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors features the work of visionary composer and Rensselaer professor Pauline Oliveros alongside Wendy Carlos, Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, EMPAC-alum Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel. Through rigorous research, interviews, and archival footage, the film follows the electronic music composers’ radical experimentations with machines that redefined the boundaries of contemporary music.”
“Philosophically speaking, experimental scores enabled a shift in investment from the static polish of a finished work to procedures and processes—often iterative, indeterminate, or chance-derived—in a way that vastly expanded and challenged what counted as a work of art. Artists and critics of the time perceived this process-based work as facilitating escape from the fashionable but dogmatic theory of modernism that had been forwarded by the eminent American art critic Clement Greenberg, whose theory valued the specialized autonomy of modernist abstraction against the threat of popular kitsch, and prized the rigorous separation of artistic mediums (painting, sculpture, etc.) from one another. In retrospect, we can see artists’ turn to scores in this moment as a major event that helped usher in the series of paradigm shifts later associated with the demise of Greenbergian modernism, a change that prepared the ground for more recently accepted ideas about the destabilized nature of both contemporary art (as idea and object) and the complex identity of artists in relation to their work.”
“Isaac Julien is a video artist and a filmmaker who weaves powerful visual narratives when creating his multi-screen installations. The artist’s practice successfully dissolves the separations that are traditionally associated with different creative disciplines, uniting film and photography, dance and movement, theatre, music and sound art, and painting and sculpture. With works that often explore themes of class, cultural history and identity, this exclusive new media artwork Encore: Tabula Rasa (Ten Thousand Waves) relates to Julien’s nine-screen installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which examines the relationship between China’s ancient past and rapidly-evolving present. In Latin, the term tabula rasa means blank slate, and here, we witness the cyclic depiction and erasure of traditional Chinese calligraphy, in a dance between older and newer generations.”
“The Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu participate in the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice with their work
Can’t Help Myself (2016). For this piece, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu use a Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame.
Info text (Guggenheim):
In this work commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu employ an industrial robot, visual-recognition sensors, and software systems to examine our increasingly automated global reality, one in which territories are controlled mechanically and the relationship between people and machines is rapidly changing. Placed behind clear acrylic walls, their robot has one specific duty, to contain a viscous, deep-red liquid within a predetermined area. When the sensors detect that the fluid has strayed too far, the arm frenetically shovels it back into place, leaving smudges on the ground and splashes on the surrounding walls. The idea to use a robot came from the artists’ initial wish to test what could possibly replace an artist’s will in making a work and how could they do so with a machine. They modified a robotic arm, one often seen on production lines such as those in car manufacturing, by installing a custom-designed shovel to its front. Collaborating with two robotics engineers, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu designed a series of thirty-two movements for machine to perform.”
These robots paint by awkwardly flopping around on canvases.
“Award-winning Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal discusses his new book “Shoot an Iraqi” and the impact of his highly provocative interactive art piece Domestic Tension.”
“In this series of automatic drawings, formal elements are open to mechanisms or phenomena beyond the artist’s control — seeking to reveal the hidden, or otherwise unnoticed motion of objects. Working in the Boston area last fall, Knowles attached pens to the branches of Redwood, Pine, Wingnut, Larch, Acer, Sassafras and Spruce trees. As the tip of each branch blew across paper, a moment was captured by the mark-making process. Like a signature, each system revealed the characteristics of an otherwise unnoticed physical experience. Please note this is only a video excerpt.”
”Extracts from Ariane Michel’s film, Les Oiseaux de Céleste. Copyright Galerie Xippas, Ariane Michel and Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, 2008. French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. For his installation in The Curve, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape.”
“In the ‘white cube’ of the Kunsthalle in the Lipsiusbau, two industrial robots wave enormous black flags. Accompanied by the operating noise of the robots, their continuous movements leave spectators without a place to rest their gaze, removing any steady reference point in the space. The waving flags translate the digital algorithm that controls the robots into a series of gestural movements in space that appear controlled, unpredictable, weightless, and measured at one and the same time.”
“Cinematography by Helder K. Sun. “It’s Raining Today” written by Noel Scott Engel.”