SCREENING
onedotzero: citystates 10 + robotica
Thursday, September 29, 7 + 9 PM
Theater
$6 each
Presenting a double feature night of screenings from the international touring festival. Curated and compiled by onedotzero, all programs explore new forms and hybrids of moving image across motion graphics, short film, animation, music videos, and more.
7 PM: citystates 10
run time: 83 minutes
A continued exploration of onedotzero's fascination with the city via an eclectic series of filmic responses to urban environments and fast-paced city living. As we accelerate toward becoming nations of super-cities, this year's festival selection presents and questions utopian desires, bringing a sense of adventure, hope, and positivity about our shared future world.
9 PM: robotica
onedotzero's partiality to our mechanical friends of the future has been demonstrated over the years throughout the festival programming. This selection touches on the ethics, social effects, and pure fun of a world shared with robots or androids, from spy messengers and declarations of love to extraterrestrial robotic invasions of earth.
Evelyn's Café is open from 6 to 9 PM with a full menu of meals, snacks, and beverages as well as a selection of wines. Parking is available in the Rensselaer parking lot on College Avenue.
Additional event information can be found on the EMPAC website: http://empac.rpi.edu/. Questions? Call the EMPAC Box Office: 518.276.3921.
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://onedotzero.com/---
TALK: DETAIL VIEW
Michael Century: Extraordinary Freedom Machines: Vignettes in the History of a Multimedia Century
Tuesday, September 27, 12 PM
Theater
FREE
In the first installment of this three-part lecture series, Rensselaer professor Michael Century presents a fresh reading of today's experimental media art scene by surveying key works, personalities and movements of the past century and laying out a framework for forecasting its future.
I. Après le Deluge, 1913–47, surveys key moments and tensions within the historical avant-garde, with examples from dance, abstract film and animation, experimental music, and critical theory.
Evelyn's Café will be open from 11:30 AM to 2 PM for Eat Local Lunch.
Michael Century is a professor of new media and music in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As a practitioner and educator for over 30 years in the intersections between classical and experimental arts, Century brings a unique vantage to the history of art, technology, and culture. In his early career, he worked at the Banff Centre for the Arts, heading its inter-arts program and founding the renowned new media research and production unit. During the 1990s, he worked as program director at a national IT lab, and as policy advisor for art and new technology to the Department of Canadian Heritage. He was responsible for creating opportunities for collaborative research among artists, technologists, and scientists in a host of settings, from studio and lab practice to setting national policies for media innovation. As a new media consultant, Century advised numerous clients, notably authoring the widely cited report Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture for The Rockefeller Foundation. At Rensselaer, he teaches courses on the history and theory of art and technology, music history, and also leads the Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble.
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James Elkins: Visual Practices Across the University
Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 6 PM
Studio 2
FREE
Renowned art historian James Elkins will discuss the wide range of image interpreting practices that take place across the departments of a university: lawyers, doctors, scientists, engineers, humanists, and social scientists all produce images and make arguments about them in different ways. This talk assesses the state of scholarship on links between art and science, and asserts that it is possible to consider images in various fields without using tropes from the humanities or social sciences as explanatory tools.
The Observer Effects series invites thinkers to present their highly integrative work in dialogue with the fields of art and science. This lecture series takes its title from a popularized principle in physics that holds that the act of observation transforms the observed. Outside the natural sciences, the idea that the observer and the observed are linked in a web of reciprocal modification has been deeply influential in philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, and politics.
A limited number of complimentary light dinners will be served at 6 PM to enjoy as part of the talk. Wine and refreshments will also be available as part of our paid cafe service.
James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He writes on art and non-art images, and his recent books include
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction, What Happened to Art Criticism? and
Master Narratives and Their Discontents. He edited two book series for Routledge:
The Art Seminar (conversations on different subjects in art theory) and
Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts (short monographs on the shape of the twentieth century). Currently, he is organizing a seven-year series called the Stone Summer Theory Institute (
stonesummertheoryinstitute.org).
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The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), founded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an international hub for art, performance, science, and technology — offering adventurous interdisciplinary public events, support for artists and scholars engaged in creative research, and the resources of a state-of-the art facility for digital media production, research, and performance situated on a college campus.
EMPAC's building is a showcase work of architecture that spans the physical and digital worlds. With a 1,200-seat concert hall, a 400-seat theater, two flexible black box studios, audio and video production rooms, and residency studios, EMPAC is a unique environment where digital technology and human experience can meet.
EMPAC 2011-2012 presentations, residencies, research, and commissions are supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts (with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; additional funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Community Connections Fund of the MetLife Foundation, and the Boeing Company Charitable Trust), and the New York State Council for the Arts. Special thanks to the Jaffe Fund for Experimental Media and Performing Arts for support of artist commissions.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is the nation's oldest technological university. The school offers degrees in engineering, the sciences, information technology, architecture, management, and the social sciences and humanities. For over 30 years, the Institute has been a leader in interdisciplinary creative research, especially in the electronic arts. In addition to its MFA and PhD programs in electronic arts, Rensselaer offers bachelor degrees in electronic arts, and in electronic media, arts, and communication — one of the first undergraduate programs of its kind in the United States. The Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies and EMPAC are two major research platforms that Rensselaer established at the beginning of the 21st century.
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The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th Street
Troy, NY 12180
http://empac.rpi.edu/
Box Office: 518.276.3921
